enough of the horrible in it, when it destroys not only happiness but
health.



S 16.-Exceptions.


But a pleasant affection has sometimes been a fatal one, and an
unpleasant one has sometimes worked a marvellous cure. Both facts rest
upon experience: should they remove the limits of the law we have
expounded?

Joy is fatal when it rises into ecstacy: nature cannot support the strain
which in one moment is thrown upon the whole nervous system. The motion
of the brain is no longer harmony, but convulsion, an extremely sudden
and momentary force which soon changes into the ruin of the organism,
since it has transgressed the boundary line of health (for into the very
idea of health there enters and is essentially interwoven the idea of a
certain moderation of all natural motions). The joy as well as the grief
of finite beings is limited, and dare not pass beyond a certain point
without ruin.

As far as the second part is concerned, we have many examples of cure,
through a moderate fit of anger, of inveterate dyspepsia; and through
fright,--as in the case of a fire--of rheumatic pains and lameness
apparently incurable. But even dysentery has sometimes resolved an
internal stoppage, and the itch has been a cure for melancholy madness
and insanity: is the itch, for this, less a disease?--is dysentery
therefore health.