By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more frequently disturbed as to equilibrium.  This fluid being that which we have in common with spirits, a congestion found upon the masses of brain or nerve, connected with the interior sense, forms a surface unduly exposed, on which disembodied spirits may operate:  communication is thus more or less effectually established.  Between this brain circulation and the heart circulation there is an intimate sympathy.  The seat, or rather the instrument of exterior vision, is the eye.  The seat of interior vision is the nervous tissue and brain, immediately about and above the eyebrow.  You remember how effectually I dissipated your pictures by the simple application of iced eau-de-cologne.  Few cases, however, can be treated exactly alike with anything like rapid success.  Cold acts powerfully as a repellant of the nervous fluid.  Long enough continued it will even produce that permanent insensibility which we call numbness, and a little longer, muscular as well as sensational paralysis.

I have not, I repeat, the slightest doubt that I should have first dimmed and ultimately sealed that inner eye which Mr. Jennings had inadvertently opened.  The same senses are opened in delirium tremens, and entirely shut up again when the overaction of the cerebral heart, and the prodigious nervous congestions that attend it, are terminated by a decided change in the state of the body.  It is by acting steadily upon the body, by a simple process, that this result is produced—­and inevitably produced—­I have never yet failed.

Poor Mr. Jennings made away with himself.  But that catastrophe was the result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected itself upon the disease which was established.  His case was in the distinctive manner a complication, and the complaint under which he really succumbed, was hereditary suicidal mania.  Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence.  If the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain.

* * * * *

MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE

PROLOGUE

On this case Doctor Hesselius has inscribed nothing more than the words, “Harman’s Report,” and a simple reference to his own extraordinary Essay on “The Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the Opening thereof.”