In the lowest phases mental organization can hardly be said to exist at all: an idiot has no character, no consistent or effective individuality. There is no unification, and so no self-control or stable will; action simply reflects the particular animal impulse that is ascendent. Hunger, sexual lust, rage, dread, and, in somewhat higher grades, a crude, naïve kindliness, are each felt and expressed in the simplest manner possible. There can, of course, be little or no true sympathy, and the unconsciousness of what is going on in the minds of other persons prevents any sense of decency or attempt to conform to social standards. In the higher grades we may make the distinction, already suggested in speaking of egotism, between the unstable and the rigid varieties. Indeed, as was intimated, selfishness and degeneracy are of the same general character; both being defined socially by a falling short of accepted standards of conduct, and mentally by some lack in the scope and organization of the mind. There is, then, one sort of persons in whom the most conspicuous and troublesome trait is mere mental inconsistency and lack of character, and another who possess a fair degree, at least, of consistency and unity of purpose, but whose mental scope or reach of sympathy is so small that they have no adequate relation to the life about them. An outgrowing, impressionable sort of mind, if deficient in the power to work up its material, is necessarily unstable and lacking in momentum and definite direction: and in the more marked cases we have people of the hysterical type, unstable forms of dementia and insanity, and impulsive crime. “The fundamental defect in the hysterical brain,” says Dr. Dana, “is that it is circumscribed in its associative functions; the field of consciousness is limited just as is the field of vision. The mental activity is confined to personal feelings, which are not regulated by connotation of past experiences, hence they flow over too easily into emotional outbursts or motor paroxysms. The hysterical person cannot think.”[106] It is evident that something similar might be said of all manifestations of instability. On the other hand, an ingrowing sort of mind, whose tendency is rather to work over and over its cherished thoughts than to open out to new ones, may have a marked deficiency of sensibility and breadth of perception. If so, the person is likely to exhibit some form of gross and persistent egotism, such as sensuality, avarice, narrow and ruthless ambition, fanaticism, of a hard, cold sort, delusion of greatness, or those kinds of crime that result from habitual insensibility to social standards rather than from transient impulse.