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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    the highest sense utilitarian, as promoting in the long-run the welfare of mankind and of the individuals who consti- tute mankind. The opponents of utilitarianism will never he persuaded, however, that it does not mean selfishness—that the theory of it is not to place happi- ness to the individual as an immediate end. But the happiness of the race, the exaltation of humanity, is its real end, in ministering to which a right-minded person is to find inward satisfaction, even though the way be through self-denial and suffering; if this be selfishness it is so only in so far as it is selfish for mankind to desire and strive to progress in evolution. The good effects of observance of, and the evil consequences of infraction of, moral law are often remote. That all sin is avenged upon earth is true, but it is not true that a man cannot escape the consequences of his ill-doing; it would be more true to say that mankind cannot escape the conse- quences of a man's ill-doing. In like manner, so far as immediate results are con- cerned, obedience to moral law, or well-doing, is often a sacrifice to duty—a self-sacrifice, such as a parent makes for his child and finds his happiness in making ; its ministration to the eventual happiness of mankind, much less of the individual, may not be apparent. But the generalisation from experience having been more or less consciously made, and having by accumulation and transmission of effects through generations been fixed in the nature as a moral sense or instinct—acquisition having become endowment here as in other depart- ments of organic development—it is obeyed as a duty