at for the
whole of the actual siege, and in truth for some little time before, I
almost lived on brandy. Appetite for food I had none, but I forced
myself to eat just sufficient to sustain life, and I had an incessant
craving for brandy as the strongest stimulant I could get. Strange to
say, I was quite unconscious of its affecting me in the slightest
degree. _The excitement of the work was so great that no lesser one
seemed to have any chance against it, and I certainly never found my
intellect clearer or my nerves stronger in my life_. It was only my
wretched body that was weak, and the moment the real work was done by
our becoming complete masters of Delhi, I broke down without delay and
discovered that if I wished to live I must continue no longer the
system that had kept me up until the crisis was passed. With it passed
away as if in a moment all desire to stimulate, and a perfect loathing
of my late staff of life took possession of me."

Such experiences show how profound is the alteration in the manner in
which, under excitement, our organism will sometimes perform its
physiological work. The processes of repair become different when the
reserves have to be used, and for weeks and months the deeper use may
go on.

Morbid cases, here as elsewhere, lay the normal machinery bare. In the
first number of Dr. Morton Prince's _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_,
Dr. Janet has discussed five cases of morbid impulse, with an
explanation that is precious for my present point of view. One is a
girl who eats, eats, eats, all day. Another walks, walks, walks, and
gets her food from an automobile that escorts her. Another is a
dipsomaniac. A fourth pulls out her hair. A fifth wounds her flesh
and burns her skin. Hitherto such freaks of impulse have received
Greek names (as bulimia, dromomania, etc.) and been scientifically
disposed of as "episodic syndromata of hereditary degeneration." But
it turns out that Janet's cases are all what he calls psychasthenics,
or victims of a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy, fatigue,
insufficiency, impossibility, unreality and powerlessness of will; and
that in each and all of them the particular activity pursued,
deleterious though it be, has the temporary result of raising the sense
of vitality and making the patient feel alive again. These things
reanimate: they would reanimate us, but it happens that in each
patient the particular freak-activity chosen is the onl