Henry Maudsley

“ Let it be our prayer that when that day comes, and this generation comes up for critical judgment as an historical study before the tribunal of posterity, it may be justly said of it that it has done as much for the progress of mankind as some of the generations upon which the wisest of us look back, perhaps, with indulgent compassion, and the unwise among us with foolish scorn.
There is nothing in the attitude of modern society toward science, cold and suspicious as it may sometimes be, which necessitates or warrants an arrogant, defiant, and aggressive spirit of hostility on its side. ”

“ I have touched upon it only for the purpose of illustrating the large scope of the medical work of the future, which is to discover those laws which have been in operation through the past to make man the superior being which he is, and to determine his future action in intelligent conformity with them; not only to cure disease of body and mind, as it has aimed to do in the past, and to prevent disease, as its larger aim now is, but to carry on the development of his nature, moral, intellectual, and physical, to its highest reach. ”

“ And Science protests in vain! Without laying claim to much gift of prophecy, one may, perhaps, venture to predict that the time will come when the inhabitants of the earth will look back upon us with astonishment and horror, not otherwise than as we now look back upon the execution of old women for witchcraft in past times—a barbarity which the judges were the last to be willing to abandon, which they clung to long after it had been condemned by enlightened opinion. ”

“ It was no mere dream of prophetic frenzy that when the fathers have eaten sour grapes the children's teeth are set on edge, nor was it a meaningless menace that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations; it was an actual insight into the natural law by which degeneracy increases through generations—by which one generation reaps the wrong which its fathers have sown, as its children in turn will reap the wrong which it has sown. ”

“ The time, in fact, has come when mankind should awake to the momentous reflection how great is the power which it may exert over its own destiny, and to the resolution methodically to use it. In fulfilling this paramount duty, upon whom will the function of inquiry and instruction immediately rest, but upon those who make the laws of vital development and function their study, and the application of the knowledge to further the well-being and development of the organism their work? ”

“ What we call insanity or mental derangement is truly, in most cases, a form of human degeneracy, a phase in the working out of it; and, if we were to suffer this degeneracy to take its course unchecked through generations, the natural termination would be sterile idiocy and extinction of the family. A curious despot would find it impossible, were he to make the experiment, to breed and propagate a race of insane people; Nature, unwilling to continue a morbid variety of the human kind, would bring his experiment to an end by the production of sterile idiocy. ”

“ To aspire to be the first to proclaim the downfall of a position of refuge to which men have clung with passionate earnestness for many generations seems to show "a pitiful ambition in the fool who uses it," a singular blindness to the essential continuity of development, a strange ignorance of what is the final end of all science. A scientific discovery is a very good thing in its way, but it is only a means to an end, after all—the improvement of man's estate—that is to say, his moral and intellectual as well as his material state ”

“ There was the energy of fear and hatred—fear and hatred of the science which threatens the dethronement of man from the pedestal of conceit upon which he has placed himself, and the destruction of some of his traditional beliefs. But a little reflection might serve to prove to those who are moved by these hostile apprehensions that they are possessed with an unreasoning fear, and are disquieting themselves in vain. Let them look beyond the dark circle of their self-love, and they will see that what is good in old creeds does not perish ”

“ It is plain, then, how large a part, by virtue of its past experience, the mind contributes to each perception; when we look at an orange it tacitly supplies to the impression which it makes on sight all the information about it which we have got at different times by our other senses, and which sight does not in the least give us; the visual impression is no more in truth than a sign to which experience has taught us to give its proper meaning, just as the written or spoken word in any language is a sign which is meaningless until we have been taught what to mean by it. ”

“ Lowe's insight has enabled him to see what his critics quite fail to see—that the statesman who has to deal with the relations of men to one another in the world would be better qualified for his work if he had a good fundamental knowledge of the laws of man's nature and constitution, and of the laws of the world in which he lives. The scientific statesman—when we get him—will hardly deem it his highest achievement to shrink scared from the grasp of a principle, or his supreme privilege and merit to wait patiently to catch the fitful gusts of an ignorant public opinion. ”

“ That was not Bacon's notion of it: he perceived clearly enough that a man does not see with his eye, but through it; that seeing in the sense of observation is impossible unless there be behind the eye the intelligence to interpret what is presented to it. The simplest act of perception is indeed more than a mere matter of sense; it is an actual induction or inference in which an important element is contributed by the mind; you cannot look at an ox or an ass, and know either of them to be what it is, without making an induction—can't see, in fact, until you are trained to see. ”

“ Under the name of justice, grievous injustice has sometimes been done, and it would be easy to point to more than one instance in which murder has been avenged by the judicial murder of an insane and irresponsible person. The saddest and most humiliating disease with which mankind is afflicted, and which should rightly make the sufferer an object of the deepest compassion, only avails in England in the nineteenth century to bring him, in the event of his doing violence, to the edge of the scaffold or over it. ”

“ To execute a madman is no punishment to him, and no warning to other madmen, but a punishment to those who see in it, to use the words of Sir E. Coke, "a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreme inhumanity and cruelty, and which can be no example to others."
Moreover, it is not necessary to hang a lunatic in order to protect society, or in order to punish him, for it can protect itself sufficiently well by shutting him up in an asylum; and the prospect of being confined in a lunatic asylum is not one which is likely to encourage a man to do a murder ”

“ Good Heavens! we lived more than two thousand years ago; have you in all that time gained no new experience of men and things which it would be well to make an essential part of the intellectual culture of your children? is it education enough for life now to let them learn from us what we thought of men and things more than two thousand years ago, and to train them in a study of the structure of our dead language? ”

“ It seems to me that no education which is given anywhere, taking it all in all, is better than that through which it is necessary to go in order to become a thoroughly accomplished physician. You are brought into direct contact with the facts of Nature, face to face with them from the beginning of your course; step by step you advance in the practice of observation and reflection, from more simple to more complex phenomena, and so you learn to make the order of your ideas conform gradually to the order of Nature. ”

“ How much keener sense of responsibility and stronger sentiment of duty they would have if they only conceived vividly the eternity of action, good or ill; if they realized that under the reign of law on earth sin and error are inexorably avenged, as virtue is vindicated, in its consequences; if they could be brought to feel heartily that they are actually determining by their conduct in their generation what shall be predetermined in the constitution of the generation after them! For assuredly the circumstances of one generation make much of the fate of the next. ”

“ I could have wished, had I had time, to have shown you how some phenomena of mental disease, which may be looked upon in this relation as instructive experiments of Nature made for us in a domain where we cannot make them for ourselves, confirm the induction which has been reached by observation of human development, both in the individual and in the race. But I must leave that unsaid, and restrict myself to the conclusion as regards conduct which results from the acknowledgment that the latest and best acquisitions of man have come to him by a process of ordinary development through the ages. ”

“ No doubt in the future, as in the past, the knowledge of one period will sometimes appear foolishness at a more advanced period of human evolution—the truth of one age become the laughing-stock of the next; but we may profitably reflect that decaying doctrine had its use in its day, and it may teach us modesty to consider that much which has its place in our mental organization now, and is serving its proper end in the development thereof, will one day probably be put aside as obsolete belief. ”

“ In pursuing resolutely the course of scientific inquiry which I have indicated, it must needs be that offenses sometimes occur, for we can hardly fail to come into collision with some of the prejudices and traditions of mankind. I do not know how it is possible, for instance, to prosecute the physiological investigation of mind to its farthest reach without shaking the foundations of the metaphysical notions which have been held concerning it and its functions; and with the fall of these notions, long cherished of mankind, other notions that are bound up with them may totter to their fall. ”

“ In past times it has been too much the practice to treat the body as if it were an entirely independent kingdom, without regard to its essential relations with surrounding Nature, and to try to drive out the enemy which was supposed to have taken possession of it, by pills and potions, as barbarous nations try to drive him out by charms and ceremonies. Now, however, in the recognition of the intimate and constant relations between the organism and its surroundings, we are awaking to juster views of our duties as observers, and of our work as curers of disease ”

“ Recognizing the obvious difference between him who will not and him who cannot fulfill the claims of the law, it is their function to point out the conditions of disease which constitute incapacity, and, when they find a false fact solemnly enunciated as a rule of law, to bring forward into all the prominence they can the contradictory instances which their observation makes known to them. "That cannot be a fact in law which is not a fact in science; that cannot be health in law which is disease in fact. ”

“ It can be no pleasure to a generous nature, inevitable though it be, to shatter the faith of even the poor Indian, who, driven from his hunting-grounds by the inexorable fate of a stronger race, looks upward with feeble faith to a Great Spirit, and forward with dim hope to the happy hunting-grounds far away where the sun goes down. ”

“ I see no reason to doubt that by discovery of these laws and intelligent practical use of our discoveries we might in the fullness of time produce, if not a higher species of beings than we are, a race of beings, at any rate, as superior to us as we are superior to our primeval ancestors; the imagination of men seems, indeed, in the gods which they have created for themselves, to have given form to a forefeeling of this higher development. ”

“ Is it not, then, fortunate for the interests of morality that it is not bound up essentially with any form of religious creed, but that it survives when creeds die, having its more secure foundations in the hard-won experience of mankind?
The inquiry which, taking a sincere survey of the facts, finds the basis and sanction of morality in experience, by no means arrives in the end at easy lessons of self-indulgence for the individual and the race, but, on the contrary, at the hardest lessons of self-renunciation. ”

“ Peerages don't come our way, and I am heartily glad they do not, for I much fear that there would not be the strength of mind to reject them; that a pitiful social ambition might tempt us to spoil the simple intrinsic nobility of our vocation with the outworn decorations of a childish stage of human progress. If medical practice be pursued as a mere means of money-getting, assuredly it causes the deepest demoralization of him who so uses it, as best things turned to basest ends breed the greatest corruption. ”

“ People are apt to talk as if they believed that insanity might be got rid of were only sufficient care taken to prevent its direct propagation by the marriages of those who had suffered from it or were likely to do so. A vain imagination assuredly! Were all the insanity in the world at the present time clean swept away to-morrow, men would breed it afresh before to-morrow's tomorrow by their errors, their excesses, their wrong-doings of all sorts. ”

“ Discarding the notion that the observed uniformity of nature is but a uniformity of sequence at will, which may be interrupted whenever its interruption is earnestly enough asked for—a notion which, were it more than lip-doctrine, must necessarily deprive him of his most urgent motive to study patiently the laws of nature in order to conform to them—it enforces a stern feeling of responsibility to search out painfully the right path of obedience and to follow it, inexorably laying upon man the responsibility of the future of his race. ”

“ In respect of the mental cultivation to be adopted, in order to guard against hallucination, I can now only briefly and vaguely enforce one important principle—namely, the closest, most exact, and sincere converse with nature, physical and human. Habitual contact with realities in thought and deed is a strong defense against illusions of all sorts. We must strive to make our observation of men and things so exact and true, must so inform our minds with true perceptions, that there shall be no room for false perceptions. ”

“ THE recent trials for murder, in which insanity has been alleged for the defence, whatever differences of opinion they may have given rise to, have clearly shown how entirely unfitted a common jury is to decide the delicate and difficult question of a prisoner's mental state. Had the wit of man been employed to devise a tribunal more unfitted for such a purpose, it might have exhausted itself in the vain attempt. ”