Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter.

  • William Benjamin Carpenter
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    whom we believe to have been in fault; but if its working was deranged by a snow-storm of unprecedented violence, we cannot say that any one is chargeable with moral wrong. So, if the pointsman can excuse himself by showing that he had been on duty for eight-and-forty hours continuously, and did not know what he was about, we shift the blame on the Directors who wrongly overtaxed his brain; whilst, if it turns out that his inattention was due, neither to drunkenness nor to over-fatigue, but to sudden illness, we cannot say that any one was in fault. But, on the Automa- tist theory, the pointsman could no more help getting drunk, than, when drunk, he could help neglecting his work; and the railway-directors could no more help keeping the points- man on duty for forty-eight hours, than he could help the bewilderment which was caused by this overstrain of his powers. And, neither the drunken pointsman nor the reckless directors were any more morally responsible for the loss of life, in the one case, than were the self-acting points in the other : each being a machine whose movements were determined by the law of its construction and the conditions in which it was placed ; and the term wrong, as applied to the action of the man, having no other meaning than it has when applied to the working of the self-acting points. —The Moral Consciousness of Mankind protests against such an identification. So, again, I am unable to attach any definite import to such words as kyKpareia, a^poavvi], continentia, or tempera?itia, —to see any meaning in the ancient proverb that he that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruletli