Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    DEFECTIVE MENTAL ORGANIZATION. is clearly sometimes the result of an actual neurosis which has close relations of nature and descent to other neuroses, especially the epileptic and the insane neuroses; and this neurosis is the physical result of physiological laws of production and evolution. No wonder that the criminal psychosis, which is the mental side of the neurosis, is for the most part an intract- able malady, punishment being of no avail to produce a permanent reformation. The dog returns to its vomit and the sow to its wallowing in the mire. A true reformation would be the ?'e-forming of the individual nature; and how can that which has been forming through generations be re-formed within the term of a single life ? Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his apots ? Thus then when we take the most decided forms of human wrong-doing, and examine the causes and nature of the moral degeneracy which they evince, we find that they are not merely subjects for the moral phi- losopher and the preacher, but that they rightly come within the scope of positive scientific research. The metaphysical notion of man as an abstract being endowed with a certain fixed moral potentiality to do the I'ight and eschew the wrong, is as little applicable to each human being born into the world as the notion of a certain fixed intellectual power would be# applicable to each being, whether of good mental capacity, imbecile or idiot. There are, as natural phenomena, manifold gradations of un- derstanding from the highest intellect to the lowest idiocy, and there are also, as natural phenomena, various