The
practical difficulty is to convince the mere observer that forms of
insanity which seem to consist in the loss of moral qualities and
principles _only_, may be as directly the effect of brain disease as any
of those grosser varieties of mental disorder which he is perfectly well
able to recognize, and fully prepared to ascribe to their proper cause.
To the professional mind, at least, it will follow from what we have
said that the injury to mind properties or qualities inflicted by the
invasion of disease may be partial, and must in every case be determined
by laws or conditions governing the progress of disease, perhaps on
the lines and in the directions which have been least well guarded by
educationary influences. A man may lose his faculty of forming a wise
judgment long before he is deprived of the power of distinguishing
between right and wrong. This is so because it is a higher attainment in
moral culture to do right advisedly, than simply to perceive the right
thing to do. The application of principle to conduct is an advance on
the mere recognition of virtue in the concrete, or even the possession
of virtue in the abstract. The question whether any past act of
wrongdoing was an act of insanity does not so much depend upon the great
question whether the person doing it was insane as a whole being, or
whether the deed done was the outcome of passion or error, the direct
fruit of limited or special disease.
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