Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    is not in other respects insane. That is, if insanity produces the false belief, which is the prime cause of the act, but goes no further, then the accused is to be judged according to the character of motives which are presumed to spring up out of that part of the mind which has not been reached or affected by the delusion or the disease. This is very refined. It may be that mental disease sometimes takes a shape to meet the provisions of this ingenious formula; or, if no such case has ever yet existed, it is doubtless within the scope of Omnipotent power hereafter to strike with disease some human mind in such peculiar manner that the conditions will be fulfilled; and when that is done, when it is certainly known that such a case has arisen, the rule may be applied without punishing a man for disease. That is, when we can certainly know that although the false belief on which the prisoner acted was the product of mental disease, still that the mind was in no other way impaired or affected, and that the motive to the act did certainly take its rise in some portion of the mind that was yet in perfect health, the rule may be applied without any apparent wrong. But it is a rule which can safely be applied in practice that we are seeking; and to say that an act which grows wholly out of an insane belief that some great wrong has been inflicted, is at the same time produced by a spirit of revenge springing from some portion or corner of the mind that has not been reached by the disease, is laying down a pathological and psychological fact which no human intelligence can ever know to be true, and which, if it were true, would not be Imo, but pure matter of fact. No such distinction ever can or ever will be drawn into prac-