Asylums for the Hopelessly Sane

THESE are courageous, intelligent days, when the world is taking itself in hand and studying its own wants, with the effect of divining some needs which our fathers crassly ignored. Our psychological development enables us more and more to look below the obvious surface of the demands of our civilization. Among other things, we are beginning to feel the necessity of erecting a few asylums for the hopelessly sane. The progress, if not the actual safety, of the commonwealth requires them.

Fortunately, there would never have to be many such institutions in existence; for sanity in its advanced stages is not a disease widely prevalent among human communities, and incipient sanity can generally be checked. But the demand might support a supply of one to every state.

What are the symptoms of sanity, and what are the dangers inherent in its development? Some of us know only too well. We have tried to deal with sane people. But others, more fortunate, have never felt the chilly blanketing of the malign influence, its distortion of the generous values of life, and they have to have their eyes opened to the thwarting peril.

Sanity holds such a wise equipoise among the conflicting forces of a none too sagacious world that it never gets pulled in any one direction more than in another. That sounds all right. Yes, the insidious nature of sanity is to sound all right. But some of the forces of the world are much better than others; some are so gloriously excellent that they should be yielded to utterly, followed without reserve to their extreme conclusion. What are such forces to make of a person who says, ‘Ah, well, yes, that does all very well; but you go too fast and too far, you become undignified. I agree with you, cautiously, up to a certain point. There I draw the line.’ Sane people are always drawing lines. That is one of the surest indications of their malady. As if the hard-and-fast lines of our human destiny were not already drawn close enough! As if, enlisted in a good cause, we had any business to set ourselves boundaries!

Sanity is Argus-eyed, and sees a great many sides to every question. That, again, sounds very well. Surely, a catholic disposition is all to the good. But it does not look deep enough to compare one side with another; for, if it did, its individual temperament would compel it to preference. The great organization that has monopolized the term catholic, has a single vision and emphatic preferences. But it may be that sanity dispenses with individual temperament, and so foregoes the very standard of choice. At any rate, by its wide tolerant recognition, it commits itself to a policy of passivity in an active world.

But is sanity tolerant? If it were, it would at least be harmless, and there would be no need for the Sane Asylums. Unfortunately, like all its other characteristics, tolerance graces it only up to a certain point. Beyond that, a decided negation takes possession of it and makes it a grim force in the world.

One has only to study the history of humanity’s greatest movements to see how this works out. The early Church went careering madly, bent wholly, fiercely, on righteousness, cutting off its hands, plucking out its eyes in every direction. The Kingdom might perhaps have come as soon as the disciples expected if that élan had continued. But then Constantine arose, at the same time giving the new religion its first organized chance and teaching it its first lessons in worldly wisdom. ‘Very well; you have your good points; I will help you — especially since, if I don’t, you seem likely to make things unpleasant for me. But you go too far. You must learn self-control. I will set you an example by deferring my baptism till the hour of my death.’ Perhaps it is ungracious to criticize the first Christian emperor; but certainly since his day, the Church has ceased plucking out its eyes, and no longer succeeds in making things effectively unpleasant for anybody. It would speak volumes if some Tammany magnate, some iniquitous factory overseer, should feel the necessity of committing himself to baptism rather than suffer the slings and arrows of some outrageous religious denomination. Unhappily, it speaks other volumes that no one does.

Enthusiasm is too sensitive and spiritual an essence not to suffer from the shock and chill of encounter with prudence. It draws in its tentacles, contracts; and, when it recovers itself, finds itself a changed being in a hardening world. There is then nothing for it but to go slowly; for hard things require deliberate manipulation. Only things made molten by a fire of love and zeal flow swiftly into place.

One sees, then, how fatal the touch of sanity may be. It is not precisely contagious, for most of us — thank heaven! — have no germs of it in us; but it is very arresting. It interrupts the momentum by which many a good cause, if left to itself, would have carried all before it. When the world at last makes up its mind to become and to do that which it promised nineteen hundred years ago, it will have to begin by locking all its strictly sane people out of the way.

But if sanity is so thwarting, does it follow, on the other hand, that madness is the disposition which best suits human life? Natural selection seems to have found it so. Everybody is mad when he is most spontaneously, most effectively himself. For then he is literally beside himself, carried out of, away from himself, lost to his own recognition in the mighty sweep of his cause. He does not stop to weigh and consider, to balance expediencies; he lets himself go, and, almost without knowing it, accomplishes great things. He who is not mad when he is in love is a pretty poor kind of lover; and what are we all but desperate lovers of Heaven?

Madness is an attribute of youth, and sanity of maturity. That is the reason why a beneficent Providence has decreed that the span of human life shall be so comparatively short, and that nations and civilizations shall be so frequently dissolved and dispersed. Only when people and countries are young, do they make vigorous history. When they take to turning on themselves and asking soberly, ‘Is this worth while? Are we not becoming ridiculous? ’ they have to be safely annihilated. Then the world-progress, sorely interrupted and impeded, can gather itself together and go on again.

This is all quite too bad. For youth’s inexperience is its serious handicap; and maturity’s wisdom might stand it in good stead, if it were not taken in such over-doses that it becomes a poison. If people and nations could only conserve their madness through the whole course of their experimenting lives, learning the rules of the game while still devoting their passionate attention to the goal, they might end by making some really great and brilliant achievements.

Perhaps, then, sanitariums would be better than asylums for our sane. Instead of waiting till they become hopeless and then committing them permanently, it might be well to note the first symptoms and take them in hand. For the groundwork of human nature is so vital and healthy that, if it is encouraged, it can almost always throw off incipient sanity. The methods of such sanitariums would be interesting to devise. Patients not too far advanced in their malady would have a good time. They would be constrained to devote themselves recklessly to whatever they held most dear (provided the causes were approved worthy); they would be made to take risks, commit imprudences. By some ingenious arrangement of the daily curriculum, they would be constantly given the choice between that which is spontaneous, vital, and that which is reasonable; and, when they chose the latter, they would be hissed. A fine place, such a sanitarium! Stimulating, inspiring, invigorating. We should all of us want to go there, for very love of the standard, for very joy in the great contagion of enthusiasm. Sane and insane alike, we should look upon the experience as a sort of religious ‘retreat.’

Ah! it is a desperate business, this life, to which we are so obscurely, so inexplicably committed. Our only chance with it is to take it desperately. It is infinitely greater than we are, it knows what it is about, its cosmic intentions endure. We are wise when we let ourselves go with it; we are very silly when we weigh and reserve our allegiance. So, then, the sane are the only insane? That is possible.