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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    grooves of their manufacture or believing in a better type of human product than they represent. Whosoever stays quietly to reflect sincerely on the facts of human life as set forth in history and presented in present process may easily discern ample evidence of such social manufacture, and perhaps find in it the only explanation of the manifold absurd burdens and painful torments which the race has persistently devised and wilfully inflicted on itself, sometime and somewhere, in relation to almost every event of life from birth to death. So monstrously gratuitous and often grotesquely silly some of them, that they would have seemed unimaginable had they not been imagined, and utterly unnatural had they not been actual conditions of social development. Thou shalt has indeed inflicted more pain than Thou shalt not as a social edict. Considering the various customs, magic ceremonies,^taboos, sacrifices, social rites, oftentimes most irksome, humiliating and painful, which peoples in all parts of the earth have invented and ob- served in their progress from primitive savagery, as if their only purpose had been to make themselves suffer as much as they could ; considering, again, the wearisome ceremonies, the senseless customs and conventions, the ridiculous fashions of demeanour and dress, the dreary amusements, the shams and hypocrisies of social life which civilized people still invent, endure, and esteem as marks of achieved superiority over their savage ancestors; then weighing these considera- tions impartially, there seems no good reason to wonder at what men have done formerly, seeing that they do so absurdly now, and very good reason not to underestimate the power of social manufacture to fashion the mode of feeling and thinking of the unit. Reflecting furthermore that savage peoples in all times and in all parts of the world have independently invented and observed the same or similar irksome and irrational customs, and that to-day civilized peoples in different countries are pleased to endure and extol their similar ceremonies and fashions, however absurd, the conclusion seems just that, notwithstanding the incalculable