A Mind That Found Itself Part 14

95 IRVING STREET, CAMBRIDGE, January 17, 1910.

DEAR BEERS:

Your exegesis of my farewell in my last note to you was erroneous, but I am glad it occurred, because it brought me the extreme gratification of your letter of yesterday.

You are the most responsive and recognizant of human beings, my dear Beers, and it "sets me up immensely" to be treated by a practical man on practical grounds as you treat me. I inhabit such a realm of abstractions that I only get credit for what I do in that spectral empire; but you are not only a moral idealist and philanthropic enthusiast (and good fellow!), but a tip-top man of business in addition; and to have actually done anything that the like of you can regard as having helped him is an unwonted ground with me for self-gratulation. I think that your tenacity of purpose, foresight, tact, temper, discretion and patience, are beyond all praise, and I esteem it an honor to have been in any degree a.s.sociated with you. Your name will loom big hereafter, for your movement must prosper, but mine will not survive unless some other kind of effort of mine saves it.

I am exceedingly glad of what you say of the Connecticut Society.

May it prosper abundantly!

I thank you for your affectionate words which I return with interest and remain, for I trust many years of this life,

Yours faithfully,

WM. JAMES.

At this point, rather than in the dusty corners of the usual preface, I wish to express my obligation to Herbert Wescott Fisher, whom I knew at school. It was he who led me to see my need of technical training, neglected in earlier years. To be exact, however, I must confess that I read rather than studied rhetoric. Close application to its rules served only to discourage me, so I but lazily skimmed the pages of the works which he recommended. But my friend did more than direct me to sources. He proved to be the kindly mean between the two extremes of stranger and intimate. I was a prophet not without honor in his eyes.

Upon an embarra.s.sing wealth of material he brought to bear his practical knowledge of the workmans.h.i.+p of writing; and my drafting of the later parts and subsequent revisions has been so improved by the practice received under his scrupulous direction that he has had little fault to find with them. My debt to him is almost beyond repayment.

Nothing would please me more than to express specifically my indebtedness to many others who have a.s.sisted me in the preparation of my work. But, aside from calling attention to the fact that physicians connected with the State Hospital and with the private inst.i.tution referred to--the one not run for profit--exhibited rare magnanimity (even going so far as to write letters which helped me in my work), and, further, acknowledging anonymously (the list is too long for explicit mention) the invaluable advice given me by psychiatrists who have enabled me to make my work authoritative, I must be content to indite an all-embracing acknowledgment. Therefore, and with distinct pleasure, I wish to say that the active encouragement of casual, but trusted acquaintances, the inspiring indifference of unconvinced intimates, and the kindly scepticism of indulgent relatives, who, perforce, could do naught but obey an immutable law of blood-related minds--all these influences have conspired to render more sure the accomplishment of my heart's desire.

x.x.xII

"My heart's desire" is a true phrase. Since 1900, when my own breakdown occurred, not fewer than one million men and women in the United States alone have for like causes had to seek treatment in inst.i.tutions, thousands of others have been treated outside of inst.i.tutions, while other thousands have received no treatment at all. Yet, to use the words of one of our most conservative and best informed psychiatrists, "No less than half of the enormous toll which mental disease takes from the youth of this country can be prevented by the application, largely in childhood, of information and practical resources now available."

Elsewhere is an account of how my plan broadened from reform to cure, from cure to prevention--how far, with the co-operation of some of this country's ablest specialists and most generous philanthropists, it has been realized, nationally and internationally, through the new form of social mechanism known as societies, committees, leagues or a.s.sociations for mental hygiene.

More fundamental, however, than any technical reform, cure, or prevention--indeed, a condition precedent to all these--is a changed spiritual att.i.tude toward the insane. They are still human: they love and hate, and have a sense of humor. The worst are usually responsive to kindness. In not a few cases their grat.i.tude is livelier than that of normal men and women. Any person who has worked among the insane, and done his duty by them, can testify to cases in point; and even casual observers have noted the fact that the insane are oftentimes appreciative. Consider the experience of Thackeray, as related by himself in "Vanity Fair" (Chapter LVII). "I recollect," he writes, "seeing, years ago, at the prison for idiots and madmen, at Bicetre, near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave a halfpennyworth of snuff in a cornet or 'screw' of paper. The kindness was too much ... He cried in an anguish of delight and grat.i.tude; if anybody gave you and me a thousand a year, or saved our lives, we could not be so affected."

A striking exhibition of fine feeling on the part of a patient was brought to my attention by an a.s.sistant physician whom I met while visiting a State Hospital in Ma.s.sachusetts. It seems that the woman in question had, at her worst, caused an endless amount of annoyance by indulging in mischievous acts which seemed to verge on malice. At that time, therefore, no observer would have credited her with the exquisite sensibility she so signally displayed when she had become convalescent and was granted a parole which permitted her to walk at will about the hospital grounds. After one of these walks, taken in the early spring, she rushed up to my informant and, with childlike simplicity, told him of the thrill of delight she had experienced in discovering the first flower of the year in full bloom--a dandelion, which, with characteristic audacity, had risked its life by braving the elements of an uncertain season.

"Did you pick it?" asked the doctor.

"I stooped to do so," said the patient; "then I thought of the pleasure the sight of it had given me--so I left it, hoping that someone else would discover it and enjoy its beauty as I did."

Thus it was that a woman, while still insane, unconsciously exhibited perhaps finer feeling than did Ruskin, Tennyson, and Patmore on an occasion the occurrence of which is vouched for by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. These three masters, out for a walk one chilly afternoon in late autumn, discovered a belated violet bravely putting forth from the shelter of a mossy stone. Not until these worthies had got down on all fours and done ceremonious homage to the flower did they resume their walk. Suddenly Ruskin halted and, planting his cane in the ground, exclaimed, "I don't believe, Alfred--Coventry, I don't believe that there are in all England three men besides ourselves who, after finding a violet at this time of year, would have had forbearance and fine feeling enough to refrain from plucking it."

The reader may judge whether the unconscious display of feeling by the obscure inmate of a hospital for the insane was not finer than the self-conscious raptures of these three men of world-wide reputation.

Is it not, then, an atrocious anomaly that the treatment often meted out to insane persons is the very treatment which would deprive some sane persons of their reason? Miners and shepherds who penetrate the mountain fastnesses sometimes become mentally unbalanced as a result of prolonged loneliness. But they usually know enough to return to civilization when they find themselves beginning to be affected with hallucinations. Delay means death. Contact with sane people, if not too long postponed, means an almost immediate restoration to normality.

This is an illuminating fact. Inasmuch as patients cannot usually be set free to absorb, as it were, sanity in the community, it is the duty of those entrusted with their care to treat them with the utmost tenderness and consideration.

"After all," said a psychiatrist who had devoted a long life to work among the insane, both as an a.s.sistant physician and later as superintendent at various private and public hospitals, "what the insane most need is a _friend_!"

These words, spoken to me, came with a certain startling freshness. And yet it was the sublime and healing power of this same love which received its most signal demonstration two thousand years ago at the hands of one who restored to reason and his home that man of Scripture "who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and wors.h.i.+pped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the Most High G.o.d? I adjure Thee by G.o.d, that Thou torment me not."