At length Dr. Maudsley republished in a modified form the “Physiology of Mind” in a separate volume of 550 pages (1876), putting it forward as a disquisition, by the light of existing knowledge, concerning the nervous structures and functions which are the probable physical foundations of those natural phenomena, which appear in consciousness, or feelings, and thoughts. In this work he says (p. 47) “that the subjective method—the method of interrogating self-consciousness—is not adequate to the construction of a true mental science has now seemingly been sufficiently established. That is not to say that it is worthless; for when not strained beyond its capabilities, its results must, in the hands of competent men, be as useful as they are indispensable.... That which a just reflection teaches incontestably, the present state of physiology illustrates practically. Though very imperfect as a science, physiology has made sufficient progress to prove that no psychology can endure except it be based upon its investigations.”
Meanwhile Dr. Maudsley had been called upon in 1870 to deliver the Gulstonian Lectures at the College of Physicians, and these were published in a small book under the title “Body and Mind: an Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, specially in Reference to Mental Disorders.” The first lecture expounded the physical conditions of mental function in health; the second described some forms of mental degeneracy which showed prominently the operation of physical causes from generation to generation, and the relationship of mental disorders to other diseases of the nervous system. The third included a general survey of the pathology of the mind, and the relations of morbid states of body to disordered mental function.
Meanwhile some important medico-legal cases had brought into prominence Dr. Maudsley’s belief that there are many forms of mental disease in which a patient ought not to be held criminally responsible for his actions, although he might be fully cognisant of their nature. This was definitely expressed as far back as 1864 in a pamphlet entitled “Insanity and Crime,” a medico-legal commentary on the case of George Victor Townley, by the editors of the Journal of Mental Science. It was in 1872 more fully developed by Dr. Maudsley in his “Responsibility in Mental Disease,” which has gone through numerous editions.
In 1879 the “Pathology of Mind” appeared in a separate and enlarged form, and contains a systematic exposition of the subject, introduced by an account of sleep, dreaming, somnambulism, and allied states. He then proceeds to deal with the causation of insanity, both social and material, and then further expounds the symptoms of insanity, treating it as one disease with varied manifestations, and then delineating the clinical groups of mental disorders met with in practice and which the physician has to deal with. One great merit of the book is, that the clinical pictures it contains are drawn from life. An extract from 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.