Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians with appendix / by Henry Maudsley.
- Henry Maudsley
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians with appendix / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.
47/214 (page 29)
![i ] MUSCULAR EXPRESSION. 29 sentaneous action, the relaxation of some accompanying the contraction of others—that the human countenance is capable of expressing a variety of more complex emotions than animals can. Those who would degrade the body, in order, as they imagine, to exalt the mind, should consider more deeply than they do the importance of our muscular expressions of feeling. The manifold shades and kinds of expression which the lips present their gibes, gambols, and flashes of merriment 5 the quick language of a quivering nostril; the varied waves and ripples of beautiful emotion which play on the human countenance, with the spasms of passion that disfigure it- all which we take such pains to embody in art, are simply effects of muscular action, and might be produced by electricity or any other stimulus, if we could only apply it in suitable force to the proper muscles. When the eye is turned upwards in rapt devotion, in the ecstasy of supplication, it is for the same reason as it is rolled upwards in fainting, in sleep, in the agony of death : it is an involuntary act of the oblique muscles, when the straight muscles cease to act upon it. We perceive, then in the study of muscular action the reason why man looks up to heaven in prayer, and why he has placed there the power whence cometh his help. A simple property of the body, as Sir C. Bell observes—the fact that the eye in supplication takes what is its natural position when not acted upon by the will-has influenced our concep- tions of heaven, our religious observances, and th habitual expression of our highest feelings. Whether each passion which is special in kind has its e](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20407750_0047.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
