origin. Alienists consider the habits of men as
being the factor in the production of insanity. Habits and heredity are
undoubted factors in the production of diseased minds, and, in fact, are
the chief agents. You cannot, however, expect to find a disordered
function where that function is absent. Savages have paresis, apoplexy,
and imbecility, seldom or never insanity. The reason is patent--they
lack the psychic function, that peculiar element, whatever it may be,
which raises civilized man so high above them. That this element can be
developed in savages I do not for one instant deny. The ploughshare of
evolutionary civilization will bring it to the surface sooner or later,
and when it does insanity follows. I have only to point to the American
negro to prove the truth of my proposition; even he is partially exempt,
simply because his civilization is of such recent date that his brain
has not yet acquired its full quota of the psychic element.

I will venture to assert, so true is the fact that insanity is the
product of civilization, that, if it were not for the combating
influences of social laws, assisted not a little by scientific medical
aid, all North America could not contain the vast and enormous army that
would constitute the civilized world's array of lunatics.

There seems to be in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything
that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was
considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil
tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old
women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were
accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United
States, not a century ago. Witches were executed in England and men
burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime
of demoniacal possession. Even in this enlightened age men are
accustomed to consider insanity rather from its psychical standpoint
than from its physical aspect. They do not take into consideration the
fact that insanity is due to a physical lesion, and that its vagaries
are but the symptoms of brain disease or brain deformity. The
inhabitants of the borderlands are invested with a certain shadowy
mystery which separates them from the rest of mankind, and which makes
them appear to us as denizens of another psychical world than ours.

In the Middle Ages, cranks, whose eccentricities took a religious