The law within / by Sir Bampfylde Fuller.

  • Joseph Bampfylde Fuller
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The law within / by Sir Bampfylde Fuller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    43/308 page 33
    a source of living energy, emotional and physical. It is a condition which could not possibly occur in the life of a monad. There is discord between the two elements of our nature when the phase of one is contrary to that of the other, as when natural gaiety is “ shocked ” by a sensation of pain or by alarm. The discord may be a continuing conflict, or may result in the dominance of the animative, or of the physical. These three conditions are illustrated very clearly by anger, spontaneous courage and fear. Anger is a continuing conflict—spiced with pleasure, since it involves expansive resistance. In spontaneous courage the animative overcomes physical shock : it is, therefore, a condition of unmixed exhilaration. Fear is so miserable because the animative is overcome by the physi¬ cal, and both become contractive. These motives must be sharply distinguished from the conscious voluntary efforts that a restimu¬ lated by ideas. That they are purely nervous re-actions is proved by the fact that they vary automatically with the tension of our spirits. Fear can hardly be resisted when the nervous tone has been lowered by hunger or fatigue : it is irresistible when tone has been lost as from “ shell-shock ”. On the other hand, courage if assisted by anything that stimulates the spirits—by love, by pat¬ riotism, by pity, by music and by alcohol. Anger cannot be alto¬ gether stilled, as fear is by courage, because it is aroused by an actual injury, obstruction or humiliation, whereas the danger that causes fear in only the possibility of these misfortunes. Resistance can, consequently, be only partially successful, transforming depression into irritation. That anger involves resistance which is dependent upon nervous tone follows from the facts that one may be too ill or depressed to be angry, and that, when the misery of prolonged illness becomes irritable, we know that the patient is recovering strength. The effects of this spontaneous internal antagonism are to be discovered in other less noticeable directions. An arresting im¬ pression causes a slight nervous shock. This is antagonized in spontaneous attention—the focussing of our perceptive faculties upon an object that actually occurs before we are consciously aware of it. The disconcerting effect of the strange is resisted in curiosity, as that of the dangerous is in courage. It is animative antagonism that limits the shattering power of physical pain, and enables us to endure it. Should the general nervous tone be lowered, as by illness or shell-shock, one loses these resistant powers. The atten¬ tion wall not fix itself; the patient becomes nervous and incurious and succumbs unresistingly to his troubles.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image