A more or less advanced decay and feebleness of the intellectual faculties ; that weakness of mind which, without depriving the person entirely of the use of his reasou, leaves only the faculty of conceiving the most common and ordinary ideas and such as relate almost always to physical wants and habits. It varies in shades and degrees from merely excessive folly aud eccentricity to an almost total vacuity of mind or amentia, and the test of legal capacity , in this condition, is the stage to which the weakness of mind has advanced, as measured by the degree of reason, judgment, and memory remaining. It may proceed from paresis or general paralysis, from senile de- cay, or from the advanced stages of any of the ordinary forms of insanity; and the term is rather descriptive of the consequences of insanity than of any particular type of the disease. See Calderou v. Martin, 50 La. Ann. 1153, 23 South. 909; Delafiehl v. Parish, 1 Itedf. (N. Y.) 115; Campbell v. Camp- bell, 130 111. 400, 22 N. E. 020, 0 L. R. A. 107; Messenger v. Bliss, 35 Ohio St. 592.
Black’s Law Online Dictionary
