e insane most nearly come from persons who try to
work out a theory to account for hysterical experiences which break
into their normal life. Sometimes the most absurd explanations must be
acknowledged as justified from the standpoint of the patient. A woman
wrote to me that she had the abnormal power to produce railroad wrecks
by her mere will, while she was lying at home in bed. She wanted me to
hypnotize her in order to relieve her from this uncanny power. She had
elaborated this thought in full detail. She did not know, what I found
out only slowly, that in hysterical attacks at night, for which every
memory was lost the next morning, she used a stolen switch key to open
a switch, because she was angry with a railway official. I will ignore
all such cases with an abnormal background here and confine myself to
the healthy crowd.

If I were to characterize their writings from an outside point of
view, I might first say that their expressions are expansive. There is
no limit to their manuscripts, though I have to confess that an
exposition of eighty-five hundred pages which has just been announced
to me by its author has not yet reached me. Nor can it be denied that
their relation to old-fashioned or to new-fashioned spelling is not
always a harmonious one. Nor should I call them always polite: the
criticism of my own opinions, which they generally know only from some
garbled newspaper reports, often takes forms which are not the usual
ones for scholarly correspondence. "Whether it is your darkness or if
it is the badness of the police that go around calling themselves the
government, that probably ordered you to put such ignorance in the
Sunday article, I do not know." Or more straightforward are letters of
this type: "Greeting--You take the prize as an educated fool.
According to reports to me by less stupid and more honest men than
you, the matter is...." It is surprising how often the handwriting is
pretty, coquettish, or affected, but almost half of my crank
correspondence is typewritten.

When the newspapers tell of a mysterious case, minds of this type
immediately feel attracted to mix in. When a few years ago I published
an article disclosing the tricks of Madame Palladino, I was simply
flooded with letters of advice and of explanation. The same thing
occurred recently when the papers reported that I was experimenting
with Beulah Miller. Now it is easy to understand that those who
fancied that the Miller chil