Thus it is generally believed throughout all Asia, that the
moon has an influence on the brain; and when a man is of insane mind, we
call him a lunatic. One of the curses of the common people is, 'May the
moon eat up your brains;' and in China they say of a man who has done
any act of egregious folly, 'He was gathering wool in the moon.'"
I was struck with these remarks, and told the Hermit that the language
of Europe afforded the same indirect evidence of the fact he mentioned:
that my own language especially, abounded with expressions which could
be explained on no other hypothesis;--for, besides the terms "lunacy,"
"lunatic," and the supposed influence of the moon on the brain, when we
see symptoms of a disordered intellect, we say the mind _wanders_,
which evidently alludes to a part of it rambling to a distant region, as
is the moon. We say too, a man is "_out of his head_," that is, his
mind being in another man's head, must of course be out of his own.
To "know no more than the man in the moon," is a proverbial expression
for ignorance, and is without meaning, unless it be considered to refer
to the Glonglims. We say that an insane man is "distracted;" by which we
mean that his mind is drawn two different ways. So also, we call a
lunatic _a man beside himself_, which most distinctly expresses the two
distinct bodies his mind now animates.
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