Life in mind and conduct : studies of organic in human nature / by Henry Maudsley, M.D.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Life in mind and conduct : studies of organic in human nature / by Henry Maudsley, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    the continuity of things. Neither will in its highest form as the agent of supreme reason, nor the moral feeling which is then its finest ingredient, is separable from the lower qualities and feelings of human nature, or could ever have existed without them; both are rooted in and cannot be parted from these, but grow from them by continuity of development, as flower from stem and stem from root. Physiologically they import a most fine and complex net- work of nervous organization which, like each subordinate network in the nervous hierarchy, has its special sensibility, is excitable by its proper stimulus, and discharges its own currents of energy along the paths organized therein by inheritance and education; for such network implies not only a multiplication and refinement of feelings, esthetic and moral, but specially linked movements, ideal or actual, together constituting the exquisitely fine apprehensions or cerebral reflex grasps which take place. Where there are no such fine plexuses in the supreme cerebral plane, as is the case in the lowest savages, there can be no refined moral sentiments nor corresponding wills ; when the plexuses are defective or defaced in civilized persons the moral feelings and will are defective or debased; and when disease erazes these acquisitions of superior culture the moral feeling and will are effaced. When all is said, it is neither passion nor will which is the real working force; they are but general names denoting the conscious outcomes of underlying organic operations; it is the concrete person, a compact whole of manifold tissues and organs who, diversely affected according as they differ, feels and shows passion more or will more—that is, passion less or more controlled in form and ruled in expression. As it is the man who thus wills the will, he is necessarily deter- mined by his constitution, culture and situation to will good or bad wills, weak or strong, turbulently passionate or calmly rational, coarsely and loosely, or finely and compactly com- pounded. They inevitably represent his essential character, bodily and mental; for there is not a particle of his body, even E 2