rth. Who fails to remember certain times in his life when he has had
an almost overpowering desire to cry out in church, or to laugh on some
sad or solemn occasion; or, having a razor in his hand, has had an
impulse, sudden and intense, to draw it across his throat; or, being on
some high place, has been seized with the desire to hurl himself
downward? This shows how near indeed the healthy mind ever hovers on the
borderlands of insanity.

Man stands so close to the portals of insanity that he can look through
the gateway, when he takes an introspective view of his psychical being,
and can see the phantoms and mental ghosts of his insane personality.

We have every reason to believe that, among civilized races, there is a
vast amount of latent insanity. Taking the tables of our insane asylums,
we find a thousand and one causes given as the exciting factors in the
mental overthrow. Love, religion, anger, disappointment, etc., down
through the long list of psychic and aesthetic emotions, until it seems
as though even a breath of wind would be sufficient to destroy the
mental equipoise.

Among savage and uncivilized races, insanity is of infrequent
occurrence. Only when a race begins to elevate itself and take on a
higher view of morality, when new rules and new laws, new customs and
innovations, tending to place individuals in a state of comparison,
arise, does insanity make its appearance. The untutored savage, living
in a state of communism, is untroubled by the jealousies and
heart-burnings of his civilized congener. He lives in the to-day and
allows the to-morrow to take care of itself. Devoid of ambition, a mere
animal, sensual and indolent, he cares only for the gratification of his
physical desires. The mental attributes of a civilized being are, in
him, wanting.

Psychos is the result of evolutionary development, and the chief reason
why insanity is not as prevalent in the savage as in the civilized man,
is because the brain of the savage lacks development. I do not wish to
convey the idea that insanity is purely psychical in its nature.
Insanity is the result of a material change in the structure of the
brain produced by morbific action. The manifestations of insanity are
merely the symptoms of a disease that involves the brain. The savage has
less development of psychical function, consequently he is less liable
to mental lesion. I mean by psychical function that portion of the brain
in which psychos has its