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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    one else did it, nature's only concern being that it should be done ; no grief from loss of fortune, if he estimated at its true value that which fortune can bring him and that which fortune can never bring him; no wounded self-love, if he had learned well the eternal lesson of life —self-renunciation. But men exhibit a marvellous facility of deceiving themselves; while professing to esteem those worldly aims as of little account, as infinitely trivial in com- parison with the momentous concerns of the life to come, they at the same time concentrate all the real hopes, aspirations, and energies of their lives upon the pursuit of them. Thus their nature is an incon- sistency; it is a house divided against itself, and how can it stand when trouble comes? How can a nature be strong which is at war with itself, whose faith and works are in discord? A decrease in the amount of insanity in the world would probably take place in a generation or two, if men were to cease to deceive them- selves, and were to make their natures strong by making a real harmony of them—if they would learn to be sincere to themselves in examining rigorously the founda- tions of their beliefs, and in estimating the quality of the aims which they actually pursue, and of the means by which they pursue them. There is a practice, highly esteemed in England, of carefully preserving certain animals called foxes, in order that they may be hunted to death for the amusement of men and women who follow the chase on horseback with extraordinary ardour and enthusiasm. It is deemed an u 2