in this
malady, because the patients do not run against the furniture of the room;
and when they apply their volition to their organs of sense, they become
sensible of the objects they attend to, but not otherwise, as general
sensation is destroyed by the violence of their voluntary exertions. At the
same time the sensations of pleasure in consequence of ideas excited by
volition are vividly experienced, and other ideas seem to be excited by
these pleasurable sensations, as appears in the case of Master A. Sect.
XXXIV. 3. 1. where a history of a hunting scene was voluntarily recalled,
with all the pleasurable ideas which attended it. In melancholy madness the
patient is employed in voluntarily exciting one idea, with those which are
connected with it by voluntary associations only, but not so violently as
to exclude the stimuli of external objects. In reverie variety of ideas are
occasionally excited by volition, and those which are connected with them
either by sensitive or voluntary associations, and that so violently as to
exclude the stimuli of external objects. These two situations of our
sensual motions, or ideas, resemble convulsion and epilepsy; as in the
former the stimulus of external objects is still perceived, but not in the
latter. Whence this disease, so far from being connected with sleep, though
it has by universal mistake acquired its name from it, arises from excess
of volition, and not from a suspension of it; and though, like other kinds
of epilepsy, it often attacks the patients in their sleep, yet those two,
whom I saw, were more frequently seized with it while awake, the
sleep-walking being a part of the reverie. See Sect. XIX. and XXXIV. 3. and
Class II. 1. 7. 4. and III. 1. 2. 18.

M. M. Opium in large doses before the expected paroxysm.

10. _Asthma convulsivum._ The fits of convulsive asthma return at periods,
and are attended with cold extremities, and so far resemble the access of
an intermittent fever; but, as the lungs are not sensible to the pain of
cold, a shivering does not succeed, but instead of it violent efforts of
respiration; which have no tendency, as in the humoral asthma, to dislodge
any offending material, but only to relieve the pain by exertion, like the
shuddering in the beginning of ague-fits, as explained Class III. 1. 1. 2.

The insensibility of the lungs to cold is observable on going into frosty
air from a warm room; the hands and face become painfully cold, but no suc