Insanity and crime : a medico-legal commentary on the case of George Victor Townley / by the editors of the "Journal of mental science".

C. Lockhart Robertson

Date:: 1864

Credit: Insanity and crime : a medico-legal commentary on the case of George Victor Townley / by the editors of the "Journal of mental science". Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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$to insanity if any distinction between disease and vice is to be maintained. There is wanting aU proof of disease ren- dermg the individual unaccountable; and if the doctrine of moral insanity is to gain acceptance, disease must always be proved, not by making assumption support assumption, but t)y logical appreciation of symptoms. 3. Impulsive Insanity.-Noihm^ has excited a more angry resistance in the legal mind, and been less acceptable to the conservative instincts of the public, than the doctrine that a man may be irresistibly impeUed, by reason of disease, to a criminal act which he knows to be wrong, and himself perhaps, revolts at. - Such a theory was as contrary to common-sense as it undoubtedly was to law,- Mr. Justice Wightman said in that ease already quoted, in which he lost the dignified impartiality of the judge in the warmth of the interested advocate. And yet aU who have given the labour of their lives to the study of insanity, men eminent and men not eminent, English authors and foreign authors, living writers and writers who have passed to their rest, are perfectly agreed upon the existence of such a foi-m of men- tal disease, and have thus conspired, with a remarlcable unanimity, against the common-sense of such as the late Mr. Justice Wightman. - Now, a common prejudice which better knowledge would disperse is exceeding apt to be mistaken for common sense; and common sense which gets angry at contradiction, and gets angry on the judge's bench, IS not unlikely to be a vulgar prejudice. The theory of impulsive insanity is, no doubt, contrary to the law as laid down by the judges, from whose Hl-grounded speculations and crude dicta one of the ablest of themselves, ]\Ir. Justice Maule, dissented; but when a judge goes out of his way to pronounce as contrary to common sense a doctrine which all those eminent men who have studied the matter specially, accept, it is not seemly on his part; and any one inclined • to such a rashness might do well, for the sake of his calling, to remember that it was once thought contrary to common sense to say that the earth moved round tlie sun. There can be no doubt that the term instinctive insanity IS badly chosen; it strikes one at once as absurd to say that$