I do not, however, maintain that one who is insane on any one point is thereby made irresponsible for all his actions. If he does what he thinks to be wrong, he acts against the dictates of his conscience, he deserves punishment from God; and if he violates a just law of the land, and it can be proved that his deed proceeded from a bad will, he may be punished by the civil courts as well, even though he is insane on other points. For instance, if a young man were to have a crazy notion that his father disliked him, that he is often in various ways unjust to him, and if, in consequence of this insane conviction, he were to attempt his father's life, he should be punished for the criminal act; because, even according to the way he views the matter, he could not be justified in killing his father for such a reason. It were different if he insanely imagined that his father was in the act of killing him, and that he could not escape death but by killing his father first; for then he could plead the right of self-defence against an unjust aggressor, as he foolishly imagines his father to be. The conclusion then from all this explanation is that an insane man should not be held responsible for a deed which he insanely thinks to be right; but he is responsible for all his other acts. In our next lecture we shall consider more fully the treatment of the insane by the civil and criminal tribunals. LECTURE VIII. THE LEGAL ASPECTS OF INSANITY. In our last lecture, gentlemen, we considered the nature and causes of delusional insanity. We saw that its essence lies in mistaking imaginations for realities with a firmness of conviction which no argument to the contrary can shake. The reasoning of the insane man may be logically faultless, we said, but he reasons from false premises supplied to him by the phantasms of a diseased imagination. The cause of the disease I showed to lie in an abnormal action of the brain, which is the storehouse of the phantasms or brain-pictures. And this abnormal action may itself proceed either from a local lesion of the brain, or from a sympathetic affection due to indisposition in other parts of the human body. I finished by examining the responsibility of an insane man for his actions, and arrived at this practical conclusion, that a victim of delusional insanity should not be held responsible for any acts which he insanely thinks right, but should be held responsible for all his other human acts.