This essay accompanied its predecessor and was written at the same approximate time, i.e., around 1989–90. Here I aimed to interpret the nerve as the sign, or diagnostic, of something other than itself, almost as if the stones could speak about an unseen world in which mind informs body. By "diagnostic" I meant ultimately the intuition: not diagnosis as the revelation of any biomedical signs but, rather, what nerves and spirits held out, in history, or for an evolving human condition. Hence I configured its protean human shapes, especially the Enlightenment creature of sensibility in a state of heightened, lowered, flattened or deranged nerves: as melancholic, hypochondriac, hysteric, depressive. The legacy remains: the human condition is fundamentally melancholic.