We have already commented on the excess of absurdity and insanity which can imagine that what washes the body, washes the soul also, and expunges from it the stain of evil actions.
If another peasant cures his king of insanity by a tune on the harp that is still more extraordinary.
The madman cannot be looked on as divinely inspired, his words to be caught as oracles, or as possessed by a devil, to be chained and scourged, since Pinel's great work has brought insanity within the range of organic disease.
Surely it was not alone physical capacity to suffer--how often had I touched the threshold of death, and trembled on the brink of insanity and self-destruction!
Instead, he is bending all his energies to increase insanity and disease among the convicts, in order to force the repeal of the law that has lessened the flow of blood money.
This system is developing insanity to an alarming extent.
But the men are rejoicing: the terrible slavery in the shops has driven many toinsanity and death.
I urge the rangeman to report to the Captain the need of "bedbugging" Butch's cell, of supplying Andy with a new mattress, and of notifying the doctor of the increasing signs of insanity among the solitaries.
Apparently the campaign of the Inspectors consists in forcing the repeal of the Muehlbronner law, by raising the hue and cry of insanity and sickness.
Upon this the Youth departed saying in himself, "By Allah, my Shaykh must be Jinn-mad and doubtless he confoundeth in his insanity truth and untruth.
The other exclaimed, "There be nor doubt nor hesitation anent the insanity of one who sayeth such say!
Hamlet had carried his feigned insanity so far as to force his way into her closet and frighten her with his antics.
Insanity and disease may obstruct and cloud the soul.
Experience certainly indicates that every human being, however normal and "good," has somewhere in him a touch of insanity and a vein of anti-social aberration.
However, betweeninsanity and genius he finds more kindred spirit.
Of the various kinds of insanity some seem to be of much greater eugenical significance than others, not only because they are strongly heritable, but also because of the periodicity of the attacks.
The term insanity is merely a loose descriptive one, and we shall gain little definite knowledge about the inheritance of such maladies until we study each separate insane diathesis specifically.
Doctor Charles Mercier, an English authority on crime and insanity, in enumerating the mental disorders most frequently associated with crime, places the insanity of drunkenness first.
In general, insanity is a degenerative process, whereas feeble-mindedness is an arrest of development.
The frequency of paresis may be realized when one learns that in some regions it is responsible for about one-fifth of all cases of insanity sent to hospitals for the insane.
It is absolutely wicked that the persons suffering from periodical insanity should be allowed to return to their homes to propagate and scatter their children about the state as dependents.
Yet it constitutes one of the commonest forms of insanity found in asylums.
The commonest manifestations of insanity are undue depression, apathy, excitement, instability, obsessions, hallucinations and delusions.
There was an hereditary taint of insanity in the family, which made his case still more discouraging.
Algernon Blackwood in Wendigo has created a supernatural animal that flies through the air and carries men away to insanity and death.
Like Maupassant and Hoffman and Poe, the Russian writers use to a considerable extent the association between insanity and the supernatural to heighten the effect of both.
There are various other uses of insanity in the novel of the period, but these will serve to illustrate.
The insanity of the young husband whose bride is mysteriously slain on their wedding day by the supernatural power accompanying Melmoth, may be compared with the madness of the wife in Scott's Bride of Lammermoor.
There are extraordinary effects of insanity associated with the supernatural in the work of Ambrose Bierce, of Arthur Machen and others of the modern school.
There are in English a number of stories of insanity associated with the supernatural which may have been influenced by the Russian method, though Ambrose Bierce's studies in the abnormality of soldier life preceded Andreyev by years.
Perhaps the most hideous aspect of insanity in the terror novel is that of the lycanthrope in The Albigenses.
The relation between insanity and ghostliness in recent fiction is significant and forms the crux of many a story since Poe.
Insanity as contributing to the effect of supernaturalism affords many gruesome studies in psychiatry.
Arthur Machen[217] tells of a German soldier who has crucified a child against the church door and is driven to insanity by the baby spirit.
These are curious analyses of the idee fixe in its effect on the human mind, of insanity as a cause or effect of the supernatural.
This inevitably suggests De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater with its dream-wonders, yet it has a power of its own and the skillful blending of reality with dream-supernaturalism and insanity has an uncanny distinction.
All the end foreseeing, Phoebus to his oath irrevocable Bowed obedient, deploring the insanity pitiless.
As civilisation advances the strain is ever greater and the statistics of insanity show a perpetual increase.
We perceive that He has relied upon love, upon love strengthened to the adamantine force of insanity or delirium, by the mere aspect of utter, utter helplessness in the human infant.
He was subject to fits of insanity at times, very clever at others.
His theory of insanity seemed in a moment the theory of a dwarf intellect trying to stick wretched, absurd pins through angels--white or black--that it thought butterflies.
Surely the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine's diatribe upon the eternity of a strong man's individual will.
This glance of Julian, so the doctor judged, precipitated his curious and subtle insanity towards an outburst.
If his insanity is too sharp for me, as it may well be, I shall be checkmated in any effort to forcibly keep him from doing harm.
So he thought, touched perhaps with a certain delirium, though not with the delirium of insanity attributed to him by Doctor Levillier.
I got a lawyer, and, as I said before, even he declined to believe my story, and suggested theinsanity dodge.
This ruse of violent insanitywas an after-thought on the part of the officials.
Another circumstance is much to be lamented, and that is that any other man should fall a victim to theinsanity of Thistlewood.
I once had occasion to study a paranoiac patient in the asylum for the criminal insane, who had spent twenty years in prison before his insanity became so pronounced as to cause his removal from one place of restraint to the other.
The most frequent form of idiopathic insanityis melancholia.
Neurasthenics are not so liable to insanity as is popularly supposed, but such an outcome is possible in certain {232} cases.
No form of insanity more frequently gives rise to assaults and murder than epilepsy, and in no form of alienation is the physician so frequently called to the witness stand to determine the responsibility of the criminal.
At least 70 per centum of the patients affected show a family history of insanity in some forms.
This is a form of insanity characterised by exaltation of spirits with a rapid flow of ideas and a distinct tendency to muscular agitation.
There is no doubt that there is some hereditary influence, for insanity in the same family is likely to keep recurring in successive generations.
In a word, it is not the direct transmission of insanity, but of a predisposition to the development of insanity under stresses and strains that is a matter of family inheritance.
Insanity is a common condition, but it has not been satisfactorily defined.
The patients who develop this form ofinsanity usually show marked signs of degeneration, even before any attack of absolute mental disturbance has occurred.
It seems not unlikely that the underlying cause of so-called idiopathic insanity is usually some change within the brain cells.
Insanity is an occasional sequence, with hallucinations, especially of hearing.
Delusions not infrequently occur, and it is one of the common symptoms of alcoholic insanity to suspect a wife or husband of conjugal infidelity.
It is one that can be lost or damaged only by insanity or death.
Norman battled with his insanity an hour, then sent for Miss Hallowell.
But he had no such access of insanity as to entertain the idea of confession.
And when her last note rose, swelled, slowly faded into silence, it seemed to him that had she kept on for one note more he would have disclosed to her amazed eyes the insanity raging within him.
As he left the room to go down the hospital stairs, he had his mind fairly distracted between the premonitory symptoms of insanity and Hetty Abury.
In a few words Arthur told him the nature of the shock, but without describing the particular symptoms on which the opinion of his supposed approaching insanity was based.
The Baron Vanboeren's insanity was avarice; and his solitary expenses caused him all the sordid anxieties which haunt the unfortunate gentleman who must make both ends meet on five-and-thirty pounds a year.
The fragments that I have just submitted to you will be sufficient, in my opinion, to enable you to appreciate this instance of mental malady, less rare in our epoch of hysterical insanity and of corrupt decadence than most of us believe.
Unfortunately Captain Landais of the Alliance was subject to fits of insanity and had been put in command of that ship against the wishes of Jones.
The insanity and death of Mr. Greeley cast a gloom over the election for victors as well as vanquished.
