“Precisely, and therefore when you meet what is called possession or obsession, you call it insanity. That is a convenient way of reasoning, and not uncommon with learned physicians and physicists; but it is a begging of the question, not its solution. You reason from a foregone conclusion. As you yourself and all the profession treat insanity as a disease, as symptomatic of some lesion or alteration of the physical system, or of the organs on which the manifestations of the mind depend, I should suppose it necessary to establish the fact of such lesion or alteration, before concluding the presence of actual insanity.” “Insanity, in such case, would be found to be very rare.” “Very possibly, and perhaps it is much rarer than is commonly supposed. It is not impossible that a large proportion of those you call insane, and treat as lunatics, are as sound of body or mind as you or I. Where we find, physically considered, all the symptoms of health, we cannot, from purely mental phenomena, infer disease. That the vulgar have often regarded as under the influence of Satan persons who were merely epileptic, cataleptic, or insane, is no doubt very true; but it is not impossible that the learned and scientific have committed not unfrequently a contrary mistake, and regarded as insane, cataleptics, or epileptics, persons who were totally free from all pathological symptoms. How will you, dear Doctor, explain by insanity a case taken from a thousand similar ones, which I chanced to be reading this morning, and which is well attested. Allow me to relate it as given by Dr. Calmeil, one of your own profession, a learned and highly esteemed manigraph, author of a work, _De la Folie_,[4] and who entertains the same views that you do. Missionaries who now, says M. Calmeil,[5] cross the seas to shed the light of faith in the New World, are frequently surprised to meet energumenes among their neophytes, whilst they acknowledge that it is seldom that the devil takes possession of the faithful in the mother country. The letter which I am about to report, addressed to Winslow, a celebrated physician, in 1738, by a _worthy_ missionary, proves that the delirium of demonopathy may everywhere become the lot of feeble and timorous souls. ----- Footnote 4: Paris, Chez Balliere, 1845. 2 vol. gr. in-8vo. Footnote 5: T. 2, p. 417. -----