Or else the imagination soars away
with the unrestful energy of a demon, conjuring up an endless procession
of broken images and disconnected thoughts, so that sleep is utterly
banished.
I have chosen here as examples men whose brains are engaged constantly
in the higher forms of mental labor; but the difficulty of arresting at
will the overtasked brain belongs more or less to every man who overuses
this organ, and is the well-known initial symptom of numerous morbid
states. I have instanced scholars and men of science chiefly, because
they, more than others, are apt to study the conditions under which
their thinking organs prosper or falter in their work, and because from
them have we had the clearest accounts of this embarrassing condition of
automatic activity of the cerebral organs. Few thinkers have failed, I
fancy, to suffer in this way at some time, and with many the annoyance
is only too common. I do not think the subject has received the
attention it deserves, even from such thorough believers in unconscious
cerebration as Maudsley. As this state of brain is fatal to sleep, and
therefore to needful repose of brain, every sufferer has a remedy which
he finds more or less available. This usually consists in some form of
effort to throw the thoughts off the track upon which they are moving.
Almost every literary biography has some instance of this difficulty,
and some hint as to the sufferer's method of freeing his brain from the
despotism of a ruling idea or a chain of thought.
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