inforced electricity. They can play this machine and make a
person talk or wake or go to sleep. They can tell where you are, even
miles away. They play in the eyes and brain, I think. They have two
machines; so they know when the police or anybody is coming toward
their house. They keep talking most of the time so as to take up a
person's mind. It is about time it was stopped, but people don't
understand such things around here. Could a wireless telephone get
their voices? Hoping you will do something to stop them, I am yours,
ONE WHO HAS BEEN ANNOYED VERY MUCH."

There is no help for such a poor sufferer except in the asylum. Here
we want to deal not with the patients, but only with the sinners who
sin against logic, while their minds are undiseased.

There is another large class of correspondents, which is not to be
blamed, and which is one of the most interesting contributers to the
psychologist's files. People write long discussions of theories which
they build up on peculiar happenings in their minds. The theories
themselves may be entirely illogical, or at least in contradiction to
all acknowledged science, but such letters are interesting, because
they disclose abnormal mental states. Here it is not real insanity;
but all kinds of abnormal impulses or ideas, of psychasthenic
emotions, of neurasthenic disturbances, of hysteric inhibition, are
the starting points, and it is only natural that such pathological
intrusions should bewilder the patient and induce him to form the
wildest theories. Again, he may believe in the most improbable and
most fantastic connection of things, but this is due to the
overwhelming power of disturbances which he is indeed unable to
explain to himself. I have a whole set of letters from women who
explain in fantastic theories their magical power to foresee coming
events; and yet it is not difficult to recognize as the foundation of
all such ideas some well-known forms of memory disturbance. Commonly
it is the widespread tendency of women to accompany a scene with the
feeling that they have experienced it once before. They are few who
never have had it, especially in states of fatigue; many have it very
often; and some are led to trust it and to become convinced that they
really experienced the scene, at least in their minds, beforehand.
This uncanny impression then easily develops into untenable
speculations on the borderland of normal intellect. The letters which
approach those of th