The physiology of mind : being the first part of a 3d ed., rev., enl., and in great part rewritten, of The physiology and pathology of mind / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1883
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The physiology of mind : being the first part of a 3d ed., rev., enl., and in great part rewritten, of The physiology and pathology of mind / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    Again, it might be thought a monstrous mistake of nature to have brought forth so many idiots and lunatics, seeing that the introspective psychologists, though mak- ing a profession of induction with their lips, have taken no notice whatever of the large collection of instances afforded by such unwelcome anomalies. Certainly it may be said, and no doubt it has been said, that the mental phenomena of the idiot and lunatic are morbid, and do not, therefore, concern psychology. It is true that they do not concern a psychology which violently separates itself from nature. But it is exactly because psychology has thus unwarrantably severed itself from nature—of which the so-called morbid phenomena are no less natural a part than are the phenomena of health —that it has no sure foundations ; that it is not induc- tive ; that it has not received the benefit of the corrective instances which a faithful observation of the unsound mind would have afforded. In reality the phenomena of insanity, presenting a variation of conditions which cannot be produced artificially—the instantia contra- dictoria—furnish what in such matter ought to have been seized with the utmost eagerness; namely, actual experiments well suited to correct false generalization and to establish the principles of a truly inductive science. The laws of mental action are not miraculously changed nor reversed in madness, though the conditions of their operation are different; and nature does not recognise the artificial and ill-starred divisions which men, for the sake of convenience, and not unfrequently in the interests of ignorance, make. 2. Consciousness, which does not even tell us that we have a brain, is certainly incompetent to give any ac- count of the essential material conditions which underlie every mental manifestation and determine the character of it. Let the function of an individual's optic ganglia be abolished by disease or otherwise, and he would not