On the other hand, this participation of the intellect in all that concerns us, and all that moves us, naturally becomes a species of incessant morbid excitement of our moral erethism, and perpetuates the griefs of the sensitive regions of our being. The physiological excit ations which stir up and vivify our moral sensibility are, then, also those which vivify and perpetuate our moral pains.
It is because man can judge of the loss which he undergoes in consequence of the sudden ruin of his affections and dearest hopes ; because he can estimate the happy memories which are fleeting; the bygone joys, the sorrows of the future, and the griefs of the present ; because he finds before his mind's eye a multitude of elements furnished by his intellectual activity working automatically—that he suffers morally in his sentient being, and that the wounds of his heart, incessantly revived by a crowd of memories which assail it like so many morbid stimulations automatically arising, remain always open; that pain lives within him and preys upon him perpetually.
Vuinus alit venis et cceco carpitur igni.
Thus it is that when trouble attacks him he passes through that series of dolorous stages which lead him to slow despair, to that phase of profound despondency so often the road to mental maladies.
The moral life of an individual, his stock of natural sensibility and emotivity, is therefore kept in a con dition of freshness and integrity only by the incessant activity of his memory, and intelligence, and the con scious perception of the things of the external world.
When the memory and intelligence begin to fail, and the energy of the mind to grow weak, the decadence of the moral sensibility follows that of the intelligence step by step. In a man intellectually degraded we can only count upon a low morality. And this is so true, that a person whose intellectual powers have been already impaired, either by the occurrence of diffuse cerebral congestions or by alcoholic excesses which have impaired the very substance of his sensorium, no longer feels moral pain according to the regular pro cesses by which it is developed in his fellow men. The
student of mental maladies frequently meets with indi viduals apparently reasoning with inflexible logic, and preserving a certain energy of the intellectual faculties, yet no longer having any exact notion of what is pass ing around them, or capable of comprehending, like every one else, the emotions of moral sensibility. If we try to convey to them a family trouble, or the loss of one formerly loved ; if we seek to set some chord of emotion vibrating within them, nothing moves them. They remain impassive, and this defect of moral reac tion indicates at once their dullness of comprehension, and the silence of the intellectual activity which has not normally interpreted the sense of the words and their range of significance. In this defect of sensitive reac tion, we have a criterion which indicates to the observer the secret dilapidations which have occurred in the sphere of mental activity.
To sum up, it is in this special mode of evolution of the moral sensibility, in its dependence upon both ancient memories and intellectual activity, that we must look for the secret of the strong action of moral influences upon the development of diseases of the brain.
It is because man is sensitive that he suffers, and because he is, as an individual, sensitive in a certain manner, and in certain favourite directions—because he is more or less interested in the acts of his life, and conscious of what passes around him, that he suffers morally. The moral wound which is established in him, once produced, does not heal up all at once, it extends its influence, festers like a serpiginouS ulcer, and being incessantly irritated by automatic impressions radiating from the sphere of the intellect, perpetuates itself, always poignant, in the sensorium, reviving in a thousand forms on the smallest provocation. It thus becomes, by reason of the special conditions of the medium into which it has eaten, a cause of ruin, of progressive wear ing out of the mental energies, unless a profound diver sion be immediately created, or a salutary method of treatment intervene to arrest disorders which tend to become incurable.