Psychology : normal and morbid / by Charles A. Mercier.

Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychology : normal and morbid / by Charles A. Mercier. 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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    Vlll favour with a certain Personage. “ No one,” says Mr. Venn, “ until he has actually made the attempt, can conceive the prodigious difficulty of thinking and writing with perfect consistency upon a subject which has been already treated by men his superiors in ability and knowledge, but which they have discussed from a very different point of view.” This difficulty was not my least; nor was it my greatest. Arriving at my results, not by the eagle-swoop of genius, but by the slow and laborious process of gradual successive approximations, it has occurred continually throughout the progress of the book, that doctrines that appeared correct and adequate when applied to a portion only of the subject, have been found incorrect or inadequate when it was sought to bring under them an additional class of facts. For this reason it happened that, as later parts of the subject were dealt with, the earlier parts had to be re-written again and again; and now, as the proofs come under review, it appears that the harmonisation is not complete, and that there are inconsistencies and repetitions that might have been avoided by a still more often repeated revision. In excuse, I can but say that the book has been so long in preparation, and its attain- ment of that perfect consistency of which Mr. Venn speaks seems still so hopelessly distant, that it seemed better to publish it as it is, with all its faults, than to extend a delay which threatened to be indefinite in duration Much allowance may fairly be claimed for the first essay in an untilled field. The disorders of mind have never before been systematically examined, arranged, and correlated with the normal types from which they erringly depart, and if the result displays a certain crudity, it may be alleged in excuse that the axe of the pioneer cannot leave such a finished result as the plane and the sandpaper of the subsequent investigator. In examining once more, from a new point of view, those great and fundamental problems which have engaged the attention of so many of the profoundest thinkers for so many generations, I may incur the accusation of presumption of which I have often seemed