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Materialism In Its Relations To The Causes, Conditions, And Treatment Of Insanity
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| 60 | But Dr. Gray expresses his belief in the spontaneity of the mind and its responsibility -- of course, on the evidence of his own consciousness: "We do not look at mind from the standpoint of regarding it as nothing more than the result of cerebral action. . . . We say that insanity is a bodily disorder; that it is a disease of the brain; . . . that there is a departure from healthy physiological action, and as a consequence of these changes the mind is disturbed or deranged." The question then may be asked: If there can be no disordered action of the mind without a prior and causative disordered condition or action of the cerebral substance, how can there be predicated any healthy action of the mind without a preceding and causative normal action of the brain? (3) (3) Dr. Maudsley (p. 385), in reviewing a book of Dr. C. Handfield Jones -- who, like Dr. Gray, has attempted to ride two horses at the same time, viz., a belief in the existence of mind distinct from body, and yet that insanity invariably depends upon bodily disease -- thus expresses himself: "In all healthy mental life whatever, there is a bodily factor and a purely mental factor; and, in all diseased mental life whatever, there is a bodily factor and a purely mental factor. To write as if sanity is a thing of the immaterial and insanity a thing of the material world is to infer that men are furnished with brain only that they may become insane." | |
| 61 | Herbert Spencer is quoted as if he too believed in spontaneity, though not recognizing it as a factor, in any mere natural or physical process. The fact is, Spencer does not believe in spontaneity at all, for he has somewhere said that he can conceive of volition, but cannot conceive of will. But let us suppose a case. An individual, apparently in perfect health, experiences a sudden shock, followed immediately by some insane feeling, thought, or act. "The mind has been subjected to a stress beyond what it is able to bear." The shock itself, no matter through what avenue of sensation the impression came which produced it, is a mental state; and it may be added, no matter what portion of the nervous or cerebral, substance is more intimately related to the mental action. (4) The evidences of the derangement, however expressed, are equally mental, and known only through human consciousness. But between these two phenomena, according to Dr. Gray's theory, there are assumed to be certain intervening physical conditions or stages. The existence of these intermediate stages or processes must be, from the nature of the case, presumed not proved. It is conceded that no research, no analysis, as yet, has furnished any palpable proof of their existence. Nor can there be any opportunity of observation that could positively determine it. For, suppose the intervening stage were some molecular action within the scope of microscopic vision, yet this is necessarily beyond its reach in the living subject. Or, again, suppose the intervening pathological state to be "a modification of polar relations of nervous element," as Maudsley expresses it, with what instrument or analysis is this to be detected? Or, with what mystical vision of the observer is this to be appreciated? (4) It is not the sensation that produces the shock, but the idea momentarily associated with it. It results from an habitual association of ideas and not from an habitual succession of molecular changes. So of the predisposition, where one exists, that makes one individual more likely than another to become insane in the face of a moral shock; it may be the result of a cerebral tissue weakened by bad physical habits, or it may he the result of a moral weakness, engendered by an habitual yielding to impulse, emotion, or passion. Of the more obscure and gradual moral influences that operate to induce insanity, it is not necessary to interpolate physical links in the chain of causation, even in these. Says a writer in the English Journal of Mental Science: "The point to which I desire to call special attention is this; the direct effect of depressing emotions is to lower moral tone, and to lessen moral control, in a greater or less degree. It is the moral effect of a moral cause," etc. VOL. VI. | |
| 62 | Two extracts from the same author, just quoted, will show to what shifts the advocates of this theory must resort in attempting to explain all mental states, suffering, and insanity, on a physical basis; and also the confession of their inability to demonstrate in any scientific way the organic or functional changes upon which these conditions are assumed to depend: "It behooves us distinctly to bear in mind, when we take the moral causes of insanity into consideration, that the mental suffering or psychical pain of a sad emotion testifies to actual wear and tear of nerve-element, to disintegration of some kind; it is the exponent of a physical change," etc. (5) Is not this putting the cart before the horse? One might as well say that labor was the exponent of perspiration, or scorn the exponent of a curl of the lip. (5) Body and Mind, p. 94. | |
