On Irritation and Insanity

their features become composed, they assume an expression of pride, and they feel an inward conviction that their intelligence is infinitely greater than that of the persons who tell them with some surprise, "I do not understand you."

The moment, however, seems to have arrived, when we may tear away the veil which renders their masters impenetrable. We hope in this work to make known the secret of their apparent superiority; and the cause of that singular stupor which they have produced in the literary world.

It is to physicians that we shall offer the explanation of these mysteries; for it is their cause that we are now pleading; it belongs to the medico-physiologists to determine, what there is really appreciable in the causes of instinctive and intellectual phenomena. We address ourselves to physicians, because he who has studied nothing more than the regular and healthy physiology of the human being, does not possess facts enough for the solution of these problems. Man is only half understood, if he is observed only in health: sickness constitutes part of his moral, as well as of his physical existence. We must not, therefore, be surprised at the reveries of an Ontologist, who is a stranger to the physiology both of health and of disease; or who is content with a superficial knowledge of authors, whom he is unable to comprehend. Such is the case with the Kanto-Platonicians, and nothing is more strange than the pretension which they set up now-a-days to give laws to our science, especially at a moment when it is undergoing a stormy revolution, the nature of which they cannot understand. On all sides they find discussions of which they know not the true motive; truth and error, sincerity and dissimulation, honorable disinterestedness, and vile speculation imitating her language, are afloat, not in the whole medical world, but in the capital of France-in all the saloons-in all the academies; and the Kanto-Platonicians are at a loss to discover their own tenets: they know not what medicine is, and yet they dare

calumniate and despise it: they proclaim that the science of man, such as they conceive it to be, has alone any pretensions to certainty: without having passed even ten years of their life in studying man as physicians, or knowing him, considered in his organs, living and dead, they think that the external observation of the grown man, is sufficient to explain all the phenomena of the embryo, the infant, the diseased, the deformed, and the dead, submitted to anatomical analysis. The first observation is for them the only true one, because it is theirs; the other is a vain and gross hypothesis, calculated for common understandings. It is of consequence to show them where the truth really lies; in particular, to make them understand that a victory over a few deserters, or some speculators, who sacrifice to them a science which they do not understand, is immeasurably distant from a victory over medicine.

We will not do so much injustice to the French youth, as to believe they can be entirely led estray by the bloated language of the Kanto-Platonicians-the fund of good sense which distinguishes them, will doubtless preserve them now, as it has done formerly. But they may be confounded by the clattering of words which assail their ears on every side, and the schools of medicine will be surprised to hear, that this senseless jargon is to be introduced into the midst of the medical faculty, while so much opposition is to be made to the fruitful and intelligible doctrine of the Physiological School. We shall endeavor to explain this enigma, and make them feel the dignity of the science they cultivate; and we shall prove undoubtedly, to every man who has consecrated the most valuable years of his life to anatomical, physiological, and pathological investigations, that the science which he has so laboriously acquired, neither is, nor ought to be, tributary to metaphysics, from which it can draw nothing useful; and that so far from receiving its laws from this science of words, ought to supply them to meta

physics which, like an ungrateful child, despises and denies its parent.

Following this great truth, we must collect the phenomena of instinct and intelligence around the excited nervous system, and give them an important place among the generating causes of irritation. We have not hesitated to adopt as the base of our work, the article Irritation, which we published in the Encyclopédie progressive, and which the public has favorably received. But the theory of irritation will receive in the following pages, a fuller developement than suited the plan of that work: so that this is in reality a new treatise on IRRITATION, which we now offer to our brethren. Since, of the four forms of Irritation, that of the nerves is more particularly developed in this book, as its importance required, and which we have hitherto refused to insist on, until time had matured our ideas,-we thought we could do nothing better than add to it by way of proof, a description of a correspondent malady. We have chosen INSANITY, as being the disorder in which nervous irritation plays the most important part. This subject suited us better, as affording new strength to the arguments which we oppose to the ambitious pretentions of the Psychologists.

In truth, our design in this work is, to unveil that mystery, under whose protection bad taste threatens to spread itself over the whole science of man, physical and moral; to contribute by a new effort, to the progress of physiological medicine, and to mark the causes which have prevented that progress from being more rapid; in fine, to pursue the science which we love, and to whose glory we have consecrated the greater part of our life, from being subjected to a disgraceful subordination.

It required motives like these, to induce us to interrupt the third edition of our Examen des doctrines mèdicales, which we have already put to press, and are sorry to delay so long; but that work shall be resumed with new activity.