ased." Not less evident
than the cure of various ailings would be the emergence of the soul into
higher life, and in some instances from the depth of despair. As the
scope of my vision constantly enlarged through multiplying experiences,
I began to see great hopes of the cure of the gravest of all
diseases--insanity--through a rigid application of this method in
Nature. I gave the matter so much thought and study that I wrote a
monograph on the subject with the idea of publishing it, but gave it up
to the idea of telling my impressions in "The No-breakfast Plan."

There are the same structural changes in the evolution of insanity as in
that of catarrh. There is a morbid structural basis in minds diseased,
the abnormal mentality or morality being merely symptoms of a physical
disease. Of all human legacies, structural weakness of the mental or
moral sense is the most unfortunate.

I shall say no more about the forms of mental disease than that there is
distinctively both intellectual and moral insanity as a direct result
of disease of the intellectual and moral centres. This will be more
clearly seen when I recall the fact that moral insanity in its worse
form--the suicidal--often exists with such intellectual clearness that
there is the greatest ingenuity displayed in carrying out
self-destruction. These mind and soul centres are often gravely diseased
without impairment of muscle energy: the furious strength of the insane
is an abiding fear with all.

It is clear that weakness of structure so soft as brain, a substance
which is on the dividing-line between liquids and solids, must be of the
gravest form from the first: grave because so fragile, grave because the
sick centres cannot rest as the broken arm, the sick body: these
centres, regardless how sick, must continue to serve, even in abnormal
ways.

The possibility of insanity must always be a matter of the degree of the
primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the
operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent
illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the
Creator," into a wild beast. That insanity, no matter what its form or
degree, is an evolution from an ancestral structural legacy, not
essentially different from the structural conditions evolved from those
of any other chronic disease, I cannot have the slightest doubt, any
more than I can have for the structural means for the cure.

There