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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    degrees of moral power between the highest energy of a well-fashioned will and the complete absence of moral sense. Nor are intellect and moral power so depen- dent mutually as necessarily to vary together, the one increasing and decreasing as the other increases and decreases : experience proves conclusively that there may be much intellect with little morality and much morality with little intellect. There is a borderland between crime and insanity, near one boundary of which we meet with something of madness but more of sin, and near the other boundary of which something of sin but more of madness. A just estimate of the moral responsibility of the unhappy people inhabiting this borderland will assuredly not be made until we get rid of the metaphysical measure of responsibility as well as of the theological notion that vices and crimes are due to the instigation of the devil, and proceed by way of observation and induction to sound generalizations concerning the origin of the moral sentiments, the laws of their development, and the causes, course and varieties of moral degeneracy. Here as in other departments of nature our aim should be the dis- covery of natural laws by patient interrogation of nature, not the invention of theories by invoking our own minds to utter oracles to us. It must be received as a scientific axiom that there is no study to which the inductive method of research is not applicable; every attempt to prohibit such research by authority of any kind must be withstood and repelled with the utmost energy as a deadly attack upon the fundamental principle of scientific