Chapter IX.
Of Demence, or Dissociation.
Related to intellectual madness is that disease of the mind, which has received from Mr. Pinel the name of demence. The subjects of it in Scotland are said to " have a bee in their bonnets." In the United States, we say they are " flighty " or " hair-brained," and, sometimes, a "little cracked." I have preferred naming it, from its principal symptoms, dissociation. It consists not in false perception like the worst grade of madness, but of an association of unrelated perceptions, or ideas, from the inability of the mind to perform the operations of judgment and reason. The perceptions are generally excited by sensible objects; but ideas, collected together without order, frequently constitute a paroxysm of the disease. It is always accompanied with great volubility of speech, or with bodily' gestures, performed with a kind of convulsive rapidity, We rarely meet with this disease
