On hallucinations consistent with reason / by John Ordronaux.

  • Ordronaux, John, 1830-1908.
Date:
[1861]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On hallucinations consistent with reason / by John Ordronaux. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    terial principle within us whose essence eludes our search, albeit its operations reveal the order of its laws. It is the principle of intelli- gence, as distinguished from the property of sensation. And inas- much as the degree of development of the intelligence is the meas- ure of man’s mentality, so the cloudiness or clearness of this principle, its ability rightly to apprehend—rightly to comprehend, whatever ideas are presented to it, will always determine the normal or abnor- mal state of the mind. The insane generally reason well from their own premises. Grant but the truth of these, and their conclusions are not often erroneous. It is in the intelligence that lies the disorder. The self-deception is in the misapprehension of the original relation of things, and not in the subordinate relations which flow out of them. In this view of the subject, any disturbance of the intelligence towards whatever sense, radiated, may provoke the occurrence of hallucina- tion. The particular sense simply repeats in a physical manner the delusion which already exists in its intellectual centre. Whence it follows that we may have hallucinations of a particular sense, as of sight, sound, smell, or taste, without involving either of the rest; and in all these conditions of partial derangement, the mind may or may not be conscious of the error under which it labors. Indeed, it is so common to associate with the idea of insanity, those extreme forms of mental perturbation which are indicated by unmis- takable physical manifestations, that we are in danger of overlook- ing those milder functional disturbances which sometimes afflict even the healthy. Violence of conduct and vehemence of language, or its contrary, moroseness and taciturnity—acts of glaring absurdity, or of childish awkwardness—paroxysms of unbridled temper and inco- herent utterance, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”—these are the usual lineaments which the unlearned and unskilled in men- tal pathology ascribe to the insane. Much, all of this indeed, is unquestionably true at different times, and yet to insist that any one of these facts by itself constitutes in- sanity, is simply to assert that a simple acceleration or retardation of function is a morbid phenomenon, and that health has fixed and ab- solute limits, beyond which it never passes. In reality, nature,