an
intermittent and epileptic character and they are temporarily sane,
or otherwise that they are near recovery. Conversely, the curative
influence of social habits is fully recognised, and they are promoted
by festivities in the asylums. On the other hand, the great teachers
of all creeds have made seclusion a prominent religious exercise. In
short, by enforcing celibacy, fasting, and solitude, they have done
their best towards making men mad, and they have always largely
succeeded in inducing morbid mental conditions among their followers.

Floods of light are thrown upon various incidents of devotee life,
and also upon the disgusting and not otherwise intelligible
character of the sanctimonious scoundrel, by the everyday
experiences of the madhouse. No professor of metaphysics, psychology,
or religion can claim to know the elements of what he teaches,
unless he is acquainted with the ordinary phenomena of idiocy,
madness, and epilepsy. He must study the manifestations of disease
and congenital folly, as well as those of sanity and high intellect.

GREGARIOUS AND SLAVISH INSTINCTS.

I propose in this chapter to discuss a curious and apparently
anomalous group of base moral instincts and intellectual deficiencies,
that are innate rather than acquired, by tracing their analogies in
the world of brutes and examining the conditions through which they
have been evolved. They are the slavish aptitudes from which the
leaders of men are exempt, but which are characteristic elements in
the disposition of ordinary persons. The vast majority of persons of
our race have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility
of standing and acting alone; they exalt the _vox populi_, even when
they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the
_vox Dei_, and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority,
and custom. The intellectual deficiencies corresponding to these
moral flaws are shown by the rareness of free and original thought as
compared with the frequency and readiness with which men accept the
opinions of those in authority as binding on their judgment. I shall
endeavour to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct
consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of
the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of
his subsequent civilisation. My argument will be, that gregarious
brute animals possess a want of self-reliance in a marked degree;
that the condi