active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that
follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first
instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out
with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and
there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie
right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology
of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to forget
conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying official
conversational surface.

One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes
it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness. discouragement,
dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. {143} Professor Ribot
has proposed the name anhedonia to designate this condition.

"The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with
analgesia," he writes, "has been very little studied, but it exists. A
young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for some time altered
her constitution. She felt no longer any affection for her father and
mother. She would have played with her doll, but it was impossible to
find the least pleasure in the act. The same things which formerly
convulsed her with laughter entirely failed to interest her now.
Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate who was
also a prey to hepatic disease. Every emotion appeared dead within
him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but complete
absence of emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did
out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his
house of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as
little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid."[76]

[76] Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.

Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary
condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is
imagined only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of
this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty
character, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the
Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographical
recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study
at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous
exhaustion with symptoms which he thus describes:--

"I had such a universal terror that