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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    acceptance, while the belief of the former being opposed to the common sense of mankind gains not acceptance, but dies out with its possessor or with the few foolish persons whom it has perchance infected. But it has happened again and again in the world that opinions which seemed absurd to the common sense of mankind, and which were therefore accounted madness, have turned out to be true. The novel mode of looking at things, which is characteristic of the insane temperament, may be an intuitive insight, a sort of inspiration, which laboured reflection could never attain unto ; it is the very opposite in action to that bond of habit which enthrals the mental life of the majority of mankind. The power of stepping out of the beaten track of thought, of bursting by a happy inspiration through the bonds of habit and ori- ginating a new line of reflection, is most rare, and should be welcomed in spite of its sometimes becoming extravagant or even degenerating into the vagaries of insanity. The individuals who manifest these impulses of development may not see their true relations, and may carry them to a ridiculous extreme, but they are still, perhaps, the uncon- scious organs of a new germ of thought, which shall plant itself and become largely fruitful in the minds of others of a larger philosophic capacity, but not perhaps capable of the originating inspiration ; for those who per- ceive and co-ordinate the tendencies of thought are com- monly not those who originate them. There are antagonistic forces at work in the deter- mination of the orbit of human thought as there are in the determination of the orbits of the planets—a