076 Slide – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

44 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

by intuition, not by reason. You are to cut yourself off from
the influence of ali knowledge gained by others after long
etudy and painful examination of the human mind in ruins,
and trust to instinct. Your own unenlightened reason even
is not to guide you. It is a question only of eyesight! As
the afflicted were ‘‘to look on the golden image and live,”’ so
you are ‘‘to look and determine.’’ This is simple and sum-
mary, and, one would suppose, final, too; for if error should
happen, by an aecident, to get in the process, there can be
no correction. The counsel exclaims, ‘‘Why resort to books
on insanity, to works on medical jurisprudence, to the opin-
ons of the learned, etc, for the tests there laid down? Does
not every man know an insane man, when he sees him!’’

Jurors, if this declaration had come from another quarter
—if it had been an emanation from the simplifiers, it would
have created no surprise, for their hostility to both learning
and knowledge is both natural and logical; but from the lips
of the counsel it may well fill with astonishment all who know
him. When before did he ever start a crusade against acience,
or pander to the pride of ignorance?

The vulgar idea of insanity does conform to the proposi-
tion advanced. Raving maniac or utter imbecility, violent
and incoherent jargon, make up the vulgar conception of
madness, and hence almost every case of feigned insanity
takes the one or the other of these forms. The insanity that
eannot be seen at a glance is rarely assumed. If the disease
is not patent on the surface, the simulator avoida it as un-
suited to his purpose. Tf it be latent, difficult of detection,
requiring, like any other secret inflammation, skill and knowl-
edge, and patient examination to find it out—if, especially, it
be of that type, which most resembles erime, the criminal is
sure never to feign it. He would as soon forge a note, a bank
note; which, after the most successful imitation, would not
be regarded as a bank bill by anyone.

if anything be certain, in our knowledge of the human
mind, it is that insanity, in some of its phases, ean be detected.
only by a severe scrutiny and a patient examination, con-
ducted with a skill enlightened by long experience and famil-