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.

    335/356 page 299
    THE CONTROL OF THE EMOTIONS. supplication which is merely a formal or sentimental invocation of help from on high, instead of enforcing the duty of enlightening the understanding and strengthen- ing the will, is to go methodically to work to undermine the intellect and the will. I call man's inability to moderate and control the affective or emotional element in his nature Slaveky, - says Spinoza. For man under the dominion of his affections is not master of himself, but is controlled by fate, as it were, so that in seeing and even approving the better course, he nevertheless feels himself constrained to follow the worse. Without doubt, if man could thus attain to freedom by moderating and controlling the affective or emotional element in his nature, he would vastly lessen the sum of insanity upon earth; for he would get rid at one stroke of the so-called moral causes of the disease. Men seldom, if ever, go mad from great intellectual activity, if it be unaccompanied by emotional agitation; it is when the feelings are deeply engaged that the stability of the mind is most endangered ; and when persons are said to have gone insane, or to have com- mitted suicide, from mental overwork, the truth in nine cases out of ten, if not in all cases, is that anxieties and apprehensions, disappointed ambition, envies and jealou- sies, the wounds of an exaggerated self-love, or similar heartaches, have been the real causes of their break- down : and these are causes which all have their footing in an undue self-feeling. Depressing passions, with the congenial thoughts which they call up and keep active in the mind, involve a large expenditure of
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