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The meditations of the philosopher cannot be uninfluenced, nor the heart of the philanthropist be unmoved, by the fact, which statistics prove, that there are at the present moment in England alone more than thirty thousand people who are deprived of all their active rights as human beings, and made, as far as possible, nonentities in the world. About twenty-six thousand of these are actually shut up in lunatic asylums; and of that number but very few are ever likely to leave their undesired abodes until they take their leave of life itself. It cannot, then, be unprofitable to endeavour, in one department of an extensive subject, to follow the gradual course of mental degeneration, and, by the exhibition of it, to justify the world's manner of dealing with the particular discords in nature's general harmony.
* It seems desirable that some such word as selfhood or “egoism” should come into regular use to express that selfness which is not selfishness, but which is concerned in all passions, and which lies at the root of self-conceit, self-complacency, self-opiniated, &c. To speak of it as the idea of self or self-feeling is not always correct, because implying a consciousness of it, whereas the selfhood may be very great without an active consciousness of it. Self-feeling, too, is used to denote the ænesthesis. It is curious to observe that the words “selfish” and “selfishness” are not above two hundred years old, obvious as they seem. “Suicism” and “philauty” (ϕ↩λαντία) were both tried before the gap was filled up by the Puritan writers, as Dean Trench remarks.Google Scholar
* “In itself,” says Müller, “no idea relating to external things is ever in this sense intense or strong, but merely distinct or indistinct, and convincing in different degrees. By intensity or strength of opinion, therefore, we here mean only the power or quantity which they acquire through the influence of passion in consequence of the striving self.” In a few pages of his ‘Physiology’ Müller has given an admirable and profound account, on physiological principles, of the laws of mental phenomena, of which account such works as the valuable one of Mr. Bain, and such articles as the elaborate one on “Volition,” by Mr. Lockhart Clarke, in the ‘Psychological Journal,’ contain a laboured exposition.Google Scholar
* It is sometimes possible to form a tolerably certain opinion as to whether the primary pathological condition of insanity is in the brain or in the viscera from the character of the disease and from the mode of its invasion. The emotions may be shortly said to depend upon the whole organism; the intellectual faculties depend on the brain itself. Hence injury to the brain structure from advanced disease or from violence is likely to produce intellectual derangement and incoherency; disease of viscera will initiate emotional insanity. Of course, however, the molecular cerebral change which visceral disease may produce, and which is manifest dynamically in emotional insanity, may be caused by blood poisons or produced in the earlier stages of actual cerebral disease.Google Scholar
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