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INSANITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO CATHOLICISM.

Elements of Psychological Medicine, being an Introduction to the Practical Study of Insanity. By Daniel Noble, M.D., Visiting Physician to the Clifton Hall Retreat; Lecturer on Psychological Medicine at the Chatham-street School of Medicine, Manchester, &c. Second edition. Churchill.

CONSIDERING the number of odd, flighty, miserable, and generally "cracky" people whom one continually meets with, it is natural that some persons should fancy that half the world are insane, and the other half are in duty bound to be their keepers. When one thinks of it, indeed, there are a great many very odd people going about the world at large. Nor is it always easy to say where eccentricity or flightiness ends and actual insanity begins; or, further, to determine whether an actually insane person is better left to himself than when put under the authoritative care of others. Still, it is well to be satisfied that eccentricity and insanity are two very different things, and also to be tolerably well informed as to the course which sane people ought to follow if ever circumstances bring them into contact with their less happy fellow-creatures.

In recommending Dr. Noble's Psychological Medicine to the general reader as a book which will give him very valuable information on these points, we are not going to the lengths of professional puffers, who protest that every body ought to buy Mr. So-and-so's last "Antidote to Popery," or "Infallible Interpretation of all the Prophecies;" but we do think that it may be read with advantage by many who usually turn from the subject as one too terrible and distressing for any but the professional adviser. Dr. Noble is a Catholic physician of considerable experience; and the early demand for a second edition of the present book shows the estimation in which it is held by the medical profession. Of course it does not treat the subject from the theological point of view; but wherever it touches on any thing in which morals are concerned, it has the advantage of being in strict harmony with Christian truth,-a merit which can by no means be claimed for all medical works in which the actions of the human will are more or less under discussion.

Before, however, proceeding further with the contents of Dr. Noble's book, we shall venture on a few remarks on a kindred subject which we do not remember to have seen

treated on by any writer, and on which Dr. Noble, writing for the general professional reader, naturally says nothing. This subject is, the remarkable attractiveness which the Catholic religion has for what are commonly called "cracked" people. We beg the devout reader not to start off, as if we were venting some irreverent insult against the faith; and we trust the laughter-loving reader will not be so amused at the notion as to refuse his attention to the subject in any but a joking mood. And as to our valued Protestant readers, who are ever exclaiming against the morals and mental soundness of converts, we beg to assure them that we are making no admission which will gratify them, or weaken the argument for Catholicism, unless it be in the minds of persons in some slight degree themselves troubled with deficiency of intellect. We are only stating a curious psychological fact, which we have not the smallest wish to deny; in which, on the contrary, we rather rejoice; and in which we see an argument not against, but in favour of the truth of the Catholic religion.

As to the fact itself, few Catholics will doubt its existence. We have almost all of us, at different times, come across people who have become Catholics, yet in regard to whom we have been constrained to wonder how their minds were equal to a serious and adequate grasping of the arguments in favour of the Church. Others, too, we meet with, not converts, but yet sincere and even devout Catholics, who are yet so decidedly singular, or queer, that the 'superficial observer is tempted to set down their attachment to Catholic religious observances as something to the discredit of Catholicism itself, which can make itself so agreeable to minds which in themselves are certainly more or less deficient. These odd people, whether converts or not, are of all kinds. Some are excitable, some are apathetic, some are melancholy, some are uproarious, some are stupid, some are clever; but all are, in some way or other, as the saying is, "touched." They want the full capacity for self-government, which the perfectlyformed man or woman possesses. In reasoning with them, or in any way associating with them, it is necessary to remember that there is some little screw or other loose in the machinery of their mind; and that allowances must accordingly be made for them, to which people of perfectly sound minds have no claim.

It is, however, only of those who are converts to Catholicism that we are now particularly speaking. And with respect to such we are perfectly ready to allow to the Protestant critic that the Catholic religion has a special attraction for minds of this slightly "cracked" description. We are not, it must be

observed, admitting for an instant that Catholicism has more attraction for the cracked than it has for the perfectly sound. Any thing more untrue could not be alleged. We venture to assert, that in the number of persons who have become Catholics during the last ten or twelve years, there is a larger proportion of good sound healthy understandings and well-balanced characters than is to be found in any equal number of other persons taken at hazard from the same classes of unconverted Protestants. The comparison we are admitting, or rather making, is between Catholicism and Protestantism, in their relative attractiveness to minds in some degree touched with unsoundness. And we allege that this very attractiveness, especially when compared with the peculiar kind of influence which earnest Protestantism has on minds similarly defective, is one of the many minor proofs that it comes from the hand of Him who creates all human intellects, both the feeblest and the most powerful.

It is not easy to define the exact characteristics of that peculiar condition of the mind which we all agree in calling crackiness, or flightiness, or deficiency. It differs from real insanity, not only in degree, but in kind; and if we might give a definition of its nature, we should say that in persons of this kind there is no actual deficiency of any one of those faculties which are necessary to the perfect mind and its healthy action, but that the parts (so to say) of the intelligent essence are so disproportionate in their degree, that the action which results is irregular, capricious, and such that it cannot be certainly depended on. The mind is sick, and must be treated like a sick body; though it is not absolutely maimed and incapable of all action worthy of a reasonable being.

Hence, while insane people are held to be morally irresponsible in the sight of God, no one supposes that flighty people are so, or that they are irresponsible to human authority. It is admitted that they require a peculiar treatment, that much cannot be fairly expected of them, and that large allowances are to be made for their infirmities; but we never think of saying that they cannot be guilty of sin, or that it is of no consequence (except as a matter of present enjoyment or suffering) under what religious influences they are placed.

Now it is a very striking-perhaps it is the most important -peculiarity in minds of this stamp, that they are all-but incapable of looking at this life precisely as it is. Their imagination is ever morbidly active. They have a perfect passion for dream-land, whether dark or brilliant. They are the antipodes of that sober, sensible, practical character, which

simply takes things as they are, expects neither much nor little, is neither highly elevated or deeply depressed, and goes through life with much contentment and much benefit to others. The "cracked" mind, on the contrary, cannot exist in comfort without creating some sort of fantastic ideal world, in which its thoughts and feelings may expatiate and exhaust themselves. It finds daily life utterly dry and unpalatable. The people it has to do with are unsatisfactory. It craves for something more, it knows not what, but yet something which shall soothe its restlessness, command its veneration, arouse its melancholy, and respond to its most transcendental aspirations. We all know what this condition of feeling is, from our own occasional experience. The most sober brain has felt the reaction that ensues after the excitement of a day of splendid pageant, or of an event which has called up the deepest emotions of the heart. At such times, the dry dull prose of ordinary existence seems duller, prosier, and more intolerable than usual, and the mind craves for something more beautiful, more apparently elevating and satisfying than the cold routine of hourly duties. And this is to a great degree the habitual state of the flighty or cracked understanding. It longs for a perpetual spectacle. Something great, or something lovely, or something exciting, must always be going on, or it finds life, if not actually intolerable, yet a strange bewildering puzzle, an enigma which it cannot solve.

Minds of this kind are, accordingly, usually disposed to religion by a kind of natural affinity. Of course they are not by nature more disposed than others to real religion; but they are strongly impelled to occupy themselves with religious ideas viewed merely as subjects for natural interest, and for exciting the natural emotions in a soothing, a passionate, or a tragic way. And here appears the remarkable contrast between the influence of Catholicism and Protestantism on minds of this description. When they "take to religion," as it is popularly expressed, in connection with Protestantism, all they gain from it is a powerful stimulus to their feelings. For their morbid imagination, for their unsettled habits in conduct, Protestantism can do nothing. It has but one remedy for the disease, and that remedy exaggerates it into actual insanity. It works violently upon their sensibilities, rousing to vehement emotion those very passions which ought to be lulled, controlled, and guided. It stirs up hope, fear, remorse, despair, and exultation, to excesses which not only border upon the frantic, but continually become really maniacal. With all the coarseness of vulgar fanaticism, it drives the poor feeble mind in upon itself, forcing it to dwell on its own.

unhealthy emotions, and teaching it to take those diseased fancies as the tests, not only of its own spiritual state, but as the very touchstone by which the true gospel is distinguishable from counterfeits.

Hence the prevalence of what is called "religious melancholy" in the world, and its more developed form of "religious mania" in asylums for the insane. The minds of the sufferers have positively broken down under the remedies applied by heretical extravagance. Understandings which might have gone on with very fair health and vigour under a proper treatment, snap in two under the tension of Luthero-Calvinism; and that Gospel which was given to heal every wound of the mind becomes the instrument of its destruction, in the frightful perversions to which it is subjected by anti-Catholic perversity. Hence also the extreme dislike entertained by so many physicians, who know of no religion but that which they callMethodism," to the introduction of the religious element into the treatment of the insane. They see its terrible results in practice, and knowing nothing of what Catholicism can do for enfeebled or defective minds, they are of opinion that the only safe course is to banish from their thoughts every idea and every practice which reminds them of the world to come.

In the Church, on the other hand, the flighty or constitutionally depressed mind finds that very pabulum which tends to nourish it to vigorous health. Her system of external worship supplies that identical vision of supernatural life and beauty for which it craves so eagerly. The imagination is at once fed and satisfied. A golden thread is interwoven with the dull dark groundwork of daily life, on which the restless eye fixes itself, and traces its manifold forms of grace. The Church offices, ceremonies, ornaments, vestments, images, pictures, incense, processions; her festival and penitential days; her consecrated ministry; her ever-open sanctuaries; her tender memory of the dead; her veneration for relics; her intercourse with the Saints and with their Queen ;-all these things present to the restless mind the realisation of that very ideal world which it is ever vainly striving to fashion from its own resources. In a perpetual interest in these things it finds a healthy and invigorating occupation. It is conscious at once of being excited and controlled; and we need not say to those who have studied mental incapacity in any of its forms, that this sense of control is an essential element in the enjoyment of persons of deficient minds. Cast such people upon the world, and they either torment themselves and their friends. beyond endurance, or sink into hopeless melancholy. Bring them into the Catholic Church, and though they are often far