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The thing that wouldn't let March alone, that forced him into the undertaking, was the declaration of the brutal philosophy of the conqueror made by the officer while he gloated over the girl who was to be his prey; the chance to put into musical terms that paranoiac delusion of world conquest.
The district attorney's own experts had pronounced the defendant a hopeless paranoiac; the prosecutor had, at a previous trial, openly declared the same to be his own opinion; and the evidence was convincing. At the time it was rendered, the verdict was accepted as a foregone conclusion.
When John Brown cunningly surveyed the lines around those houses in Kansas, observed the fastenings of their doors, marked the strength of the shutters, learned the names of their dogs, crept under the cover of darkness on his prey as a wild beast creeps through the jungle and hacked his innocent victims to pieces, we know that he was a criminal paranoiac pursuing a fixed idea under the delusion that God had sent him.
"Not yet," he said, "O too enthusiastic youth! Our friend here has not yet come to the point at which I was aiming. The application of my remarks to the Kaiser whom I regard as a gifted paranoiac is altogether too personal and limited. I was thinking of something larger and more important. Do you give me leave to develop the idea?" "Fire away, sir," said Dick. Hardman nodded his assent.
As soon as the obsessing idea of the influence of another person takes still a stronger hold and develops systems, the suspicion of insanity always lies near; especially when hallucinations are superadded, the probability is great that we then have to do with the delusions of a paranoiac, and thus no case for psychotherapeutic treatment.
He had never been able to control more than two dozen people in any enterprise which he undertook. And in these small bands rebellions always broke out. The paranoiac had been transfigured now into the Hero and the Saint through the worship of the mob which his insanity had created.
The depression of the neurasthenic must not be treated like the depression of the melancholic, the obsession of the psychasthenic must not be mixed with the fixed ideas of a paranoiac, the hysteric inability to walk must not be confused with an injury of the motor nerves; in short, each symptom has to be treated as part of a complete situation.
With all the means not only of psychology but of neurology and internal medicine, he has to separate the particular case from similar ones and to examine whether he deals with, for instance, a hysteric or with a paranoiac, with a neurasthenic or with a case of dementia præcox; and he will not forget that there exist almost no symptoms of serious diseases which the nervous system of the hysteric may not imitate for a time.
Thus we must claim that all those so-called functional disturbances like neurasthenia and hysteria, fixed ideas and obsessions, phobias and dissociations of the personality, as well as the typical insane states of the maniac or paranoiac have their basis in a pathological change of the anatomical structure of the brain.
My first impression was decidedly that of a paranoiac. Yet in some ways the case suggested another view. There had remained an insight into the unreality of the obsession. The patient did not really believe the theory of the telepathic hypnotic influence.
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