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Take another view. Dr. Gray believes in the existence of mind, if not apart from body, yet in its essence distinct from body and bodily functions. The mind, then, viewed as an entity, there must be conceded to it a life embracing peculiar functions, powers, and faculties, related to each other, and capable of coordination and cooperation. Upon the harmonious action of these severally, as well as upon healthful bodily conditions, must depend all normal mental exercise. It has, according to the paper before us, "spontaneity and responsibility." These involve some other attributes, and of all these it may be said, with propriety, that they are impaired, disordered, deranged, or diseased.

But, accepting extreme materialistic views of the nature of insanity and its causes, there can be no objection to borrowing terms from material science to describe it; especially as all we can know of mind, upon this supposition, must be derived, by analogy, from physical conditions.

Dr. Brigham, in his first as well as in his later reports, dwelt upon the injurious influence of excessive religious excitement in producing insanity. His views were shared by the profession generally in his time, and, I doubt not, by a majority of the profession now. To opposing this opinion, Dr. Gray devotes quite a fraction of his paper, and it seems to me with unwonted confusion of ideas. Upon this subject, I may add, he appears to stand quite alone, so far as my reading goes. The argument is not one that lies against moral causes generally. It is rather the inadequacy of excitement upon religious topics, as among moral causes, to produce any effect in the direction named. Thus he says (p. 381): "We indeed think it is safe to infer that religious anxiety is rarely, if ever, a cause of insanity. The sublime faith of Christianity is rather a safeguard against it, and is unquestionably a support under its scourging. We do not believe that insanity is produced by this cause directly, by a profound impression made through the sentiments and emotions upon the nervous system; or, indirectly, by gradually undermining the general health." Again: "It will hardly be argued that depression is a phase of religious experience." The confusion of ideas is, that he does not discriminate between the sublime faith of Christianity and the thousand-and-one forms of religious extravagance. Or, as if the path to religious hope, and joy, and peace, was not supposed, by a large part of the religious world, to lie through a sense of exceeding guilt, etc., etc.

Even with more complacent views of what a religious experience should be, we have the ill effects of a too intense introspection upon individual life, and too long-continued dwelling in thought upon themes that pass over the borderline between the finite and the infinite.

It is no more strange that intellectual blindness should follow the protracted contemplation of any one of the divine attributes, than that loss of sight should result from gazing at the mid-day sun.

But the real dogma of the paper is stated with the most emphasis in the following passage: "We hold that it is not necessary, in order to establish the physical origin and nature of insanity or other cerebral diseases, to show that every case is of such origin and nature. If in a single case insanity" (that is, mental derangement) "is shown to come on as the result of well-recognized bodily disease, and the mental disturbance disappears pari passu with the physical restoration, the argument is invincible." Any thing more inconsistent with the demands of logic could hardly be stated. Remember the general proposition, to be proved by him, is: no physical disease of the brain, no mental derangement, no insanity. Now, nothing short of evidence that the two phenomena, disease of the brain and mental derangement, related as cause and effect, have occurred, not once, but every time, and in every case observed, leaves the argument "invincible." Pari passu implies also that, with constant cerebral lesions, there must be uniform psychological effects, and the reverse. The on-coming, the successive steps, and the out-going of the related phenomena, must be invariably parallel and coincident, less the inappreciable interval not yet measured between cause and effect in this specific relation. But let us apply his own reasoning when meeting what he calls the exploded vagaries of the French materialists: "In physiology (and if in physiology why not in pathology?), causes and results must bear a uniform relation; and we should have for so much grief, so many tears; for so much provocation, so much anger, and the like. Instead of having varied manifestations in the same individual as well as in different individuals, from the same causes, the manifestation should be uniform." Now, of what lesion or pathological condition, that has been found associated with a particular form of insanity, can we say that when occurring it will invariably produce the same. In the absence of this invariability the induction is imperfect -- by his own showing.