Mental faculty

“ Do we observe instances of a total want of memory, imagination, and judgment, either from an original defect in the stamina of the brain, or from the influence of physical causes? The same unnatural defect is sometimes observed, and probably from the same causes, of a moral faculty. ”

“ We may, indeed, remove from the start the mistaken fear that a consistent causal aspect of life leads to injustice to the higher aims and ideal purposes of mankind. If we want to have psychology,—and that means if we want to consider the mental life in a system of causes and effects,—we must proceed without prejudices, and without side-thoughts. ”

“ When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution.... ”

“ Balance of the Mental Faculties.—There must exist a certain balance between the various faculties of the brain in order to insure sanity. A high order of intelligence without much will, or keen emotions without a corresponding power of inhibition, and overmastering will and slight moral sense, vivid imagination without common sense, intense social instinct without much conscience, fervid religious instinct without much sense of duty or altruism, must invariably produce one-sided and unbalanced individuals, and the results would be bad for society ”

“ One need not enter into a lengthy discussion in order to show that we have here a mental disorder, the origin of which can be definitely traced to psychic causes, the emotional shock accompanying the crime and conviction. ”

“ As in the defects of the intellectual development, so in the moral sphere, the condition varies from a complete arrest of moral development to all forms of moral perversion and even to an abnormal development of the moral and emotional susceptibility. ”

“ The type of behavior disorder, the social reactions, the trends of interests, etc., which psychopathic personalities may show give special features to many cases, e.g., criminal traits, moral deficiency, tramp life, sexual perversions and various temperamental peculiarities. ”

“ Persons of unsound mind—that is, persons who, owing to disorder of the mind, are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs.
"Class II: Persons mentally infirm—that is, persons who, through mental infirmity arising from age or decay of their faculties, are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs. ”

“ Many of the grosser cases are found at last to be accompanied by mental disorder, and it is difficult to avoid referring the whole class to something different from simple misuse of the reasoning power. The first instance is one which puts in a strong light the state of things in which we live, brought about by our glorious freedom of thought, speech, and writing. ”

“ To know the supposed bodily belief of the patient and what has claimed to produce it, enables the practitioner to act more understandingly in destroying this belief. Thus it is in healing the moral sickness; the malicious mental operation must be understood in order to enable one to destroy it and its effects. ”

“ They will take wrong steps in life, they may be unsuccessful, [Pg 78] their stupidity may lead them to the poorhouse, their recklessness may lead them to the penitentiary. And yet we do not speak of them as patients because their disproportionate mental features may be sufficiently corrected by other mental states which are perhaps more strongly developed. ”

“ Each case must be studied entirely on its own merits, with a leaning in favour of the criminal or patient, in case there are evidences in past life of serious disturbances of mentality, though only of very temporary nature, or if there is a strong nervous or mental heredity.
The notion of the possibility of a secondary personality asserting itself is a much older idea than it is usually thought to be. ”

“ I fly from the subject, and thicken the cloud of mystery, of which I have so often, and, I still think, so justly complained.—These are some of the effects of the contradictory systems, that have so long bewildered our principles and conduct. A combination of causes, added to the conflict between a thousand delicate and nameless emotions, have lately conspired to confuse, to weaken, my spirits. You can conceive, that these acute, mental, sensations, must have had a temporary effect on the state of my health. ”

“ In both we are dealing with a type of mental organization which is primarily incompetent to face reality in an adequate, socially acceptable manner, and therefore has to resort to constant deceit and lying, and in which those inhibitions determined by social, ethical, and æsthetic considerations are equally impotent. ”

“ It was the first time in his life that he had with deliberation acted against his convictions, and there followed the reaction and remorse inseparable from such conditions.
Is there any depression so deep as this? is there any night so dark as this first eclipse of the soul, this first conscious stilling of the instinct for right? He had conspired to obscure truth, he had made himself partaker in another man's wrong-doing, and, as the result, he had lost his moral foothold, his self-respect, his self-reliance. ”

“ Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word “psychology” is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole. ”

“ At this stage of your development you will probably discover in yourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enable you to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you wander through your mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come [14] upon an ugly intruder of a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as fear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like, there is only one right way to treat it. ”

“ From what has been said thus far it will be seen that the mental processes underlying the mental state of malingering differ in no essential from those operative in the human mind generally; that man in his endeavor to reach a satisfactory compromise between the two underlying principles of his conduct,—i.e., that of pleasure and reality,—frequently resorts to his fantasy ”

“ Especially wherever good precepts are allowed to rest peacefully beside undiscarded bad habits, moral weakness is directly cultivated. Volitional recollection, or forcing the mind to reproduce a train of impressions, strengthens what we may call the mental will ”

“ We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty—their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration. ”

“ Concentration, centralization in ideas, conscious mental substitution, creation of strong mental ideas, and psychic displacement of the negative with the positive, both by the patient within himself and from the attendant or physician without, will bring insanity under control. ”

“ Any defective development of the nervous system, moreover, may lead to instability of moral character, because the free action of the soul may be hampered by the physical environment with which it is associated. ”

“ As I am addressing those who are primarily interested for the moment in criminology, I may do well to begin with the subject of psychic determinism. In contrast to the common sentiment of all people in favor of free will in mental processes, the facts elicited by psychoanalysis point to a strict determinism of every psychic process. ”

“ The American Psychiatric Association tells us that "severe mental illness can seriously impair a sufferer's ability rationally to appreciate the wrongfulness of conduct." Brief for American Psychiatric Association et al. ”

“ In the attempt to subject ourselves to the inward law, we may encounter a class of mental refusals which indicate no congenital incapacity, but prove that the mind has been incapacitated by its acquired habits and its ordinary occupations. ”

“ During this period, which is normally interrupted at about the third or fourth year, as result of organic evolutionary processes and the indispensable help of education, those mental forces are formed which appear later as inhibitions to the sexual instinct and narrow its course like dams; mental forces such as disgust, the feeling of shame, the esthetic and moral standards of ideas. ”

“ The will is sometimes spoken of by certain of these modern psychologists as mainly an inhibitory faculty, that is, a faculty which prevents certain reflex acts from taking place, though permitting one set of reflexes to have its way. ”

“ The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial. ”

“ The perfect oneness of the personal self must be maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to will, to remember, to compare. ”

“ Those who have accumulated the largest sum of experience in disorders of the intellect, have viewed the various forms under which they are manifested, as equally conducing to render an individual incapable of conducting himself and managing his affairs, whether the mental affection be termed madness, melancholy, insanity, mental derangement, non compos mentis, idiotcy, or lunacy ”

“ In default of mental force, they possess themselves of him by other means—by sighs, supplications, or base seductions. If they cannot fetter him, they snare his feet in traps. But that he should live in them, through them, for them, is the only thing admissible. ”

“ While we all allow that extensive or recognizable diseases of, or injuries to, the brain, free a man from responsibility and punishment, how can we logically mete out blame or praise, punishment or reward to our ordinary acts, thoughts, and impulses, seeing that all our acts, thoughts, and impulses, good or bad, virtuous or criminal, are equally the mere expressions of certain inevitable physical changes in the brain, the mere register on the dial plate of consciousness of necessary predetermined complications in the working of certain atoms of the gray matter of our cortex? ”

“ Even in the lighter forms of psychic degenerative forms that lie on the borderland of mental alienation, such, for instance, as are present in the various forms of psychopathic maladies we still find that the same relation holds good. ”

“ Not all the faculties of the larger self—for instance, the faculty involved in telepathic action—seem to be adapted for ready employment here on earth. Which would argue, of course, for a future state in which, freed from all hampering limitations of the body, such faculties will have full manifestation. ”

“ Do we ever observe a partial insanity, or false perception on one subject, while the judgment is sound and correct, upon all others? We perceive, in some instances, a similar defect in the moral faculty. There are persons who are moral in the highest degree, as to certain duties, who nevertheless live under the influence of some one vice. ”

“ Show your student that mental malpractice tends to
blast moral sense, health, and the human life. Instruct
452:1 him how to bar the door of his thought against this
seeming power, - a task not difficult, when one under-
452:3 stands that evil has in reality no power.
Incorrect reasoning leads to practical error.
The wrong thought should be arrested before it has a
452:6 chance to manifest itself.
Egotistic darkness
Walking in the light, we are accustomed to the light
and require it; we cannot see in darkness. ”

“ I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected nervous centres. ”

“ While the evidence in this field has been taken largely from extremely pathological cases, the distortions and perversions of mental behavior, noticeable in such cases, are simply extreme forms of the type of distortion that takes place in the case of normal individuals whose desires are seriously frustrated. ”

“ We instinctively recognize and classify individuals according to this faculty they have, some of drawing us out, others of crushing us. It is a faculty they usually exert without knowing it, even against their will: they are tonic or depressing just as one is short or tall, just as one has black eyes or green. ”

“ But with the abnormal person, who spends his entire time in intense mental concentration and who rigorously suppresses all his emotions, the loosening of the subconscious is apt to result in a violent manifestation. ”

“ To the restraints constituted by mental representations of the intrinsic effects of actions, which, in their simpler forms, have been evolving from the beginning, are added the restraints caused by mental representations of extrinsic effects, in the shape of political, religious, and social penalties. ”

“ Those who still believe in an exclusively materialistic theory of mental disorder must find it extremely difficult to maintain their doctrine in the face of the many incontrovertible facts brought to light through modern research in the field of psychopathology. ”