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.

    97/356 (page 61)
    DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL SENSE. of certain acts by individuals as injurious to the family or tribe, should finally generate a sentiment of right and wrong in regard to such acts, and that such sentiment should in the course of generations be transmitted by hereditary action as a more or less marked instinctive feeling, is in entire accordance with what we know of the results of education and of hereditary action. Time was, we know, when men wandered about the country in families or tribes. In order that they might rise from this nomadic state to a national existence, the acquisition and develop- ment of a moral sense must clearly have been essential conditions—not, however, as preformed agents, but as concomitant effects, of evolution.* This development is still going slowly on; but the proof how little moral sense itself instigates progress is seen in the absence of it between nations. Men have risen to a national existence, but they have not yet risen to an international existence. With moral principles that have not changed within historical times, nations still laud patriotism, which is actually a .mark of moral incompleteness, as the highest virtue ; and statesmen sometimes think it a fine thing to sneer at cosmopolitanism. But it cannot be doubted that the time will come, though it may be yet afar off, when * And if we could imagine the human race to live back again to its earliest infancy—to go backwards through all the scenes and experiences through which it has gone forward to its present height—and to give back from its mind and character at each time and circumstance, as it passed it, exactly that which it gained when it was there before— should we not find the fragments and exuviaj of the moral sense lying here and there along the retrograde path, and a condition at the beginning, which, whether simian or human, was bare of all true moral feeling.—Body and Mind, p. 58.