The pathology of mind / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The pathology of mind / by Henry Maudsley. 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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    some pretext or anotlier. Perhaps lie withstnucls successfully for a time his vicious propensity, alter the perils of indulgence have been pointed out forcibly to him, but before long he falls back into evil, and is afterwards depressed, gloomy, troubled with all sorts of anomalous sensations, and full of fancies and fears about his health. Does he get so far as to be engaged, it is when the wedding-day is to be fixed, or is fixed, tliat his doubts and agitations reach their height; he is aiixious, full of hesitations and apprehensions respecting his fitness to marry, and puzzles and troubles his betrothed or his friends with his vacillations, his fears of incompatibility, and the like; in the end he probably breaks off the engagezuent, or runs away from marriage at the last moment, on some pretext of overstrained religious scruple, or because he is overwhelmed with the thought of the serious res]Donsibility of bringing children into the world. Perhaps he discovers that the consumuiation of marriage is the degradation of love, and will none of it, Verv remarkable is it what a strain of exalted sentiment and lofty idealism is pro- fessed in some of these cases: the world is too coarsely selfish and rudely jiractical for their fine sensibilities and nice asjaira- tions, and notwithstanding tliat they are sunk in a degrading self-indulgence, and perhaps emasculated by it, they will pour out loftily pitched moral sentiments, and take it hotly to ta&k in high conceited fashion for its low aims and gross ways. They may project some great mission of social reform without true practical resolve, as they have abundant self-conceit without self-knowledge, a spasmodic cort of self-will without true will, a thin intellectual eagerness without breadth and calmness of understanding, a morbid intensity of self-feeling which they mistake for altruistic feeling. It is a mistake which manv medical men make to recommend marriage to these persons in the hope of curing them, for seldom does anything but sorrow and misery come of it. INTarriage is by no means a certain cure; the confirmed sinner has little desire or power of natural intercourse, finding no pleasure in it; the indulgence of a depraved appetite has destroyed the natural appetite. Cold- ness and indifference to his wife, discord, quarrels and threats of violence, separation from bed or house, suicide, and even
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