The troubled conscience and the insane mind / by Charles Blondel ; with an introduction by F. G. Crookshank.

  • Blondel, Charles (Charles Aimé Alfred), 1876-1939.
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The troubled conscience and the insane mind / by Charles Blondel ; with an introduction by F. G. Crookshank. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/98 page 11
    is generally repulsed into the subcon¬ sciousness as irreducible to the symbolic verbal formulae provided by social ex¬ perience. But nothing is more personal to each one of us than is the cenesthesia, that sum of inner sensation or sentiment which is now so generally attributed to the visceral mass, in connection with the sympathetic—as opposed to the cerebro-spinal—nervous system. Normally, and for the normal person, cenesthesia remains, in Blondel’s phrase, on the outskirts of the consciousness, or mind, since it has no appropriate linguistic expression ; for the reasons just given. It may, however, be observed, in paren¬ thesis—and the point is perhaps not altogether unimportant—that in those few moments when consciousness of all the external world other than some very immediate “ object ” is almost in abeyance, and organic life is almost wholly given over to direction by the vegetable, or sympathetic nervous system, cenesthesia attains an overwhelming intensity and finds linguistic expression—of a kind, it
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