Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cherishes superstitious belief instead of systematically setting to work to enlighten his understanding; like them, he puts up prayers where he should exert an intelligent will; like them, he suffers from the stern and inexorable dominion of laws which he has not been taught to under- stand, and which he does not even recognise when he suffers by them. No one can of course fail to testify, consciously or unconsciously, to the workings of natural laws in his being; he witnesses to them, though he cannot trace them, in his thoughts, feelings and actions, and thus inevitably acquires crude empirical rules to guide him; but the misfortune is that he is apt thereupon to assign an immediate supernatural agency, and to prostrate himself in helpless fear when he ought to proceed reve- rently to enquire and then intelligently to obey. Is there any fundamental difference between the savage coming to destruction through ignorance of the law of gravitation and the civilised European coming to madness through ignorance of the laws of his own nature, and of the laws of the nature of things and men around him ? Insanity is simply a discord in the universe—the result and evidence of a want of harmony between an individual human nature and the nature surrounding it, and of which it is a part. The marvel is perhaps that there are not more insane persons than there are, considering how blindly men are yet compelled to live in very complex relations, how much they depend upon the crude instincts of empiricism, how little they have yet systematically done to know nature in themselves and themselves in nature. u