INTRODUCTION.

THE origin of many existing diseases, as well as of others now extinct, may be traced to very remote periods; and their progress and influence on humanity have proved objects of curious and instructive research. But none claim such high antiquity as insanity, which, having its source in the moral as well as the physical qualities of man, is coeval with his creation.

Fiction has invested the primeval race with all the attributes of purity and innocence: but sacred tradition records, that man was ever the slave of his passions. Excess of passion is designated a short madness; and what else was the act of the fratricide Cain, the first born?

Madness is one of the curses imposed by the wrath of the ALMIGHTY on his people for their sins; and deliverance from it is not the least of the miracles performed by CHRIST. Saul was mad, and was cured of melancholia by the music of David's harp; and it is evi dent that insanity was then of common occurrence, since David himself, when beset by his enemies, "changed his behaviour before them, and feigned himself mad."

The first notice of insanity as a disease traces it to the era of fable; yet the cure of the daughters of Proteus by Melampus, through the means of hellebore, bears too many marks of consistency to be a mere fiction.

When the light of philosophy first broke in upon the universal ignorance and superstition which reigned, one of the first objects of study was man. That he was

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imbued with a distinctive faculty or faculties above all other animals, was a self-evident fact; and what was the nature and seat of this faculty, which we denominate mind, became, instinctively, an inquiry among natural philosophers.

To trace all the theories to which this fruitful source of speculation led, would be to push research into the mystical recesses of Egyptian mythology and metaphysics. Had these philosophers been satisfied to confine their investigations, as Dugald Stewart observes,* to ascertain the laws of our constitution, as far as they can be discovered by attention to the subjects of our consciousness, and afterwards to apply these laws as principles for the synthetical explanation of the more complicated phenomena of the understanding,-they would have done wisely, and attained all the knowledge of the human mind permitted us. This is the philosophy which Hippocrates contemplated, and which, when combined with the other qualities, gave the character of DIVINE to the medical art.

Unfortunately, the fascinations of speculative phi losophy prevailed, and hypothesis superseded induction. The physician and the metaphysician forgot that the proper study of man is man; and that he who aims at the most perfect knowledge of the human mind must study human nature, not by scholastic rules, but by the realities of life. In truth, to acquire this knowledge, we must first "unlearn the errors of the crowd, and the pretended wisdom of the schools." The errors of the crowd, indeed, obtain for a time, and pass away; but the dogmas of the schools are more dangerous, because, sanctioned by such authority, they are embraced unexamined, and perpetuated.

Philosophers of every age, who have made the human

mind the subject of abstract study, and who set so high an estimate on human genius, must have been struck with awe and wonder in beholding the frequent subversions of this, the DIVINE attribute of their species. To speculate, therefore, on the nature of the mind, and the morbid phenomena of intellectual derangement, was a natural

consequence.

In pursuing their inquiries, however, the ancients plunged so deeply into the mysticism of metaphysics, that they lost sight of the true object of their research. The dogma, that the soul or mind was a divine and divisible principle, governing and directing the intellectual faculties, but independent of organic matter, or, in other words, the body-fascinated and absorbed their whole attention. The opinions thence imbibed have descended through intervening ages, were revived with renewed ardour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and still, in the nineteenth, exercise a controlling influence.

The effect has been, to consider mental derangement not as a disease connected with the grosser or corporeal part of man, and within the province of medicine; but as a subject of abstract contemplation.

Cicero, an acute observer, remarked, that the nature of the human mind was too subtle for our weak perceptions to discover. Of its disorders, "the absolute source, if ever fully developed," says Bacon," will be found to exist in corporeal changes, or the effects of external agents acting on the gross machine, and not primarily on the immaterial principle, as has, unfortunately for the subjects of disease, been too commonly apprehended.”+

Notwithstanding this great authority, which points out the true and only mode of investigating the causes. of insanity, viz. to study its phenomena in the living,

• Tusc. Disput. lib. i.

+ Novum Organon..