ess insane, as
they were to be encountered in the many places through which he
wandered professionally in England, that enabled Shakespeare to make
his pictures of insane characters so true to life, that even at the
present day we are able to recognize from his marvelous description
exactly the form of insanity that was present.

In a word, these generations of the Middle Ages builded better than
they knew in this matter of the care of the mentally afflicted, as in
everything else which they took up for serious consideration. They did
only the most obvious things, and what they could not very well help,
under the circumstances, and yet very often the solutions of grave
problems which they hit upon so naturally, proved to be as efficient
as, indeed sometimes practically identical with, those we have reached
by much more elaborate methods. This story of the treatment of the
insane in the Middle Ages {380} deserves careful study. I have given
only a few suggestions for the interpretation of certain methods of
action on their part, apparently very different from our ideas, yet in
reality anticipating our most recent conclusions.

What many people have not been able to forgive the generations of the
Middle Ages, and especially the ecclesiastics of the centuries before
our own, is that as educated men and leaders of the people they should
have accepted the view that mental diseases may, in some of their
forms at least, be due to possession by the devil or some other
spiritual interference with the working of the human intellect. During
the latter half of the nineteenth century, it became the custom among
the educated to scoff at any possible manifestation of this kind. The
interference of the spiritual world with any of man's actions came to
be looked upon as absurd, except by those who still clung to old-time
beliefs and thought that new fashions in opinion might very well prove
almost as variable as do corresponding fads in the realm of dress or
of interests. The difficulty in the matter was that the generations of
the latter nineteenth century lost their faith, to a great extent, in
the existence of a spiritual world, and consequently it was easy to
laugh at those who had found the interference of such a world as not
only possible, but actual, in a great many affairs in human life. As a
matter of fact, when we realize how many utterly inexplicable
phenomena the earlier centuries tried to explain this way, it is not
surpr