I have been seduced into a dry discussion where I had intended only a few amusing facts, in proof, that the mind makes the sense far more than the senses make the mind. If I have life, and health, and leisure, I purpose to compile from the works, memoirs, and transactions of the different philosophical societies in Europe, from magazines, and the rich store of medical and psychological publications, furnished by the English, French, and German press, all the essays and cases that relate to the human faculties under unusual circumstances, (for pathology is the crucible of physiology), excluding such only as are not intelligible without the symbols or terminology of science. These I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, &c.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating, and realizing power; the speculative reason, 'vis theoretica et scientifica', or the power, by which we produce, or aim to produce, unity, necessity, and a universality in all our knowledge by means of principles, [2]'a priori'; the will or practical reason; the faculty of choice, ('Willkühr'), and (distinct both from the moral will, and the choice), the sensation of volition which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch. Thence I propose to make a new arrangement of madness, whether as defect, or as excess, of any of these senses or faculties; and thus by appropriate cases to shew the difference between;-- 1. a man having lost his reason but not his senses or understanding--that is, when he sees things as other men see them,--adapts means to ends as other men would adapt them, and not seldom, with more sagacity,--but his final end is altogether irrational: 2. his having lost his wits, that is, his understanding or judicial power; but not his reason or the use of his senses,--(such was Don Quixote; and, therefore, we love and reverence him, while we despise Hudibras): 3. his being out of his senses, as in the case of a hypochondriac, to whom his limbs appear to be of glass, although all his conduct is both rational, or moral, and prudent: 4. Or the case may be a combination of all three, though I doubt the existence of such a case, or of any two of them: 5. And lastly, it may be merely such an excess of sensation, as overpowers and suspends all, which is frenzy or raving madness.