Outlines of insanity : an attempt to present in a concise form the salient features of mental disorder.

  • Walmsley, Francis H.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of insanity : an attempt to present in a concise form the salient features of mental disorder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    largely dependent on the character of the muscular feelings. For the purposes of our intelligence we need to be distinctively aware of degrees in our motive energy put forth; it is in this way that we obtain perceptions of many properties of the outward world; it is by tactile impressions and muscular sensibility that we are informed of the expenditure of nerve- power necessary to gauge the weights of heavy bodies, to lift them, and indirectly acquire a precise notion of their attributes, etc. Thus, the important attributes of Extension, Size, Form, are impressed upon the mind through the movements they require us to make, and are therefore pure feelings of muscularity. The sense of touch, combined with the muscular sense of effort, leads to the inference of resisting bodies outside of us. This sense of resistance, which contact with outer objects creates in us, forms the raw material of primitive thought, constitutes in fact the muscular element of thought as distinct from the other elements or contingents of sensitive impres- sions received through the special senses. It is the primitive element in our intelligence ; all our primary or fundamental ideas—Matter, Space, Motion, and Force—arise from our experiences of resistance. There is no feeling of our nature of more im- portance to us than that of resistance; of all our sensations, it is the most unintermitted, for whether we sit, or lie, or stand, or walk, still the feeling- of resistance is present to us; everything we touch— and we can never be free from impressions of touch at the same time resists, and everything we hear, see, taste, or smell suggests the idea of something that resists.