Persons, often, in company, think it necessary exclusively to exercise the exhilirating passions, and they return home not only with these feelings exhausted, but with the depression passions assuming in their turn an over-active state, and in this state they perhaps encourage a spirit of discontent, and peevishness, making sad havoc of domestic peace, and producing an unhealthy state of mind, _an alteration in the state of the nervous energy_, _generating an acrid and morbific matter in the system_, _and ultimately disease_, both in themselves and others. {22} It is too well known that many who are all life and energy in company, sink on returning home, into this state of apathetic melancholy. This is especially the case with those persons who are betrayed by their buoyant spirits and powers of pleasing into extremes, exciting themselves by stimulus and other excesses; and as they are often minds originally of the most amiable constitution, they afterwards, when left to sober reflection, are overwhelmed with self-condemnation; and should they, to raise their sinking spirits, have again recourse to stimulus, the evil is increased, and the effects are terrific. It is to these painful and conscientious conflicts, as much, and perhaps more, than the mere physical effect of their excess, that the disorder and destruction of their minds are to be attributed. I mention these simple and common forms of irregular and discordant excitation, to shew that from such causes the susceptible mind gets into the habit which may terminate in the more fixed and serious form of alternate states of irresistible excitement of the exhilirating and depressing passions, constituting insane cases, just as we find those of the alternate over-excitement of the kindly and benevolent affections; or, of the angry and malevolent passions terminate in corresponding states. How many persons live in this baneful domestic atmosphere of perpetual storm and sunshine? And hence, when the mind of one of these becomes morbid, and the malevolent passions assume the exclusive sway, they are said to hate those they formerly loved, which is simply the more permanent state of their former fits of anger; in fact, every form of incipient insanity may be traced with more or less ease, to these corresponding causes. This may not be popular doctrine, but it is the truth.