he insane? Not so long as he can carry out a line of conduct consistent
with his station and surroundings.

It is remarkable how many obsessions we may harbor without causing us to
swerve from our accustomed line of conduct. Whatever our thoughts, our
conduct may be such that we attract little attention beyond the passing
observation that we are a little odd. We may break down, it is true, under
the double load we carry, but we are in little danger of insanity. Those
established in the conviction that they cannot stand noises or other
sources of discomfort, rarely reach the point of a certain poor old lady
who used to wander from clinic to clinic, able to think of nothing else,
and to talk of nothing else, than the ringing in her ears, and to attend to
no other business than efforts for its relief. She was counselled again and
again that since nothing was to be found in the ears she should endeavor
to reconcile herself to the inevitable, and turn her thoughts in other
directions. Unfortunately, she had become peculiarly adept in the detection
of disagreeable sights, sounds, and other sources of irritation, and had
for a long term of years practiced quite the opposite of control. She had
hitherto either insisted on discontinuance of all sources of irritation,
fled their neighborhood, or put on blue glasses and stopped her ears with
cotton. When, finally, her sharpened sense caught the sound of her own
circulation, she could think of nothing but this unavoidable source of
discomfort, which was prepared to follow her to the uttermost parts of the
earth.

A well-known author has said that the difference between sanity and
insanity depends only on the power to conceal the emotions. While this
definition will hardly pass in law or medicine, it surely offers food for
thought. Suppose for a moment that we were dominated by the impulse to
externalize all our thoughts and all our emotions, there would be some