Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    45/356 page 9
    and metaphysical mysticism engaged the whole attention of men, who rivalled one another in verbal disputations, without agreement in the meaning of the terms they used, and in blind worship of the authority of Aristotle, without real regard to the true method of his philosophy or to the facts with which it dealt. As if knowledge were nothing more than a process of ingenious excogitation, they made no attempt to observe the phenomena of Nature, and to search out the laws governing them, but laboriously invoked their own spirits to utter oracles to them; wherefore philosophy was little more than a web of un- meaning terms and of empty metaphysical subtleties. With this sort of intellectual activity was joined, as the result of the detestable spirit which inspired monastic teaching and monastic practice, a harsh religious asceti- cism, through which the body was looked down upon with contempt, as vile and despicable, the temple of Satan, the home of the fleshly lusts which war against the soul, and as needing to be vigilantly kept in subjection, to be crucified daily with its affections and lusts. It was the earthly prison-house of the spirit whose pure im- mortal longings were to get free from it. Such was the monstrous doctrine of the relation of mind and body. What place could a rational theory of insanity have in such an atmosphere of thought and feeling ? The con- ception of it as a disease was impossible : it was ascribed to a supernatural operation, divine or diabolical, as the case might be—was a real possession of the individual by some extrinsic superior power* If the ravings of the * The most learned physicians only put the devil a step further back,
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