the
features constitutes a caricature? Every grotesque change in the
relations ruins the healthy state: what makes us sure that the harmony
of health is spoiled?

Certainly we cannot settle it by mere statistics. The norm never means
merely a majority. Even if the overwhelmingly larger part of mankind
suffered from phthisis, the few who were free from it would be
recognized as well and all the others would be considered ill. In mental
life still more, no one ought to propose that the exceptional function
is the symptom of disease. The few persons who never had a dream in
their lives differ much in their mental experience from the large
majority and yet their peculiarity is certainly not a symptom which
needs curative treatment. The only real test of health is the
serviceableness to the needs of life. We have an unhealthy state of the
personality before us wherever the equilibrium of the human functions is
disturbed in a way which diminishes the chances of existence, and the
seriousness of the ailment depends upon the degree of this diminishing
power. Seen from a strictly psychological point of view, we must expect
thus a broad borderland region between the entirely normal well-balanced
mental life and that unbalanced disorder of functions which really
interferes with the chance for self-protection and effectiveness. That
the melancholic who declines to take any nourishment, or the paranoiac
who misjudges his surroundings, is unable to secure by his own energies
the safety of his life cannot be doubted. The balance is completely
destroyed and the will and the intellect of the physician and of the
nurse must be substituted for his own mental powers, if his life is to
be prolonged at all. But the misjudgment and the depression of the
insane are only an exaggeration of that which may occur in any man.

There are therefore thousands of steps which lead from the normal error
or regret to the destructive disturbance. Everyone knows persons whose
pessimistic temperament makes them inclined to an over-frequent
depression, or others whose silly disposition brings out constantly
those emotional tendencies which the maniac shows in an exaggerated
degree. The stupid mind shows those lacks of association and connection
which reach their maximum degree in the mind of the idiot. We know from
daily life the timid, undecided man who cannot come to a will impulse;
the hasty man who rushes towards decisions; the inattentive man who can