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.

    75/356 (page 39)
    and perplexities should arise in dealing with, particular cases. The matter is made worse by the strong tendency which there is in the human mind to believe that there are actual divisions in nature corresponding with the more or less arbitrary divisions which are necessarily made in the acquisition and classification of knowledge; whence comes either an aversion, conscious or uncon- scious, to admit frankly the existence of intermediate instances which cannot be duly marshalled in distinct classes, or a disposition so to exaggerate resemblances and to overlook differences as to force the rebellious instances into one class or another. It is vain, how- ever, to shut our eyes to facts, however inconvenient they may be to our systems of classification; and, in very truth, these cases that will not be classified, these intermediate steps, are often of excellent use, if rightly appreciated, in breaking down the barriers of artifi- cial distinctions and bridging the gaps between them. Opinions that might seem almost as opposite as heaven and hell, and for which men fight unto death, have really a bridge of connection, though it may be abridge of many arches, which their furious defenders fail to see. It would be no exaggeration to declare that there is so much in common between a most virtuous and a most vicious man as would render it impossible to attain to a scientific understanding of the nature of the one without a scientific understanding of the nature of the other. In the formation and verification of our generalizations it is almost as incumbent upon us to look carefully to the intermediate