fill the purest
mind with unholy thoughts. There are others which destroy the force
of the strongest will and take from character all balance and
self-control.[23] It often happens that we have long been blaming a man
for manifest faults of character till at last suicide, or the disclosure
of some grave bodily or mental disease which has long been working
unperceived, explains his faults and turns our blame into pity. In
madness the whole moral character is sometimes reversed, and tendencies
which have been in sane life dormant or repressed become suddenly
supreme. In such cases we all acknowledge that there is no moral
responsibility, but madness, with its illusions and irresistible
impulses, and idiocy with its complete suspension of the will and of the
judgment, are neither of them, as lawyers would pretend, clearly defined
states, marked out by sharp and well-cut boundaries, wholly distinct
from sanity. There are incipient stages; there are gradual
approximations; there are twilight states between sanity and insanity
which are clearly recognised not only by experts but by all sagacious
men of the world. There are many who are not sufficiently mad to be shut
up, or to be deprived of the management of their properties, or to be
exempted from punishment if they have committed a crime, but who, in the
common expressive phrase, 'are not all there'--whose eccentricities,
illusions and caprices are on the verge of madness, whose judgments are
hopelessly disordered; whose wills, though not completely atrophied, are
manifestly diseased. In questions of property, in questions of crime, in
questions of family arrangements, such persons cause the gravest
perplexity, nor will any wise man judge them by the same moral standard
as well-balanced and well-developed natures.

The inference to be drawn from such facts is certainly not that there is
no such thing as free will and personal responsibility, nor yet that we
have no power of judging the acts of others and distinguishing among our
fellowmen between the good and the bad. The true lesson is the extreme
fallibility of our moral judgments whenever we attempt to measure
degrees of guilt. Sometimes men are even unjust to their own past from
their incapacity in age of realising the force of the temptations they
had experienced in youth. On the other hand, increased knowledge of the
world tends to make us more sensible of the vast differences between the
moral circumstances of men,