Case CXLVI

"When I was at school," says Dr. Rush, "in Cecil County, Maryland, I often went, on holidays, with my companions, to visit an eagle's nest, which was placed on the summit of a dead tree. The daughter of the farmer in whose field the tree grew, and with whom I became acquainted, married and settled forty years ago. From time to time, we met and talked of our childhood's play, of the country pleasures of that period, and amongst other things, of the eagle's nest.

"Some years since, I was called in to attend this woman, who was in the last stage of typhoid fever. On my arrival, I attracted her eye, and said to her, in a pleasant and cheerful voice: 'The eagle's nest.' She seized my hand, could not pronounce a word, but her countenance expressed powerful emotion. From that moment, she began to mend. She is now well, and never fails, when we meet, to salute me with the words: 'The eagle's nest.' "*

The third and last kind of association, called arbitrary or fictitious, is generally produced by a voluntary effort of the mind; the facts have no other connection than those which arise from this effort; for example, a piece of paper put into a snuffbox, as a reminder of something to be recollected. There is a variety of this third species which is produced without the least cause being apparent. Circumstances entirely forgotten suddenly start up, we know not how, and cause infinite combinations.

* Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations on the Diseases of the Mind, 5th ed. Philadelphia, 1835. Vide Abercrombie, op. cit.

We have seen that there are two sources of ideas in man; those which proceed from objects which strike the senses, and those which are termed general, such as the ideas of existence, quality, causality, connection or analogy, time, order, law, good, equity, etc. These are the attributes of mind, as sensible qualities are those of the body, etc.

This division of ideas - borrowed from the spiritualists, of whom we are proud to be a disciple, which yet does not prevent our placing a proper value on the uses of the organs - is very important in the subject which occupies us; for persuaded, as we are, that primitive ideas cannot be impaired, and that their essence, their type, experiences no touch of insanity, we think, on the contrary, that sensual ideas - the most numerous, it is true - contain the exclusive materials of derangement of mind; and if a superficial observation of facts would seem to show that the first are sometimes drawn into the fatal circle, a more attentive examination proves that only the sensible form, which the imperfection of our nature obliges us to give to immaterial things, is affected.

We can form no conception of spiritual things without endowing them with a face and a form. We comprehend, it is true, that this mode is defective, even false; that these things have a mode of being which docs not fall within the range of the senses; it is one of those primary truths which has only to be stated to be believed; but our finite nature, encompassed by matter, to which it is bound by innumerable ties, falls back incessantly into the same errors. As it receives its first apprenticeship from the senses, and its primitive ideas are only developed by language, education, and tradition; constantly obliged to abstract itself; being, in the greater number of cases, only struck with the material origin of this operation, it only, by consequence, sees, in its abstractions, the qualities of the bodies to which it naturally connects itself. Thus, in saying that a stick is white, long, and pointed, each of these qualities is joined to the image of the stick; in like manner, when we affirm a man to be good, amiable, and just, these divers attributes associate themselves with the human figure. Such is the case, we believe, in the spiritual world; we attach a certain form to ideas which emanate from it, and their attributes become materialized in our brain. A closer examination proves that this process of mind is purely artificial,-and that sensible signs attached to spiritual ideas do not develop them more clearly to our senses. Besides, independence of mind is as distinct and as entire beneath illusory sensations, as in those which are regulated and conformed to the external world. "In fact," says M. l'Abbe Forrichon, "the diseased person who thinks he sees serpents, acts exactly as we should do under the reality. But although he may hold incoherent discourses, these discourses must not be confounded with his sensations, and considered as the work of the brain which produces the latter, because the consequences drawn therefrom argue another origin, and prove that they are not, like his sensations, a physiological production of the encephalon. It is probably not the brain which alarms itself with its own strange creations; its pathological state is only a certain mode of being as indifferent to itself as any other condition would be, in relation to matter."*

It would be much more astonishing if the sick man, with sensations so different from those which men in health around him experience, should receive the same impressions with them; then, indeed, reason would be perverted and extravagant. Let us beware of concluding that because the brain may occasion the delirium, it is therefore the brain that thinks and reasons; as well might we say that the eye expatiates on colors, because it makes us distinguish them with more or less of truth. This being decided, it now remains to inquire how impressions derived from the senses may be reproduced, without their concurrence, with all the characters of reality. It is, in fact, evident that hallucinations, in psychological language, cannot be considered as an error of the senses, since nothing strikes them from without. Doubtless they are formed in blindness and in sleep, of images placed in the brain, formerly brought there by the senses, and which appear to be outwardly manifested, under influences which must be appreciated. It would appear that the emotion formed within from external causes, is executed in an inverse sense. Malebranche says that the nervous fibres may be affected in two ways; either by the portion that is without the brain, or by that within the brain. If these little fibres are moved within the brain by some cause, the mind recognises something external. Charles Bonnet, and other logicians, after having laid down as a principle that the latter part of every sensation is connected with a special and actual molecular state of the brain, repeats, that the same sensation should be reproduced each time that the same material combination is reproduced in the encephalic mass. Such is also the explanation given by Meyer, professor at the University of Halle, in his Essay on Apparitions.*