To live in that world of delirium, in the midst of the triumph of unreason, was, through the fatality of place and things, to join the living symbols of the institution itself: I would point out that most of the insane to be found in houses of correction and the state prisons lost their reason either as a result of excessively poor treatment, or through a horror of the solitude where at every turn they are confronted by the illusions of an imagination sharpened by pain.