The Pathology of Mind (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1895. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV CAUSATION OF INSANITY II. Pathological. I.--The Organic Mechanism and its Reactions. Given the individual constitution, such as it has come of the long travail of the past, an organic product to the creation of which all things from the beginning have ministered, I go on to consider it now as what it simply and essentially is--an organic mechanism placed in social and physical conditions to which it must adjust itself or which it must adjust to itself in order to live at all, and make the best mutual adjustment in order to have the best life and function. Moreover, because in its nature all things have silent intelligence one with another and each with the whole, therefore the greater in number, the wider in range, and the more special in character the relations between it and its surroundings, the fuller and keener will its life be. In this process of interrelation it is acted on and reacts, suffering passions and performing actions, combining impressions in perception and reflection, and responding to them through fit volitions; such action and reaction being the physical basis of its various sensations, feelings, thoughts and wills. Were the relations between an organism and its medium the most special full and fit of their kind possible, action and reaction would be everywhere opposite and equal. There would be no passion then in the sense of suffering, because there would be a perfect equilibrium between feeling and doing; an aggregate of perfect reflexes might function so exactly and completely on every occasion that consciousness would be swallowed up in the victorious achievement of ideal perfection. Let a man of the fullest possible mental capacity get into the completest relations with the external not-himself, the separation between him and...