Page:The psychology of insanity (IA psychologyofinsa00hartiala).pdf/71

 of our reasoning, but its significance is not allowed to penetrate the compartment which contains his delusion; it glides off as water glides off a duck’s back.

Although the phenomena just described are so bizarre, and so characteristically insane, yet this dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human being. Our political convictions are notoriously inaccessible to argument, and we preserve the traditional beliefs of our childhood in spite of the contradictory facts constantly presented by our experience. Such phenomena can only be explained by the existence of a certain amount of dissociation, and, though less in degree, it is precisely similar in kind to the dissociation which permits the asylum queen to scrub the ward floor, serenely unconscious of the incongruity between her exalted rank and her menial occupation.