Ex Cathedrâ essays on insanity / by T. Claye Shaw.

  • Shaw, T. Claye.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ex Cathedrâ essays on insanity / by T. Claye Shaw. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    crime is simply social incompatibility, though for varying reasons. It might appear from the above that we are creating a paradox, that the man who by dint of his exertions raises himself to a higher level—that the parvenu or the nouveau riche who casts off the social garb of his native state, and assumes the manners of a higher grade, who brings into his new-born title the formed habits of his first life which he ineffectually tries to conceal under his new assumption of social evolution—is jpro facto insane j that the repentant criminal who renounces his natural and former life and begins to tread the respectable social ladder, until at last he finds himself on the higher platform, does by the success of his efforts make himself insane. Surely such a conclusion seems absurd, and must imply a wrong postulate; but, in fact, there is no absurdity. The man who has changed the skin of his original life role is but a travesty of his assumed part j he is for the time being an actor, in a more or less accomplished way, and nothing really pleases him more than to have the opportunity of shuffling off his assumed clothing, mental and bodily, and of indulging in the delicious ease of his former and real self. Observe in the people under discussion there has been no real and entire change; it is usually a laughable farce that is being enacted. The new platform is not the real one, but a sham and a bad copy, and the man who treads it is always looked upon as an alien, to be utilised or kicked off as expediency may determine. If he assumes the mannerisms of his new rank, he