BY THE EDITOR.

The views of John Bigelow upon this subject in his work entitled "Mystery of Sleep," published in 1903, is of intense interest, showing the views of a careful and accurate observer who, while not a physician, was a man of extraordinary gifts, genius and attention, and whose extensive research, intelligence and great learning, entitles his opinions to consideration.

From the work written by him in 1896, the second edition of which was revised and published by him in 1903, I take great pleasure in giving Mr. Bigelow's views prominence, by quoting at length from pages 171 to 182 inclusive.

"May he not be as sane as any other man appears to be in a dream? May not his attention be divided between the two worlds which, like the dreamer, he seems to inhabit? May not the society in which he finds himself at times when to others, he seems insane be as real as any other? --and may not agencies be at work as constantly for his regeneration as for any other of God's children?

Insanity has many causes, but the kind of insanity with which we are most familiar results from a disproportionate activity of some psychic qualities: ambition, avarice, vanity, an undue estimate of our importance in the regulation of the world' which, whether inherited or acquired, induce a disproportionate activity of certain emotions, which gradually, like all our appetites, grow by what they feed on, until they overmaster the reason and disqualify one for taking the precautions and avoiding the practices and habits for which they lust.

One of the first evidences of this loss of balance is usually insomnia. Most suicides are, directly or indirectly, attributable to the same cause. But where, I may be asked, are the evidences of divine love in such dispensations? That question may be most conveniently answered by asking another: What would be the consequences of allowing a person whose vanity or ambition, or other inordinate appetite, led him to the indulgence of such excesses for its gratification, if its progress were not arrested by the impairment of other faculties that go to make up the balance of a healthy character, but over which his reason, without being seriously impaired, had ceased to have control? He would evidently become by degrees a monster-such a monster as to be capable of any crime, and entirely inaccessible to any rectifying spiritual influences.

We are all of us more or less familiar with the perils we have providentially escaped through our disappointments and reverses in life. Are we not all in a certain sense like lunatics-victims of a more or less unbalanced mind? And is not the work of spiritual rengeration simply the effort, through divine aid, to restore the balance? And in the proportion that a lunatic is disqualified to take a sensible and rational interest in the phenomenal word, may he not to that extent be made accessible to regenerating influences of a similar character with those we have supposed to be operative during the suspension of our consciousness in sleep?

No one has ever ventured to sneer at Dryden's remark that "Great wits are sure to madness near allied." One can easily be persuaded by a reference to the biographies of men of genius that this poet's words deserve to be taken quite seriously.

Lucretius, the greatest poet of ancient Italy, and Tasso, the greatest poet of modern Italy, both wrote the works to which they owe their fame with posterity during the interruptions of frequent attacks of lunacy. The former is said by St. Jerome to have died by his own hand at the com

paratively early age of forty-four, leaving unfinished that greatest monument of Roman literary genius, the "De Rerum Natura."

Tasso, like Socrates, believed he had a familiar spirit, or genius, that was pleased to talk with him, and from whom he learned things never before heard of.

Caesar was an epileptic, and subject to cerebral disorder. Charles V. was an epileptic; he took refuge from his throne in a monastery, where he had his own funeral rites celebrated in his presence-two of the many evidences he gave of an unbalanced mind. His mother was insane, and his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, died at the comparatively early age of sixty-two, in a state of profound melancholia.

Linnaeus died in a state of senile dementia.

Raphael had more or less of the suicidal mania.

Pascal could not bear to see his father and mother together, though pleased to see either separately; neither could he see water without transports of vexation.

Walter Scott, during the latter portion of his life, had visions betokening an unbalanced mind.

Michael Angelo attempted to starve himself to death, and was only saved by the interference of his physician.

Richelieu had attacks of insanity. His elder brother committed suicide, and his sister also was insane.

Descartes imagined himself followed by an invisibe person urging him to pursue his investigations in search of the Absolute.

Goethe fancied he saw the image of himself coming to meet him. Cromwell had violent attacks of melancholia, and a sickly neuropathic constitution from his birth.

Jean Jacques Rousseau suffered all his life from an unbalanced mind, and not infrequently from attacks of acute delirium and maniacal excitation. He died from an apoplectic attack.

Mohammed was epileptic, and claimed to be a messenger from God and to have had interviews with the Angel Gabriel.

Moliere was a neuropath, and any delay or derangement of his plans would throw him into convulsions.

Mozart was subject to fainting fits before and during the composition of his famous "Requiem." He imagined messengers were sent to him to announce his end. He died at the early age of thirty-six of cerebral hydropsy.

Cuvier is said to have died of a disease of the nervous centres. He lost all his children by cerebral fever.

Condillac was a somnambulist.

Bossuet is known occasionally to have lost the faculty of speech, and even of understanding.

Madame de Stael died in a delirium, said to have lasted several months. She had a nervous habit of rolling between her fingers small strips of paper, an ample supply of which was kept on her mantel-piece. She had a nervous fear of being cold in the tomb, and desired to be enveloped in furs before burial.

Swift from an early period of his life was queer, and "died at the top," a violent maniac. He was called the "Mad Parson."

Shelley suffered from somnambulism, disturbing dreams, and an excitable and impetuous temperament, which increased with age. He was called "Mad Shelley."

Samuel Johnson was a hypochondriac, had hallucinations and convulsions, and was constantly apprehensive of insanity.

Southey wrote verses before he was eight years of age, and died an imbecile.

Cowper was attacked with melancholia at the age of twenty, from which he suffered for a year. It subsequently returned. He tells of attempts at suicide, and he would have hanged himself had not the rope broken from which he suspended himself.

Keats was subject to fits of despondency, and was so nervous that the glitter of the sun or the sight of a flower made him tremble.

Coleridge was a precocious child and had a morbid imagination. When thirty years of age he took to the use of opium.

Burns tells us that his constitution from the beginning "was blasted with a deep, incurable taint of melancholia which poisons my existence." George Eliot was extremely sensitive to terror in the night, and remained "a quiverng fear” throughout her whole life.

De Quincey, in consequence of general nervous irritability, took opium to excess.

Alfred de Musset had attacks which George Sand described as manifesting a nervous condition approaching delirium. He had a suicidal inclination. He had hallucinations which compelled him to ask his brother to assist him in distinguishing it from real things.

Carlyle showed extreme irritability, and spoke of himself in his diary: "Nerves all inflamed and torn up, body and mind in a hag ridden condition."

Bach and Handel were both very irritable, great sufferers from nervous troubles, and both died of apoplexy.

Newton in his latter years was subject to a melancholia which deprived him of all power of thought. In a letter to Locke he says that he "passed some months without having a consistency of mind."

Alexander the Great had from infancy neurosis of the muscles of the neck, and died at the age of thirty-two, exhibiting all the symptoms of acute delirium tremens. Both his parents were dissolute, and his brother was an idiot.

Lamartine was a crank, like his father before him.

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was descended from a family exhibiting many peculiarities and mental disproportions approaching alienation. Pope was rickety and subject of hallucinations.

Lord Byron was scrofulous, rachitic, imagined he was visited by a ghost, which he attributed the over-excitability of his brain. Lord Dudly did not disguise his conviction that Byron was insane.

Napoleon I. feared apoplexy and was subject to hallucinations.

There is no occasion to enlarge this list, as it might be indefinitely. In the instances we have selected there is sufficient evidence that insanity probably is, and certainly may be, a providential interruption of degenerating and pernicious tendencies. Even with our short sight, these tendencies may be traced to an unequal and disproportioned interest in some of our worldly affairs and the consequent enfeeblement of others intended to be regulating or compensating faculties. But it is blasphemous to suppose that the class of men so conspicuous for their usefulness in the world, to whose unbalanced minds attention has just been called, were not to the last, as much as ever, the object of God's uninterrupted and inexhaustible love and mercy. There is really no more reason for supposing there is such an interruption in the case of lunatics than there is for a like supposition in the case of those whose consciousness is suspended by sleep. The impairment of some of their faculties may have been rendered necessary to prevent their confirmation in evils to which they may have been prone, just as all of us are more or less withheld in our slumbers, and thus made amenable to spiritual influences to which otherwise they would have been inacccessible.

Let it not be supposed that the changes here referred to are physical or the results of morbid cerebraton, as was so flippantly taught not many years ago by many eminent French physicians; for we have abundant medical authority to the contrary. "Frequent autopsies," says Chauvet, "reveal no appreciable difference between the brain of a lunatic and a man of unimpaired mental integrity. Such is the affirmation of all conscientious physicians who have made a special study of mental maladies."

It is a medical aphorism as old at least as Hipocrates that a sufferer from a painful disease generally loses all consciousness of it on becoming deranged. A disorder of the mind replaces the disorder of the body. In

illustration of this, De Sunenhausen, on the authority of the chronicler Bulan, Hist. Secr. i. 12 quotes the following experience of the grandmother of Mirabeau.

"This femme bigote," as he calls her, "eighty years of age and emaciated to a skeleton, was attacked, in consequence of a wrong treatment for the gout, with a furious nymphomania. From that moment, she seemed to renew her youth; her monthly courses reappeared. This healthy period last for four years, but she rapidly sank and expired with the return of reason.'

Here is a case of a person experiencing for a series of years an extraordinary rejuvenescence of strength and respite from pain by being to a considerable extent cut off from ordinary relations and communication with the phenomenal world. She was bigote says De Bennenhausen. Was not Providence clearly dealing with his infirmity as it had once dealt with St. Paul's, by cutting off her relations with an environment which had developed that mental disease, and reducing her to a condition which protected her from its influence, substituting a love for others, though on the natural plane, in the place, perhaps, of a morbid selfrighteousness?

When Jesus and his disciples came down from the Mount of Transfiguration there came a man who, kneeling down to Him, said "Lord, have mercy on my son; for he is a lunatic and sore vexed: and oft-times he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to the disciples, and they could not cure him.” We are told that “Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour."

While Jesus was in the borders of Tyre and Sidon, a Syrophoenician woman whose young daughter had an unclean spirit "besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter." For the faith exhibited by this mother, he said: "Go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter. And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out and her daughter laid upon the bed."

The man with an unclean spirit, who could not be bound even with a chain, and whom no man could tame, when he saw Jesus, ran and worshipped him. Jesus bade the evil spirit come out of him, and the demoniac was left clothed and in his right mind. He then begged to remain with Jesus, but Jesus made a missionary of him, as later he did of Paul of Tarsus.

Jesus may be seen by the feeble-minded today just as distinctly as when seen by this demoniac in Syria.

While we are permitted to assume that the insane and the idiotic, so far as they are detached from the phenomenal world, may be, to the same limited extent, in the condition of the sleeper and in a degree sharing the advantages which the condition of sleep is supposed to provide, it must not be inferred that any form or degree of insanity is in itself desirable, otherwise than as it tends to arrest spiritual tendencies of a more perilous character.

Insanity may be presumed to be in most cases the fruit of either deliberate or hereditary tendencies which conflict with divine order. The cases with which we are all of us most familiar are of persons who have become insane by over-work or by resorting to artificial means for superseding the demands of their constitution for sleep. As these excesses are commonly the results of inordniate ambition or vanity or greed, and when these spiritual infirmities reach a stage where any voluntary arrest of them is hopeless, a merciful Providence may be presumed so to modify their relations with the phenomenal world as to prevent further spiritual degenration. In some cases the ministrations of Jesus warrant us in thinking that the work of regeneration is allowed to progress. All that can be said with confidence of the influence of insanity is that in detaching its victim from habitual, this-worldliness it so far resembles the operaton of sleep, and is a real and usually an unappreciated evidence of diviine mercy. A French investigator has reached the conclusion that the brains

8

THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES.

of military men give out most quickly; that out of every 100,000 men of the army or naval profession, 199 are hopeless lunatics. Of the liberal professions, artists are the first to succumb to the brain-strain. Is there nothing in the inspirations and aspirations of these pursuits to explain these results?

THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES.

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