The work and the counterwork, or, The religious revival in Belfast : with an explanation of the physical phenomena / by Edward A. Stopford.

  • Stopford, Edward Adderley, 1809-1894.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The work and the counterwork, or, The religious revival in Belfast : with an explanation of the physical phenomena / by Edward A. Stopford. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ment can neither refuse nor account for an admission destructive of the argument itself. I have to account for it from what we know of hysteria. I think it must he acknowledged by every one who has watched hysteria, that its paroxysm occasions a sense of undefinable and indescribable distress of physical feeling never before experienced from any other cause, and unaccountable by any feeling or cause of pain or distress ever before experienced. The force of this will be more felt if we remember that a whole system of nerves, always before in very subordinate action as respects self-feeling, is now excited into unnatural activity, and demands the w'hole attention of the mind as being, for the time, the chief or, perhaps, only source of self-feel- ing.* A state so unnatural may well be the source of unutterable and unaccountable physical distress. This seems indicated in the peculiar character of * “ Self-feeling” is thus explained by Feuchtersleben:— “ . . . Common feeling, where the word ‘ feeling’ only stands for sensation. . . The so-called common feeling itself, through which we perceive only the vegetative sphere of our body, is wholly somatic (of the body, from aa/xa) ; but if from the psychical (from 'I'WX'T], used here for the spirit of man) termination, we trace the relation downwards, we certainly come to a point at which the psychical element so loses itself, as respects our investigation, in the physical element of the common feeling, that we can no longer draw the boundary line of the transition—no longer point out the share taken by body and mind. At this point, therefore, there would be common feeling rising into the psychical sphere, and we could not designate it better than by the expression ‘ self-feeling,’ a feeling of personal existence in an empirical, not a metaphysical, sense. “ Self-feeling, then, combines in itself sensation and idea; its sub-