which the acts of others are given an invidious construction. They
anticipate ill will, carrying the _chip_ on the shoulder. Of two
constructions of a given situation, they leap to the more offending.
Some take on the vindictive attitude as a result, approaching that
type of insanity known as _paranoia_, of which Guiteau and Prendergast
were conspicuous examples; others are humiliated, as a consequence
approaching the _melancholia_ type of insanity, each illustrating
again how the sane and insane states are paralleled. Many come to bear
the outward marks--the stigmata of this mental attitude, approaching
sometimes the "asylum" face, like that of the insanely suspicious
Rousseau. We all know such faces, with their hard, set expressions, as
if forever sealed against any tender of good will.
By a curious fact, those who invite ill will seem often to get it.
Society, based on a reciprocity of faith, seems to have no smiles to
bestow upon the misanthrope. It bids him, "Laugh, and the world laughs
with you." It so comes to pass that many of them acquire some real
ground for their "sense of injury," and in the long run that real
quarrels are precipitated from this atmosphere of suspiciousness.
Indeed, this is the psychology of most quarrels. The _effect_ of
imaginary grievances comes in turn to be the _cause_ of real ones. Thus
into an incident between two persons, one of them mistakenly reads an
affront to himself. He retaliates, and the other person, unconscious
of having done anything to evoke any hostility, finds _himself_
affronted, and in _his_ turn retaliates. By this time real grievances
have come, and the quarrel is on. Balzac, that master analyst, in
alluding to friendship, in one of his stories, says: "It died" (the
friendship) "like other great passions--by a misunderstanding. Both
sides imagine treachery, pride prevents an understanding, and the
rupture comes." Just as the malevolent feelings may arise _de novo_,
so it is with the benevolent ones. Nordau shows how the nondescript
state of being "in love" often arises. Some incident between John and
Mary leads one of them--we will say John--to think mistakenly that Mary
has been attracted to him. Pleased with the fact, he reciprocates.
Mary, altogether unconscious of the reciprocal nature of John's
attention, finds pleasure in it, and in _her_ turn reciprocates. Mutual
reciprocity then follows.
In irritable persons we find the morbid sense of injury coupled with
resentment. Quickly interpreting anything disagreeable to them as an
affront by another, their first impulse is to resent it, which they
do more or less violently, according to circumstances, their second
thought often recognizing the irrational nature of the outbreak. This
suggests the feral instinct. Examples are common in the lower animals,
while in pain attacking those about them as if they were the cause of
it. No doubt this resentment is a survival from evolutionary ancestry.
It has probably served a necessary purpose in the conservation of
animal life by causing the animal to attack what may, in the jealousy
of self-preservation and its feeble discrimination, even be suspected
of being inimical to its welfare. Blind and unjust, perhaps, but
Nature hesitates at no apparent injustice to accomplish this. When
we go higher, to the tribal relation of man, we find the same blind
resentment. The Australian aborigines have no conception of death,
except as vaguely associated with homicidal causes, and when a member
of a tribe dies a most natural death a member of a hostile tribe
is killed to avenge the supposed murder. The Africans, too, read
homicidal forces into natural deaths. In civilized social relations it
appears again in the very popular and usually irrational demand for a
scapegoat when matters go wrong. The idea of religious sacrifice, too,
is a practice by which the anthropomorphic God is credited with being
aggrieved by human conduct and of wishing to be appeased therefor.
Though the exercise of this indiscriminate resentment was probably
greater and more necessary in the pre-social stage of human evolution,
there is still ground for its activity to-day in the struggle for
existence which has but changed its arena. Under a veneer of amity,
laudable enough, there are till the suspicion and resentment of the
tribal relation, as we may often see unveiled in a posse of boys, and
that this resentment is yet of the blind kind, we still have proof if
we have seen an enlightened man deliberately kick a harmless chair
because he stumbled on it in the dark.
Phylogenetically, then, we see this morbid "sense of injury" to be
reversional. This is in harmony with the atavic theory of insanity. In
the individual it is a delusion, and, like other delusions, an attempt
by the reason to explain a disordered feeling; in this case a _painful_
feeling, having its origin broadly in some imperfect adaptation of the
organism. This attempt to explain a feeling or sensation seems a human
necessity. However wide of the truth such explanations usually are, we
seem forced to attempt them. In the case of this _painful_ feeling,
with which we are here concerned, we are either unwilling or unable to
explain it in its true way, and are prone to attribute it to malevolent
agencies, often personal--perhaps the "bogy-man" remnant of the
child and race. Such explanation is often an easy escape from truths
unwelcome to our ego--truths which, if recognized, would wound pride
or conscience beyond easy endurance. It requires a man of rare courage
and mental clarity to recognize his particular pain from failure in
adaptation as autogenetic, and to lay it to natural and unflattering
causes. We prefer, of the two, to accuse the environment rather than
the organism, especially when the organism happens to be our own. We
take refuge in a grievance rather than impugn the supremacy of our ego.
Indeed, it seems to be necessary for healthy subjective activity, so to
speak, that a sort of _imperialism_ of the ego, however circumscribed,
be maintained. It is the condition _sine qua non_ of the necessary
measure of well-being of the individual. It is most reluctantly
relinquished, and we constantly see the plainest truths immolated that
it be retained. Only in the great self-effacement of melancholia and
in those rare characters who recognize and bear complacently naked
truths--the _Weltschmerz_ of Goethe--is this well-being renounced.
Even those who are willing to father their own wounded ego still
seek the necessary approbation by reducing its future pretensions
or claims so that they may not be again pained by their failure to
achieve them. They _unhitch_ their wagon from the star. Professor
James has illustrated this by a fraction showing that our approbation
is determined by our _success_ divided by our _pretensions_. Thus,
success/pretensions = approbation (self-esteem). The quotient may
be increased by diminishing the _pretensions_ or by increasing the
_success_. James's fraction is as applicable to the moral conduct as to
the intellectual side.
When we look for the physical equivalent of the mental state which
evokes the "sense of injury" we find it in dynamic and toxic states
of the nervous system and their correlation. Certain conditions of
the individual or environment bring these into special relief. Old
age is one. The querulousness, the sense of abuse or persecution
which afflict the aged and often lead them to take refuge in the
martyr-spirit, are sad examples. The state of fatigue or exhaustion is
another, and "neurasthenic" insanity is only an expression in greater
degree of the morbid mental action found in fatigue and exhausted
states.
The primary and secondary effects of alcohol or other narcotic
indulgence is another soil in which the "sense of injury" easily grows.
The _habitué_ is notoriously suspicious and irritable, and full of
fictitious grievances and unwarranted persecutory ideas. His attitude
toward them is that of the paranoiac, vindictive, rather than that
of the melancholiac, humiliated. They swell the army of so-called
"borderland" cases of insanity, fretting their friends and puzzling the
doctor with conduct alternately interpreted as "cussed" or "crazy."
Where there is bodily disease, acute or chronic, the morbid "sense
of injury" is much in play. An intelligent patient, on recovery from
a stomach disorder, admitted that whenever her stomach had ached she
was taken with a violent hatred of her companion with whom she was in
affectionate relation. An ignorant Southern colored woman, who had
rheumatism in her ankle, believed that she had been "hoodooed," and
explained the pain in her ankle by the presence of a snake, which she
believed had been put there by a "hoodoo." She was not insane, the
idea being consistent with her degree of intelligence, training, and
early environment. Another patient, a sensible, cultivated woman,
while suffering from a non-nervous illness, in which she had received
all the consideration that love and money could furnish, believed
herself to have been constantly and deliberately abused. After her
recovery, now some years, she still maintains the belief. Instances
could be multiplied, for doctors continually meet this atmosphere in
the sick-room, from ugly little grievances to delusions of persecution.
They are not surprised when a patient tells them in mingled confidence
and complaint that he is hungry and neglected, that "they" will
give him nothing to eat, etc., to find that his wife has been most
attentive, has been pressing him to eat, and has stocked the pantry in
anticipation. Dr. Johnson had plenty of ground for saying that a sick
man is a rascal, though the modern doctor has reversed the formula.
Persons who suffer from actual trouble or ill treatment easily develop
a morbid sense of injury, just as under similar conditions they may
become insane. Unable to estimate the precise amount of their real
grievance, there is an easy mental overflow into the fictitious
ones. It is for this reason that the narrative of a real trouble or
quarrel is so fraught with calumnious arraignment of others that it
is unreliable until we have heard the "other side of the story," and
that when disputants meet and explanations follow they often find
that they have no _casus belli_. In the examination of the alleged
insane for commitment we have constantly to separate the real from the
imaginary troubles. Mr. F---- was the subject of such examination. He
was suffering from heart disease, and thereby compelled to remain at
home idle. His wife was supporting the family by keeping boarders,
and he began to develop a morbid jealousy of her. He annoyed her by a
constant surveillance and suspicion of her every act, which amounted
at times to the delusion that she was unfaithful to him, and which
culminated one night in an outbreak in which the police figured. It
was difficult to separate his real from his imaginary grievances, for
his wife had ceased to have any affection for him, though his delusion
in regard to her unfaithfulness was unfounded and had been grafted
upon his real trouble. Sent to a general hospital, he improved, and
was reported "not insane." Circumstances requiring a hard struggle
for existence, disappointment without apparent cause, coupled with a
certain sentimental cast of mind, often prevent the correct estimation
of the wrongs suffered and the proper relation of undoubted misfortunes.
In the insane the sense of injury or its analogue--delusions of
persecution--appears in numerous shapes. Thus patients are defrauded,
or conspired against, or acted upon by witchcraft, magnetism,
electricity, or poisoned, or preached against, or subjected to
disagreeable odors. Sometimes the delusions are but ill-defined
and vague. Often it is possible to trace them to their underlying
disordered sense impression or the particular environment or to
vestiges of outgrown beliefs. They appear in depressed states of
melancholia as well as in the exalted states of mania and paranoia.
In melancholia they accompany a feeling of worthlessness which is the
patient's explanation of his persecution--i. e., he is unworthy of
better treatment. In paranoia the patient believes the persecution to
be prompted by fear or envy of him, and there is consequently a feeling
of self-importance--a morbid egotism which is in direct proportion to
the magnitude or complexity of the ideas of persecution. Indeed, it
is probable that these ideas of persecution, acting on a potentially
melancholic or a potentially paranoiac mind, whatever these may be,
determine the type that these mental diseases take.
The difference between the "injured" sense in the sane and insane
states we must from our view point, without essaying to bridge all
the _terra incognita_ which lies between sanity and insanity, regard
as largely but one of degree. And so with the underlying mental and
physical states. We find the morbid ideas more fixed in the sane than
in the insane, frequent repetitions of the morbid impression tending
to its final organization, so to speak. We also find that the morbid
idea is usually more elaborated in the insane than in the sane state,
although instances of the greatest elaboration are sometimes met with,
especially where the element of some external foundation is large. It
is probable, however, that the elements of fixity and elaboration of
the persecutory idea are after all dependent upon and in proportion to
the intensity of the underlying brain and mind states. In other words,
that to increase a given intensity of these states is to increase the
fixity and elaborateness of the "sense of injury," is to prevent the
correction of the morbid idea, until finally exploited in conduct,
which is the _début_ of the insanity.
Thus the relativity of insanity which has all along been maintained is
clear on the line here pursued. It would be equally so in following
other lines of morbid psychology. It has, though, received but little
general recognition, and writers still treat insanity as an entity
apart from its bearings on the average mind and its evolutionary
history. The word "insanity," or "lunatic," is no doubt largely
responsible for this, suggesting popularly, as it does, a distinct
class of persons--a type of being as unlike ourselves as a Martian
might be fancied to be. Nature or science, however, has set no line
between the morbid mental manifestations which constitute sanity and
those which constitute insanity, that being an arbitrary, however
practical, distinction which science has had rather to descend to
meet. Nothing so stands in the way of the best welfare of the insane
than this abysmal ignorance which still prevails in regard to them--an
ignorance which still clings to the mediæval idea of insanity, the
classical portraiture, as in the pictures of Hogarth, or on the stage,
or in fiction; an ignorance which is ever hearkening for the maniac's
shriek or the clanking of his fetters, which recognizes nothing short
of "furious madness" as sufficient ground for committing a brain-sick
man to the tender therapy of the hospital ward.
But those who know best tell us that the insane are very much like
other people, that there is wonderfully little difference between them
and ourselves; and sometimes but a slight circumstance, a mere accident
of environment, determines which side of the hospital wall we shall be
on.
EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN AIR FLIGHT.
BY M. BANET RIVET.
Man has sought in all times and at all places to find means of leaving
the earth's surface, in imitation of the birds, and rising into the
air. Ancient legendary lore furnishes many stories, like those of
Dædalus and his son Icarus, of attempts of this sort. In the fourth
century B. C., Archytas of Tarentum, a learned Pythagorean, who has
been credited with the invention of the screw, the pulley, and the
kite, according to Aulus Gellius, constructed a wooden dove which could
rise and sustain itself in the air by some mechanism the arrangement of
which is not known. Credible accounts exist of an English Benedictine
monk, Oliver of Malmesbury, in the eleventh century, having tried to
fly by precipitating himself from the height of a tower, with the
assistance of wings attached to his arms and his feet. It is said that,
after having gone along a little way, he fell and broke his legs. He
attributed his accident to failure to provide his apparatus with a
tail, which would have helped preserve his equilibrium and made the
descent a gentler one.
In the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci first demonstrated that a
bird, which is heavier than the air, sustains itself, advances in the
air, "by rendering the fluid denser where it passes than where it does
not pass." In order to fly it has to fix its point of support on the
air; its wing in the descending stroke exerts a pressure from above
down, the reaction of which from below up forces the center of gravity
of its body to ascend at each instant to the height at which the bird
wishes to maintain it. Some sketches that have come down to us prove
that Leonardo occupied himself, like Oliver of Malmesbury, with giving
man power to fly by the aid of wings suitably fixed to his body. We owe
to Leonardo also the invention of the parachute, which he described in
the following terms: "If a man had a pavilion, each side of which was
fifteen braces wide and twelve braces high, he might cast himself from
any height whatever, without fear of danger." It may be said, too, of
Leonardo da Vinci, that he was the first to suggest the idea of the
screw propeller. "If," he said, "this instrument in the form of a screw
is properly made--that is, made of linen cloth, the interstices of
which have been filled with starch--and if we turn it rapidly, such a
screw will make a bearing nut for itself through the air and rise. This
can be proved by moving a broad, thin rule rapidly through the air,
when it will be found that the arm is forced to follow in the direction
of the edge of the board. The frame for the cloth of which I have been
speaking should be made of long, stout reeds. A model of it might be
made in paper, with, for its axis, a thin strip of iron which we twist
forcibly. When the strip is left free it will turn the screw."
In 1680 Borelli published some studies of a remarkably correct
character on the flight of birds. According to his view, the wing
acts upon the air in the phase of beating down, in the manner of an
inclined plane, so as, by virtue of the resistance opposed by the
air, to push the body of the animal upward at first and then onward.
The action of the ascending wing was compared to that of a kite, and
it would consequently continue to sustain the body of the bird while
waiting the following stroke. But Borelli never thought of turning
his observations to advantage, so as to supply man with the means
of flying. Attention was much engaged in 1742 with the attempt of
the Marquis de Bacqueville, substantially repeating that of Oliver
of Malmesbury, which was terminated by a similar accident. Mention
should also be made of Paucton, who in 1768 drafted a plan for a screw
machine. In 1784 Launoy and Bienvenu exhibited and operated, before
the Academy of Sciences in Paris, a screw which was moved by a strong
spring. Before this, however, Joseph and Stephen Montgolfier had filled
the world with the noise of their discovery of the air balloon, and the
ingenious machine of these aëronauts failed to receive the attention it
deserved.
It has been known since the days of Archimedes that every body partly
or wholly submerged in a liquid in equilibrium suffers a vertical push
upward from the fluid equal to the weight of liquid it displaces.
Let us consider the case of a body entirely plunged in a liquid--water,
for example. If its weight exceeds the thrust it suffers it will fall
to the bottom of the water under the action of a descensional force
equal, at each instant, to the difference between the weight of the
body, which is invariable, and the thrust, which is invariable also,
and thus constant in direction and also in amount. If the weight of the
body is less than the thrust, the latter overcomes it, and, contrary
to the usual laws of weight, the body will rise under the action of
an ascensional force, which will evidently be likewise constant in
amount as well as in direction. A cork held down at the bottom of a
vessel of water and then left to itself will supply an example of this
ascensional movement.
A third case may be presented--that in which the weight of the body
is equal to the thrust of the water. Weight and thrust are then in
mutual equilibrium. No force invites the body either to descend or to
rise, and it remains balanced in the midst of the liquid, wherever it
happens to have been placed. This state of indifferent equilibrium is,
however, possible only if the weight of the body remains rigorously
constant. The slightest augmentation of the weight immediately causes
the body to descend, while the slightest diminution sends it up. From
this source arise the difficulties that are met in the construction
of submarine boats, when their ascent or descent is obtained by
means of air chambers, which are filled with water or emptied of it
according to the requirements. The equilibrium of these engines is
always precarious, and this explains why none of them, from that of Van
Drebbel in 1620 to the experiments of Goubet in 1895, have given really
practical results in the matter of stability of immersion.
When Galileo, following Aristotle, had demonstrated the ponderability
of the air, and Torricelli had proved that atmospheric pressure was a
result of that property, it was immediately thought that the principle
discovered by Archimedes might be extended to the air, and Otto von
Guericke gave an experimental demonstration of it by the invention of
the baroscope.
From this period it seems, then, that the discovery of aëronautics was
possible. If the weight of the volume of air displaced is greater than
that of the body, the latter should take an ascensional movement in the
atmosphere, as a cork does when plunged into water; and it is evident
that for a body to satisfy such conditions we have only to fill a very
light envelope with a gas less dense than the ambient air. But the
study of gases was still in its infancy in the seventeenth century, and
it required the labors of Mortrel d'Élement and Hales, at the beginning
of the following century, to teach physicists how to collect and retain
them.
The history of the progress of the human mind shows, further, that the
pure and simple acceptance of a scientific discovery is not enough to
make it produce all the consequences we have a right to expect from it.
It must, further, impregnating the mind with itself, pass, we might
say, into the condition of an innate idea. Chemistry, in this very
matter of the discovery of the weight of the air and of the gases,
presents a striking example of the accuracy of our proposition. The
ponderability of the air had been accepted by physicists for a long
time, while chemists continued to take no account of it, although, as
Mendeleef has remarked, no exact idea could be conceived, under such
conditions, concerning most chemical phenomena. It is to the glory of
Lavoisier that he first took account of this ponderability and of that
of all the gases as well. When we reflect that it was not till about
1775, or a hundred and fifty years after Galileo, that this illustrious
Frenchman began to set forth those ideas, it is not any wonder that
the discovery of aërostats was not made till toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Lalande was therefore much in the wrong when he
said "it was so simple! why was it not done before?"
It would not be just, however, to refer the discovery of aërostats
solely to the efforts of the Montgolfiers. Like all inventors, like
Lavoisier himself, these brothers, as Figuier has remarked, had the
benefit of a long series of isolated labors, carried on often without
special purpose, by which the elements of their invention had been
gathered up.