To understand this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of consciousness are _instinct, reason, emotion_ and _intuition_. These four states of consciousness are _functions_ of the normal mind. When a patient becomes over-intensified in either one of these parts of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense states _uncommon_, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a "genius" or a "dementia." The ordinarily insane individual has lost all relationship with his natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason, instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and as time goes on, he loses complete control of his idea centers. Every individual has definite idea centers within his own brain, and it is through these centers that ideas are coordinated, received or rejected. As over-intensification of feeling and emotion goes on, the normal action of the idea centers is interfered with and the individual has superinduced emotional and intuitional states which are no longer guarded by reason and thought. The emotion senses a purely imaginary condition and the idea centers have no power to reduce it to truth. As time goes on, all power of association is lost and the individual passes along, the plaything of his subjective states of mind. As he becomes more and more intensified subjectively, he opens the deep psychic currents both within and without himself, and loses his connection with his common mind and his physical body, and becomes a prey to all the psychic currents. There are lives everywhere open to subjective thought currents, and all unknown to themselves they are allowing themselves to become disintegrated by the daily and hourly response they are giving to the stimulus of a plane they should master instead of allowing it to master them. The psychic plane may become a pathway to power, or it may become the open doorway to a body and mind full of disease, insanity and absolute loss of power and poise. There are many patients confined in the asylums today, who would never have been there, and who would be released and cured, if those in charge fully understood the truth of this unnaturally natural development and directed their attention to its control.