of belief, if we may be permitted so to call it, appears to be disordered. (1.) The first class are those who seem incapable of believing anything which they are required to receive on the testimony of others. They must see it with their own eyes; they must hear it or handle it for themselves; they must examine it by square, rule, and compass. They remind one of the Savage, who complained, when something was proposed for his belief, "that it would not believe for him." The causes of this singular inability are worthy of more inquiry than has hitherto been expended upon them. When it is very great, it is a mark of the approach or actual existence of idiocy.(2.) There is another class of persons who plainly show a derangement of this power by their readiness to believe everything. No matter how incongruous or improbable a story is, it is received at once. They take no note of dates, characters, and circumstances; and as they find nothing too improbable to believe, they find nothing too strange, marvellous, and foolish to report. This state of mind is frequently an accompaniment of light-headedness.-(3.) There are other cases where the alienation of belief is not general, but particular. There is nothing peculiar and disordered in its ordinary action, but only in respect to particular facts. That is, certain propositions, which are erroneous and absurd, are received by the disordered persons as certain; and nothing can convince them of the contrary. One believes himself to be a king; another that he is the prophet Mohammed; and various other absurdities are received by them as undoubtedly true. On all other subjects they appear to be rational; but the alienation or insanity of belief is evident as soon as their cherished errors are mentioned.

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359. Idea of total insanity or delirium.

We finish what we have to say on the subject of the Intellect, both in its regular and its disordered action, by a brief explanation of Total Insanity or Delirium. Partial insanity is so designated, because it exists in one only or a small number of intellectual powers; but total insanity, as the expression indicates, implies the perversion of all of them. It involves the idea of a total disorganization; of a chaotic mingling together of the mental elements, without regard to law or order; perception, consciousness, association, memory, reasoning, all conflicting with themselves and with each other in one wild mass of irretrievable ruin.

It may perhaps be intimated here, that the relation which total insanity holds to partial insanity precludes the necessity of saying much on the former, because we have only to unite the various evils which exist in partial insanity in one mind, in order to constitute the idea and the reality of total insanity. There is undoubtedly some foundation for this suggestion; but it is nevertheless true, that objects often assume a new character in virtue of the relations they sustain; and evils, which are great in themselves, may not only assume a new aspect, but an increased aggravation by being associated with other evils. And this is true in insanity. So long as only a part of the mind is disordered, there is some hope that the light which is unobscured may penetrate the darkness of the region which is insane. At any rate, we may well suppose the insanity of the mind is favourably modified and kept in check by the elements that still remain unperverted. But when the contagion has spread through the whole mass; when every modifying and conservative influence is obliterated, the separate evils, which existed in the different departments and powers of the mind, are likely to become more intense than they would otherwise be.

that

360. Of perception in cases of total or delirious insanity.

We may illustrate the general views of the last section by a reference to the power of perception. It will be recollected that perception involves something more than mere sensation; such as the reference of the sensation to the outward cause, and not unfrequently acts of judgment distinguishing one cause from another. Of course it follows, if the power of relative suggestion or judgment be disordered, as it is in all cases of delirium or total insanity, the disordered condition of the power of perception will be likely to be increased. This is the case, in particular, in respect to what are called Acquired perceptions. In visual perception, for instance, all objects at first seem to touch the eye. Accordingly, our estimate of distance by the sight is not, properly speaking, original knowledge, but acquired. What we term perception of distance is not a mere act of the eye, a mere visual apprehension, but always presupposes certain preceding acts of the judgment. But in delirious insanity the power of judging is subverted and lost. Hence the delirious man necessarily mistakes in the perception of distance, and it is no uncommon thing to find him attempting to throw himself from the windows of an upper story or down the brink of a precipice. Such attempts can be accounted for on no other supposition than a mistake of sight, founded not so much on a false sensation as on a false or perverted jndgment, involved in the complex act of visual perception. The same causes which perplex his perceptions of distance, also confuse his notions of extension, of the form of bodies, and of the outlines of any object of sight whatever.

361. Of association in delirious insanity.

In the form of insanity which is termed DELIRIOUS, the principle of association is not unfrequently found to be greatly affected. Rapidity of association was given as a characteristic of that form of partial insanity which was termed light-headedness or "demençe." But in delirium it often exists in a far more striking degree. In lightheadedness, the direct and indirect influence which is retained and exercised by the will over trains of thought,

is only diminished; in delirium it seems to be wholly annulled. Every new object, every new countenance, every noise heard in the room where the delirious person is, or noises that are heard from without; indeed, everything with which thoughts and feelings have been formerly as sociated, revives those ancient trains of mental acts. They are poured in upon him like a flood; and it is easier to conceive than describe what a tumultuous chaos the mind in such a condition must be. When we consider that these uncalled-for trains of thought are thrown in upon the maniac when his system is in great nervous excitement, and that he is unable to resist or to regulate the instantaneous transference of the mind from subject to subject, it is no wonder that he should exhibit, as we often find that he does, much external agitation, wildness of countenance, violence of gestures, and outcries.

§ 362. Illustration of the above section.

The following account of the rapid mental transitions of an insane person in the New Bethlem Hospital, London, will go to confirm and illustrate what has been said. Like all characteristic sketches of insanity, it is a melancholy picture. Difficult as it is to conceive that such an endless series of topics should be crowded into the mind in a space so short, it is only what is realized in all cases of delirious insanity, where a derangement of the laws of association is the prominent trait." Wholly unlimited by the identities of time, place, or person, he instantly accommodates each to his fancy, and in a moment he is anywhere, and everywhere, and anybody, by turns. At one time he imagines himself to be the Lord Chancellor, or, as he emphatically styles himself, Young Baggs;' and no mortal tongue ever maintained the loquacity of the law, or talked with more incessant volubility, than his imaginary lordship. He would decide ten thousand causes in a day; he would accuse, try, condemn, and execute whole nations in a breath. His language was as wild and far-fetched as his fancy was various; topics of all kinds seemed to come tumbling into his mind without order or connexion. Of every name he heard mentioned he instantly became the personal representative,

and says, 'I am he;' thus he is by turns Bonaparte, the King, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Londonderry, the Persian ambassador, Mr. Pope, Homer, Smollet, Hume, Gibbon, John Bunyan, &c.

"He is successively a Hottentot, a Lascar, a Spaniard, a Turk, a Jew, a Scotsman. He has been in all situations and occupations of life, according to his own account; a potboy at Hampstead, a shoeblack, a chimneysweeper, an East India Director, a kennel-raker, a goldfinder, an oyster-woman, a Jew cast-clothesman, a police justice, a judge, a keeper of Newgate, and, as he styles it, 'His Majesty's law iron-monger for the home department:' nay, he has even been Jack Ketch, and has hung hundreds; he has been a soldier, and has killed thousands; a Portuguese, and poniarded scores; a Jew pedlar, and cheated all the world; a member of Parliament for London, and betrayed his constituents; a Lord Mayor, a bishop, an admiral, a dancing-master, a Rabbi, Grimaldi in the pantomime, and ten thousand other occupations, that no tongue or memory but his own could enumerate. The specimen just given may serve as a sample of what is passing in his fancy."

§ 363. Of the memory in connexion with delirious insanity.

The memory, too, whatever perversions it may suffer in partial insanity, is, as a general thing, still more unfavourably affected in delirium. The memory, it will be recollected, holds nearly the same relation to association that perception does to sensation. That is to say, it embraces something more; and this additional element is an act of the judgment, a process of comparison. If, therefore, the action of the judgment is annulled or greatly perplexed, as it always is in delirium, the malady of the memory, whatever it may happen to be, is unquestionably increased by that circumstance. Under such circumstances, the memory is not only like a ship without a rudder (a comparison which is frequently employed to illustrate its disordered action), but is coasting a shore where there are no buoys or lighthouses. The surrounding beacons of the mind are extinguished; the landmarks which nature had erected in other departments of the