Maniac

“ For days, for weeks, that awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye never closes, so the hands never rest,—they open and grasp, as if at some palpable object on which they close, vicelike, as a bird’s talons on its prey; sometimes they wander over that brow, where the furrows seem torn as the thunder scars, as if to wipe from it a stain, or charm from it a pang ”

“ The maniac, it is well known, is often found clever and inventive in the selection and adaptation of means to his ends; but his ends are madness. He has lost his reason. For though Reason, in finite Beings, is not the Will—or how could the Will be opposed to the Reason?—yet it is the condition, the sine qua non of a Free-will. ”

“ So are the brains of sick and frenzied men
Stored with unreal and strange imaginations.
(After a short pause.) Am I become a maniac? Oh! have words, To which the firm conviction of my mind
So strongly stands opposed, the baleful power
To fix this misery on me? This is madness! ”

“ Among the said figures, also, that of a maniac is very notable, for, with the features of madness, with the person writhing in distorted gestures, the eyes blazing, and the mouth gnashing and showing the teeth, it resembles a real maniac so greatly that it is not possible to imagine either a more lifelike picture or one more true to nature. ”

“ The madness next seizes the hands; and the unfortunate maniac writes what exhibits, in the most decided manner, the inflamed and delirious state of the brain. He falls into demoniacal convulsions, draws his sword, and fights with fury and desperation to the last gasp. ”

“ He wishes he had power to redress the wrongs of this suffering maniac—his very soul fires up against the coldness and apathy of a people who permit such outrages against humanity. "There!—he comes! he comes! he comes!" the maniac speaks, with faltering voice, then strikes up a plaintive air, which she sings with a voice of much sweetness, to these words:
When you find him, speed him to me, And this heart will cease its bleeding, &c. ”

“ I believe the maniac was one of those who do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire. This, at least, I know for certain. Whether such men have laughed or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping. Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an adder. ”

“ Believing your own body is glass is a more daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the top of a pole. But all true delusions have in them this unalterable assertion—that what is not is. The difference between us and the maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look, but about what they self-evidently are. The lunatic does not say that he ought to be King ”

“ The dreadful change in the identity of the maniac—the maniac proper, the victim of brain-disease—is at least complete; so complete often as to force the idea of possession on minds reluctant to receive it. ”

“ My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. ”

“ If you were told your house was on fire you would hardly think of calling the man a maniac for informing you of it, even if he should use a tone of voice and gestures somewhat earnest and impassioned. ”

“ The theory supposed an escaped lunatic—a homicidal maniac, of course; that would account for everything. A maniac—a murderous maniac. He must have been lying concealed in the wood; he must have rushed out armed with his club, like that gorilla. This theory seemed to meet every point in the case. He shut up the book; he had found out the truth; he could now go about his own work again, forgetting the mysterious murder which drove his great-grandfather off his balance. ”

“ Such is the maniac, whom accordingly we shut up, to prevent him from being dangerous to the public;—for he has been known to mistake so remarkably the relation of things, and the conduct adapted to his circumstances, as to murder his most valuable friend, or his own helpless infant. ”

“ On the first ebullition of frantick mania, the looks, voice, and gestures are wild and impetuous; in many audacious and ferocious: they are irascible, impatient, and violent on any contradiction or restraint: they ramble with wonderful rapidity of ideas, and garrulity of speech, from one object to another; shouting, singing, laughing: some, transported with extacy, roam in incoherent rhapsody through all the fairy regions of enchantment and romance: we observe maniacks in idea personating every being and object celestial and terrestrial, animate and inanimate. ”

“ One sometimes hears of the horror of a maniac’s laugh; but the maniac’s laugh is horrible by reason of its vacancy. This laugh was by no means vacant, it was full of expression, but it was the expression of relentless malignity.
Then the leader dismissed the men and they moved away towards the further end of the valley. Then he turned and moved slowly towards us and we moved slowly to meet him. He met us with the same stately courtesy as before and we exchanged salutations. He led us to the square where the men had been and he invited us to sit down. ”

“ Enlightened views on the subject now prevail among the educated classes of society; and the old notion that a maniac can be restored to mental health by treating him like a criminal, or by administering a few shocks to his already excited nerves, is fortunately a thing of the past. ”

“ Any one who watches the symptoms of a hysterical-epileptic patient, or a maniac, will see how naturally in the infancy of medical science demoniacal possession came to be the accepted theory of disease, and the exorcism or expulsion of these demons the ordinary method of treatment. It is so among savages, as when a sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead man has got into him and is gnawing his liver; or when in a Patagonian skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming to drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever. ”

“ In sanity of mind, and in mania, the most philosophical distinction is based on the health or disease of memory. The ecstacy of madness may not seem perhaps more irrational than an ecstatic vision, but the maniac will not re-word the matter; whereas the mere visionary will repeat the action of the trance as a dream. ”

“ Fever, or a blow on the head, will change the most gifted individual into a maniac, cause the lips of virgin innocence to utter the most revolting obscenity, and those of pure religion to speak horrible blasphemy; and most cases of madness and eccentricity can now be traced to a peculiar state of the brain. ”

“ These suggestions may be given from without, in a thousand different ways which will be readily recognized by the student of insanity, or by auto-suggestion. Long and intense concentration of mind upon one subject, and inordinate egotism, will be readily recognized as striking illustrations of the power of auto-suggestion as a factor in monomania. The maniac is one whose objective mind is disorganized by disease of its organ, the brain ”

“ In maniacs there is a peculiar malignity, accompanied by an extraordinary acuteness of some of the senses, particularly in distinguishing the voice of a stranger. The cries that he heard on every side seemed like a wild and infernal yell of joy, that their mansion of misery had obtained another tenant. ”

“ Murderers have assigned as the only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that “the Devil got into them,” and urged the deed. But the insane have, perhaps, no attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem. The maniac who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in his hair and calls them a crown. So much does inordinate arrogance characterize mental aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have detected, in that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before the brain had made its disease manifest even to the most familiar kindred. ”

“ The malady yielded to leeches. {183} Examples of the first sort of apparitions taken by the judgment to be real, are common in madness, in the intemperate, and in ghost stories. The maniac believes in his visionary attendant or enemy, the drunkard in his rats and snakes, the ghost-seer often supposes that he has actually seen an acquaintance (where no mistaken identity is possible) and only learns later that the person,—dead, or alive and well,—was at a distance. ”

“ It is true, however, the maniac will, on his recovery, often dream of the subject of his insanity, yet insanity is more exemplified by action, the dream being usually passive.
The predisposition to insanity is often, too, hereditary, so that the slightest moral influence, imperceptible perhaps to the physician, may incite such a mind to madness; for where there is no predisposition, that is, a perfect integrity of brain, a right judgment is evinced even under the potent influence of the passions. ”

“ The maniac stared at me a few seconds with a most bewildered air, looking as if he had forgotten something, or as if he did not quite understand how I came to be in my present position, and then went on:
[Pg 264]
"Yes, this red stain is his. I slew him. Why? Let me think," resting his elbow on the table and pressing his forefinger to his brow for all the world like a sane man. "Let me think; I had a motive for it. What was it? Love of my art? ”

“ It may not be amiss to notice that the case does not present the point of what is called emotional insanity, or mania transitoria, that is, the case of one in the possession of his ordinary reasoning faculties, who allows his passions to convert him into a temporary maniac, and while in this condition, commits the act in question. ”

“ Accompanying this mental excitement there is frequently persistent loss of sleep, constant restlessness, and great bodily activity, and indifference to or refusal of [Pg 18] food. Sometimes the brain excitement is so great that all self-control is lost, and the patient becomes a raving maniac.
The delusions of mania are largely of grandeur and self-exaltation; the patient thinks himself in the best of health, and very strong, or of a superior mind, or, that he is a great singer, poet, actor, or preacher ”

“ Now and then, the malady of some individual growing to a crisis, or taking a sudden turn of fury, we conveyed him to a secret cell, lest his disorder should infect the rest, and there kept him until we could dismiss him to his friends — for with the raging maniac we have nothing to do. ”

“ Strong as was his temptation the man dared not look. He kept his face turned to the maniac. He put one foot behind him and fell back in the direction of the beach, moving with the utmost caution. With equal caution the maniac followed. ”

“ If the maniac is found loose in the morning, good hopes are conceived of his full recovery. If he is still bound, his cure remains doubtful. It sometimes happens that death relieves him during his confinement from the troubles of life. ”

“ When fully pronounced, they are familiar to everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate will is the maniac: his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his associative processes are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive, and he says and does whatever pops into his head without a moment of hesitation.
Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the over-inhibited type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that for them life is impossible. ”

“ When a maniac believes himself threatened with a fit of madness, he leaves no knife 135within reach of his hands, and he puts himself under constraint, in order to avoid responsibility in a state of sanity for the crimes which his troubled brain might lead him to commit. In a similar manner it is an obligation for us to seek the salutary bonds which religion and the æsthetic laws present to us, in order that during the crisis when our passion is dominant it shall not injure the physical order. ”

“ A talented maniac arrives spouting incoherently about sometimes nearly incomprehensible urgent things and then is dead, and Joan Baez sings about that poor girl or everyone says in memorium — too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye. ”

“ The belief of these unfortunates results from their former habits, voluntary self-illusion, and their old memories and associations, and they are devil-kings, gamblers, and keepers of seraglios—something on the same principle that a straw-crowned maniac is to himself, and other of his ilk, a regal and potent brow-gemmed monarch—a species of insanity generally the result of personal excess and congenital disease ”

“ The fury of these maniacal attacks is of the most furious and maddest kind, blind, the most utterly regardless of consequences [p. 193] of any kind of insane excitement, and without the intelligence even of the acute maniac.
The ability to recognize his own mental state is sometimes retained by the patient, at certain times at least, to a quite late stage in the disease, so that he learns to call his visions hallucinations and his strange fancies delusions. He may even agree that his illusions are all nonsense, that the disease is in his brain. ”

“ Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, "As mad as a hatter." A more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.
And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners. ”