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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    of mind, and particularly the so-called moral sense and the will; while the old metaphysical spirit still inspires the criterion of responsibility which is sanctioned and acted upon by courts of justice in cases of insanity. If a madman be supposed to know he is doing wrong, or doing that which is contrary to law, when he does some act of violence, he is held to be not less responsible than a sane person. The conclusions reached by the observa- tions of self-consciousness in a sane mind are strictly applied to the phenomena of diseased mind; not other- wise than as if it were solemnly enacted that the disorder and violence of convulsions should be measured by the order and method of voluntary movements, and that whosoever, being seized with convulsions, and knowing that he was convulsed, transgressed that measure, should be punished as a criminal. The unfortunate sufferer, or others on his behalf, might, it is true, innocently argue that the very nature of convulsions excluded the idea of full voluntary control; but the metaphysical in- tuitionist would rejoin that it was certain from experience that man has a power of control over his movements ; that the convulsive movements were a clear proof to all the world that he had not exercised that power; and that his convulsions, therefore, were justly punishable as crime. This pathological comparison is scientifically just and its justness has oftentimes received terribly striking illustration in the effects of the legal criterion of responsibility; for it is certain that in conformity with it many persons unquestionably insane, who have done homicide not because they would not, but because they