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It happens that the author carries on a correspondence with several
lunatics in asylums. There is a considerable freedom of notepaper
in these institutions; the outgoing letters are no doubt censored or
selected in some way, but a proportion at any rate are allowed to go
out to their addresses. As a journalist who signs his articles and
as the author of various books of fiction, as a frequent NAME, that
is, to any one much forced back upon reading, the writer is
particularly accessible to this type of correspondent. The letters
come, some manifesting a hopeless disorder that permits of no reply,
but some being the expression of minds overlaid not at all
offensively by a web of fantasy, and some (and these are the more
touching ones and the ones that most concern us now) as sanely
conceived and expressed as any letters could be. They are written
by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called
"sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a
lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or
melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take
abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the
safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of
drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance.
Then the insane become "glorious," or they become murderous, or they
become suicidal. All these letter-writers in confinement have
convinced their fellow-creatures by some extravagance that they are
a danger to themselves or others.
The letters that come from such types written during their sane
intervals, are entirely sane. Some, who are probably unaware--I
think they should know--of the offences or possibilities that
justify their incarceration, write with a certain resentment at
their position; others are entirely acquiescent, but one or two
complain of the neglect of friends and relations. But all are as
manifestly capable of religion and of the religious life as any
other intelligent persons during the lucid interludes that make up
nine-tenths perhaps of their lives. . . . Suppose now one of these
cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel,
disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times
overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful
tendency, as it were magnified for examination. It is clear that
the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the
cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with
that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem
of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives. It
is an unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which
refuses to serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and
succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control. But
his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the
backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly
houses in our own private texture.
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