Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders : being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians : with appendix / by Henry Maudsley.
- Maudsley Henry, 1835-1918.
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders : being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians : with appendix / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![I.] mental states, because they are so numerous, various, delicate, and complex, and because, in conjunction with the muscles of the larynx and the respiratory muscles, they modify sound, and thus make audible language. Having, on this account, been always used as the special instruments of utterance, their connection with thought is most intimate; the Greeks, in fact, used the word \oyoc to mean both reason and speech. But this does not make the relations of the movements of speech to mind different fundamentally from the relations of other volun- tary movements to mind; and we should be quite as much warranted in assigning to the mind a special faculty of writing, of walking, or of gesticulating, as in speaking of a special faculty of speech in it. What is true of the relations of articulate movements to mental states is true of the relations of other movements to mental states : they not only express the thought, but, when otherwise put in action, they can excite the appro- priate thought. Speak the word, and the idea of which it is the expression is aroused, though it was not in the mind previously; or put other muscles than those of speech into an attitude which is the normal expression of a certain mental state, and the latter is excited. Most if not all men, when thinking, repeat internally, whisper to themselves, as it were, what they are thinking about; and persons of dull and feeble intelligence cannot com- prehend what they read, or what is sometimes said to them, without calling the actual movement to their aid, and repeating the words in a whisper or aloud. As speech has become the almost exclusive mode of express- \](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21694540_0047.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
