ingly well-informed
on current events, amazes his listeners with his really wonderful memory
and his ability to quote _ad infinitum_ from law books and statutes.
Absence of hallucinations is the rule. Memory and the capacity to
acquire new knowledge remain intact, and reasoning and judgment on
matters of everyday life which do not touch his more or less
circumscribed delusional field may remain quite normal. In short, he
shows none of those tangible signs and symptoms upon which we must so
frequently rely in our efforts to convince a jury of laymen of the
existence of mental disorder. It is only when we take into consideration
the entire life history of a paranoiac, which unfortunately is
frequently ruled out as hearsay evidence, that the real state of affairs
becomes manifest. We then see that where it concerns his delusional
field the paranoiac's judgment is formed, not as a result of
observation, or logic and reasoning, but as a result of an emotion, a
mere feeling that this or that proposition is true. In every adverse
decision of the court he sees a deep-laid conspiracy to deprive him of
his rights. His lawyers are incompetent and in collusion with his
persecutors; the judge is corrupt or ignorant of the law, and the
legislators negligent in their duties in not writing into the statutes
laws which would take care of his grievance. He constantly harps upon
what he calls "the principle of the thing", losing, gradually, all
concern in the real issues involved.

Indeed, in watching the amount of attention a paranoiac bestows upon his
grievances, the zest with which he takes up every newly discovered flaw
in the law, and the dexterity with which he weaves it into the maze of
his delusional system, the idea forces itself upon one's mind that what
the paranoiac least desires is a settlement of his grievances. One can
readily imagine the void in the unfortunate's life were he to be
deprived of this all-engrossing, and to him really life-giving, _casus
belli_. Thus, not infrequently, when one grievance is actually settled,
another soon appears and assumes the center of the stage. The means
these individuals use in their efforts to convince the authorities of
the righteousness of their cause or of the genuineness of the
persecutions to which they are subjected, are really amazing in their
ingenuity. They are supported to a considerable extent by retrospective
falsifications of memory, and when occasion arises, by a conscious