Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/165

150 “O, sides, you are too tough Will you yet hold : How came my man i the stocks ''' This flightiness of thought, this readiness to take up a subject strongly, and to lay it down again lightly, to run from one subject to another, and still more, from one tem per to another, is a phase of mental disease approaching that which is called incoherency. At present, the sudden changes of thought and feeling are capable of being re ferred to some cause recognizable, although inadequate. In complete incoherency, the mind wanders from subject to subject without any clue being apparent by which the suggestion of thought by thought, or idea by idea, can be fol lowed and explained. In the sane mind one idea follows another, according to laws of suggestion, which vary in indivi duals, but are subject to general principles; so that a man, intimately acquainted with the mental peculiarities of ano ther, might give a very probable opinion as to the succes sion of any ideas which had passed through the well known mind; or, one idea being given, might guess the character of the one which suggested it, and the one which in turn it would suggest. But, in the mind of the insane, these general principles of the succession of ideas are abrogated. Doubtless there are rules of suggestion and succession if we knew them, but for the most part they are too strange and uncertain to be recognized; the mode of suggestion of ideas in one madman being far more unlike that which exists in another madman,

than the different modes which exist among sane people. Moreover, the genesis of thought differs greatly in the same insane mind, during different periods

and phases of the malady. The idea of preaching, for in stance, in the present phase of Lear's insanity, would pro bably have suggested some sublime expression of moral truth. At a later period it brought under his notice the