Much the same may be said regarding mental health in general; its presence or absence may always be expressed in terms of sympathy. The test of sanity which everyone instinctively applies is that of a certain tact or feeling of the social situation, which we expect of all right-minded people and which flows from sympathetic contact with other minds. One whose words and bearing give the impression that he stands apart and lacks intuition of what others are thinking is judged as more or less absentminded, queer, dull, or even insane or imbecile, according to the character and permanence of the phenomenon. The essence of insanity, from the social point of view (and, it would seem, the only final test of it) is a confirmed lack of touch with other minds in matters upon which men in general are agreed; and imbecility might be defined as a general failure to compass the more complex sympathies. A man’s sympathies as a whole reflect the social order in which he lives, or rather they are a particular phase of it. Every group of which he is really a member, in which he has any vital share, must live in his sympathy; so that his mind is a microcosm of so much of society as he truly belongs to. Every social phenomenon, we need to remember, is simply a collective view of what we find distributively in particular persons—public opinion is a phase of the judgments of individuals; traditions and institutions live in the thought of particular men, social standards of right do not exist apart from private consciences, and so on. Accordingly, so far as a man has any vital part in the life of a time or a country that life is imaged in those personal ideas or sympathies which are the impress of his intercourse. So, whatever is peculiar to our own time, implies a corresponding peculiarity in the sympathetic life of each one of us. Thus the age, at least in the more intellectually active parts of life, is strenuous, characterized by the multiplication of points of personal contact through enlarged and accelerated communication. The mental aspect of this is a more rapid and multitudinous flow of personal images, sentiments, and impulses. Accordingly there prevails among us an animation of thought that tends to lift men above sensuality; and there is also possible a choice of relations that opens to each mind a more varied and congenial development than the past afforded. On the other hand, these advantages are not without their cost; the intensity of life often becomes a strain, bringing to many persons an overexcitation which weakens or breaks down character; as we see in the increase of suicide and insanity, and in many similar phenomena. An effect very generally produced upon all except the strongest minds appears to be a sort of superficiality of imagination, a dissipation and attenuation of impulses, which watches the stream of personal imagery go by like a procession, but lacks the power to organize and direct it.