A writer on the history of the Christian church has remarked that “every nation has its peculiar heresy.” A student of mental pathology might justly add that every nation has its peculiar form of insanity. An irrational tendency is present and active in every community, ever striving to gain the ascendancy, and when it succeeds, as has often been the case in history, it makes steadily for the destruction and extinction of the national existence.
The forms of mental alienation are as various in the collective as in the individual mind, and as they are extensions of the symptoms seen in the latter, they may be classified on similar lines. I shall examine them, therefore, first as they are connected with intellectual and next with emotional disturbances, in accordance with the following scheme:
1. Conditions of Deficiency │(_a_) Imbecility. │(_b_) Criminality.
2. Conditions of Perversion │(_a_) Delusions. │(_b_) Dominant Ideas.
1. Conditions of Hypersthenia (active motor │(_a_) Hysteria. states) │ │(_b_) Exaltation. │(_c_) Destructive │ Impulses.
2. Conditions of Asthenia (passive sensory │(_a_) Melancholia states) │ (Depression). │(_b_) Neurasthenia │ (Exhaustion).
I. PSYCHOPATHIC CONDITIONS IN THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE—1. CONDITIONS OF DEFICIENCY.—The intellect of a group, like that of the individual, has its limits, beyond which it is not possible to educate it. This is conspicuously seen in intellects below the normal, such as in feeble-minded persons. No amount of training can cure their radical defects and make them the equals of their average associates. These are instances of intellectual deficiency. It may express itself either in some degree of imbecility or in the active form of criminal habits.
Another class do not seem below the average in general powers, may, perhaps, appear in various directions above it; but they have some twist or obliquity in their mental make-up which separates them from their fellows, usually to their detriment. In common life such persons are known as “cranks” or “eccentrics,” men of one idea and paranoiacs. They are examples of intellectual perversion. Ethnic psychology can also supply abundant instances of this character.
_(a) Imbecility._—To say that there are tribes or whole peoples actually imbecile would perhaps be going too far. Yet this has been asserted of some by competent observers. Mr. Horatio Hale, who was among the native blacks of Australia, related that the impression they produced on his mind was one of “great natural obtuseness, downright childishness, and imbecility.” The only arguments which availed with them were “such as we should use towards a child or a partial idiot.” Mr. Hale attributed this to generations of semi-starvation and malnutrition, and was so convinced of this that he believed the most favoured race would, by similar conditions, be reduced to the same low intellectual stage.