Letter from a Madman
My dear doctor: I am putting myself in your hands. Do with me as you please.
I am going to tell you very frankly my strange state of mind, and you will decide whether it might not be better to have me cared for, during a certain time, in a sanitarium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that harass me.
This is the story, long and exact, of the strange sickness of my soul.
I used to live like everyone else, looking at life with man’s open, blind eyes, without wonder and without understanding. I lived as animals live, as we all live, fulfilling all the functions of existence, looking and thinking that I saw, thinking that I knew and understood what surrounded me; when one day I realized that all is false.
It was a phrase of Montesquieu’s that suddenly illuminated my mind. Here it is: “One organ more or less in our mechanism would have caused us to have a different intelligence. … In short, all laws established on the basis of our mechanism being of a certain kind would be different if our mechanism were not of this kind.”
I reflected on that for months, for months and months, and little by little I was permeated by a strange clarity, and this clarity has brought on darkness.
Actually, our organs are the only intermediaries between the external world and ourselves. That is to say, our internal existence, what constitutes the I, makes contact by means of certain networks of nerves, with the external existence that constitutes the world.
Now, not to mention the fact that we fail to comprehend this external existence because of its proportions, its duration, its innumerable and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its ends, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs supply us, concerning that portion of it which we are able to understand at all, with information as uncertain as it is sparse.
Uncertain, because it is solely the properties of our organs which determine for us the apparent properties of matter.
Sparse, because since our senses are but five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are very restricted.
Let me explain. The eye acquaints us with dimensions, forms, and colors. It deceives us on these three points.
It can reveal to us only objects and beings of medium dimensions, in proportion to human size—thus causing us to apply the word large to certain things and the word small to certain others, solely because its weakness does not permit it to comprehend what is too vast or too minute for it. As a result, it knows and sees almost nothing; almost the entire universe remains hidden from it—the star in space and the animalcule in a drop of water.
Even if it had a hundred million times its normal power, if it perceived in the air we breathe all the races of invisible beings, as well as the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist infinite numbers of races of yet smaller beings, and worlds so very distant that it could not reach them.
Thus all our ideas of proportion are false, since there is no possible limit of largeness or smallness.
Our estimation of dimensions and forms has no absolute value, being determined solely by the power of one organ and by constant comparison with ourselves.
Furthermore, the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. It is deceived by a flawless sheet of glass. It confuses it with the air, which it also does not see.
Let us go on to color.
Color exists because our eye is so constituted that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways in which bodies absorb and decompose, according to their chemical composition, the light rays which strike them.
The varying degrees of this absorption and decomposition constitute shades and tints.
Thus this organ imposes on the mind its manner of seeing, or rather its arbitrary manner of recording dimensions and estimating the relations between light and matter.
Let us examine hearing.
Even to a greater extent than with the eye, we are the dupes and playthings of this whimsical organ.
Two colliding bodies produce a certain disturbance of the atmosphere. This movement causes to vibrate in our ear a certain small membrane which immediately changes into sound what is really only vibration.
Nature is mute. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us in the form of a sense, a sense that differs according to the number of vibrations, all the quiverings of the invisible waves in space.
This metamorphosis accomplished by the auditory nerve in the short journey from ear to brain has enabled us to create a strange art, music, the most poetic and the most precise of the arts, vague as a dream and exact as algebra.
What shall we say of taste and smell? Would we know the flavors and the quality of foods if it were not for the bizarre properties of our nose and our palate?
Humanity could, however, exist without hearing, without taste, and without smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or odor.
Thus, if we had several fewer organs, we would be ignorant of things that are admirable and strange, but if we had several additional organs, we should discover about us an infinity of other things that we should never suspect due to lack of means of ascertaining them.
Thus, we are deceived when we judge what we know, and we are surrounded by unexplored
