As a third cause we add that in our age psychology has penetrated into all departments. There are psychologies of the senses, of the sentiments, of the will, the psychology of the crowd, of the insane, of criminals, and finally the psychology of the cell, or at least of the infusoria (Binet). Therefore, as statistics is applied to history, to politics, to religion, in the same way psychology has at last entered into romance and the drama, and has taken the lion's share. And, far from being repelled by the public, the authors who use it or abuse it, like Euripides and to a certain point Shakespeare, win the admiration of the public; and we are proud to see Zola taking from _L'Uomo delinquente_ the Jacques of his _Bête humaine_ to make an immortal figure of him, and Dostoiewski depicting innate criminals in his House of the Dead, and the criminaloid in his Crime and Punishment; and we do not despise Bourget when, making more a caricature of psychology than a psychology, he assumes to apply it to the toilets of women and the Parisian _cocottes_ under the form of a psychology of love.
It may at first sight seem a contradiction that we have shown that there were also found in antiquity at great intervals dramatic poets and romancers like Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides who, led by the observing and creative instinct, did not confine themselves to events, but studied characters too, and, keenly perceiving the dramatic potencies in the character of insanity, treasured it up in their works. Thus Euripides depicts Helena, vain even into her old age, saving a part of the hair she was offering at the tomb of her sister so as not to lose what remained of her former beauty; and Orestes has not the simple bestial fury depicted by Æschylus, but has choreic movements, genial intervals, and a tendency to suicide, which show that the author had attained a true conception of the maniac.
In the Mahabharata the maiden Damaianti is described as made insane by love (Book II, st. iii) and Nalo, who, possessed by the demon Kali, stakes his kingdom on the dice, and, denying his wife, abandons her in the wood:
"And with soul slave to the thought, discolored face, and all absorbed in sighs, now lifting up the head, now musing, bereft of sense, you would say; a sudden pallor came on. With mind occupied with one desire, nor sleep, nor the table, nor the sight of familiar friends afforded pleasure, nor day nor night gave repose. Ah! poor miserable one! thus exclaiming and bursting into tears, by that lament, by those soul-sick acts, she was recognized by her friends."