chapter iv
., dealing with the influence of conditions of life on the production of insanity, will show how at every step Dr. Maudsley introduces considerations bearing on morality.
“The maxims of morality which were proclaimed by holy men of old as lessons of religion indispensable to the well-being and stability of families and nations, are not really wild dreams of inspired fancy, nor the empty words which preachers make them; founded on a sincere recognition of the laws of nature working in human events, they were visions of eternal truths of human evolution. Assuredly the ‘everlasting arms’ are beneath the upright man who dealeth uprightly, but they are the everlasting laws of nature which sustain him who, doing that which is lawful and right, leads a life that is in faithful harmony with the laws of nature’s progress; the destruction which falls upon him who dealeth treacherously and doeth iniquity, ‘observing not the commandments of the Lord to obey them,’ are the avenging consequences of broken natural laws. How long will it be before men perceive and acknowledge the eternity of action, good or ill, and feel the keen sense of responsibility, and the strong sentiment of duty which so awful a reflection is fitted to engender? How long before they realise vividly that under the reign of law on earth sin or error is inexorably avenged, as virtue is indicated, in its consequences, and take to heart the lesson that they are determining in their generation what shall be predetermined in the constitution of the generation after them?”
A later important work is “Body and Will,” 1883. “Its justification from my standpoint,” says Dr. Maudsley, “is, that I have been engaged all my life in dealing with mind in its concrete human embodiments, and that in order to find out why individuals feel, think, and do differently, and in what way best to deal with them so as to do one’s duty to oneself and to them, I have had no choice but to leave the barren heights of speculation for the plains on which men live and move and have their being. It is not enough to think and talk about abstract minds and their qualities when you have to do with concrete minds that must be observed, and studied, and managed.”
This work deals with questions too vast to be summarily discussed; but one aspect of Dr. Maudsley’s mind is well expounded in the following extract:—
“In nature, as we see it, we seem to see a conflict of warring opposites; gravitation opposed, or rather indeed complemented, by repulsion; chemical affinities by chemical repulsions; magnetic attraction by electric repulsion; evolution by dissolution; conservation by revolution, quiet or catastrophic; love by hate; self-love by love of kind; heaven by hell. Certain it is that hate and destruction are just as necessary agents as love and production in nature, which could no more be, or be conceived to be, without the one than without the other; and to call the one good more than the other, however necessary from the standpoint of human egoism, is just as if one were to call gravitation good and repulsion bad, as gravitation, had it self-consciousness, would no doubt do. In order to have a theory of cosmogony that shall cover all the facts, it has always been necessary to supplement a good principle by a bad principle, a God of love and creation by a God of hate and destruction. And it must always be so. We may, agreeably to the logic of our wishes, comfort ourselves in our pilgrimage by entertaining the hope and belief of the working out of good through evil and of the permanence of good after the disappearance of evil, just as, if it were useful and pleasing to us to cherish the illusion, we might persuade ourselves that repulsion will one day be annihilated and gravitation endure, or that evolution will continue and dissolution cease to be; but if we look at the matter in the cold spirit of strictly rational inquiry we shall always find abundant reason to believe that the sum of the respective energies of good and evil remains a constant quantity, the respective distribution only varying, and that we might as well try to increase the height of the mountain without increasing the depth of the valley, as to increase the good in the world by purging it of its so-called evil.”
Dr. Maudsley became a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1869, has been President of the Medico-Psychological Association, and received the LL.D. degree from Edinburgh University in 1884.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] “Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints,” 1856.
[18] For details of the exposure of 1813 and 1814, see “A History of the York Asylum,” York, 1815.
[19] For a description of the state of Bethlem Hospital in 1815, see Conolly’s work above cited, pp. 26-29. In making this record Conolly says, “Nothing can more forcibly illustrate the hardening effect of being habitual witnesses of cruelty, and the process which the heart of man undergoes when allowed to exercise irresponsible power. Partly from custom, and partly from indifference, and partly from fear, even physicians not particularly chargeable with inhumanity used formerly to see patients in every form of irritating restraint, and leave them as they found them. _Such facts justify the extremest jealousy of admitting the slightest occasional appliance of mechanical restraints in any asylum. Once admitted, under whatever pretext, and every abuse will follow in time._”
[20] Memoir of John Conolly, M.D., D.C.L., by Sir James Clark, Bart., 1869; very ill-arranged.
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