The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83,
September, 1864, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

Author: Various

Release Date: January 13, 2007 [EBook #20350]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIV.--SEPTEMBER, 1864.--NO. LXXXIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

THE CADMEAN MADNESS.

An old English divine fancied that all the world might go mad and nobody
know it. The conception suggests a query whether the standard of sanity,
as of fashions and prices, be not a purely artificial one, an accident
of convention, a law of society, an arbitrary institute, and therefore a
possible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. The
decision is a matter of majorities. Should a whole community become
insane, it would nevertheless vote itself wise; if the craze of Bedlam
were uniform, its inmates could not distinguish it from a Pantheon; and
though all human history seemed to the gods only as a continuous series
of mediaeval processions _des sots et des anes_, yet the topsy-turvy
intellect of the world would ever worship folly in the name of wisdom.
Arts and sciences, ideas and institutions, laws and learning would still
abound, transmogrified to suit the reigning madness. And as statistics
reveal the late gradual and general increase of insanity, it becomes a
provident people to consider what may be the ultimate results, if this
increase should happen never to be checked. And if sanity be, indeed, a
glory which we might all lose unawares, we may