Part 5

Connected with these subjects, there is a point of considerable importance, and of frequent occurrence, which yet remains to be examined, and with which the present essay will conclude: namely, the state of mind, under which, a person may legally dispose of his property by will. Medical practitioners are often called upon to attest the competence or incapacity of particular persons to the performance of this act, which requires a state of disposing mind. In many instances it is deferred to that extremity of bodily disease when recovery is hopeless. To urge its propriety or necessity at an earlier period, often excites alarm or despondency, and such state of feeling, the medical attendant, in many disorders, is unwilling to excite. As a person of liberal education, and from the enquiries he has made during his attendance on the patient, he is justly presumed a proper judge of his competence to dispose. This instrument is termed a will, which does not simply imply an act of volition, but the volition of a sound or sane mind; because a lunatic, of all men, is most the creature of volition. The same conditions of intellect which have been heretofore enumerated, as exempting him from punishment, and disqualifying him from the management of his affairs, would, as far as a medical opinion may prevail, equally disable him from disposing of his property: such disposal involving the most important part of its management.

There is great, perhaps insuperable, difficulty in considering this subject in a general point of view. It is presumed, that no person, actually under a commission of lunacy, could legally dispose of his property by will, because such instrument confides the management of his affairs to others. But in the judgment before cited, and where the law is expounded by the highest and most competent authority, it appears, that the legal definition of a lunatic, implies a person interchangeably visited by insanity and reason. “The question whether he was a lunatic, being a question, admitting in the solution of it of a decision, that imputed to him at one time an _extremely sound mind_, but at other times an occurrence of _insanity_, with reference to _which_, it was necessary to guard his person and his property by a commission issuing.”

In the insane mind, these parentheses of reason, have been technically denominated a lucid interval, which in a former work[102:A] I have endeavoured to explain, as far as such state becomes obvious to the medical practitioner. Its legal force I do not pretend to calculate. According to the legal interpretation of a lunatic, he ought, in common justice, at those bright periods when he possesses an _extremely sound mind_, to be lawfully allowed the free and valid exercise of his volition. But having noticed in the work above mentioned that the term _interval_ is extremely indefinite, as applied both to time and space, it is the province of the law to define its duration and extent. As a constant observer of this disease for more than twenty-five years, I cannot affirm that the lunatics with whom I have had daily intercourse, have manifested these alternations of insanity and reason. They may at intervals become more tranquil, and less disposed to obtrude their distempered fancies into notice. For a time their minds may be less active, and the succession of their thoughts consequently more deliberate;—they may endeavour to effect some desirable purpose, and artfully conceal their real opinions, but they have not abandoned or renounced their distempered notions. It is as unnecessary to repeat that a few coherent sentences do not constitute the sanity of the intellect, as that the sounding of one or two notes of a keyed instrument, could ascertain it to be in tune. To establish its sanity it must be assayed by different tests, and it must be detected to be as lucid on the subject of those delusions, which constituted its insanity, as on topics of a trivial nature. But the law alone must determine whether it will consider an individual sane act as a lucid interval, and infer soundness of _mind_, which is the abstract term for all the intellectual phenomena, and implies the aggregate of the ideas, of the individual, from a single and successful effort.

[102:A] Vide Observations on Madness and Melancholy pages 44 and 210.

If the performance of a sane act by an insane person should be deemed valid, let the converse of the proposition be allowed. Many who have been of accredited soundness of mind have in some instances made such a testamentary disposition of their property as has astonished those who have survived them. Without apparent reason or provocation they have left their property away from their nearest relations to public institutions, officers of state, or to those with whom they were very slightly acquainted. Has this single act, independently of other concurring or collateral evidences of derangement, born the imputation of insanity? Would the uniform tenor of sane and consistent conduct, for many years, both prior and posterior to such act, be set aside for this individual deed? If it should, then long existing insanity ought to be overlooked by a single act of consistency. The reader must be aware that this is general reasoning, as no particular case has been the subject of discussion. The search has been directed to a broad and general principle, without prying into subtil distinctions;—it is reasoning as far as a knowledge of the human intellect, in its sane and disordered state, may be expected from medical opinion; but it presumes not to dictate to that constituted authority denominated law, which in all civilized nations, has been wisely established for the protection and happiness of the community.

_Printed by G. HAYDEN, Brydges Street, Covent Garden._

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The following corrections have been made to the original text:

Page 9: wanted the means[original has “sn” in inverted type] of direct information

Page 9: subtil craziness[original has “crasiness”] of Hamlet

Page 13: having gauged[original has “guaged”] his insanity

Page 15: where he betrays[original has “bewray”] no derangement

Page 18: gratuitous and groundless supposition[original has “suppposition”]

Page 20: Is it[original has “is”] christian-like to deem him

Page 36: These apparitions[original has “apparations”] were obtruded

Page 54: although it[original has “its”] deserves the fullest consideration

Page 58: where he perfectly recovered.[period missing in original]

Page 60: witnessed only two attempts[original has “at-attempts” hyphenated across a line break]

Page 64: state of the person’s[original has “persons’s”] mind

Page 73: obstacle to its advancement.[period missing in original]

Page 79: medical persons in[original has “person sin”] the treatment

Page 89: if such term be[original has “he”] legally insisted

Page 100: but the volition[original has “voli-lition” hyphenated across a line break] of a sound