[247]. Bain, Study of Character, p. 214.
[248]. Reproduced in extenso in Bain, The Will, p. 413 (chap. vii.).
[249]. “It has been asserted that every temperament is equal to every other, and that all are equally necessary to the progress of humanity: I do not believe this.”
[250]. “Le tempérament au point de vue psychologique et anthropologique,” a paper published (in French) in the Bulletins du Congrès International d’Anthropologie, iv. St. Petersburg, 1892, pp. 91-154.
[251]. Le Caractère dans les Maladies, p. 188 et seq.
[252]. Régis, Maladies mentales, p. 200.
[253]. Brain, No. 32, p. 570, and Brain Surgery (1863), chap. i.
[254]. I owe these observations to the kindness of Dr. Dumas, who collected them with a view to a special study of the decay of feeling.
[255]. “When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution.... In undoing a mental organisation, nature begins by unravelling the finest, most delicate, most intricately woven, and last completed threads of her marvellously complex network. Were the moral sense as old and firmly fixed an instinct as the instinct to walk upright, or the more deeply planted instinct of propagation,—as many people in the presumed interests of morality have tried to persuade themselves and others that it is,—it would not be the first to suffer in this way when mental degeneration begins; its categorical imperative would not take instant flight at the first assault, but would assert its authority at a later period of the decline; but, being the last acquired and the least fixed, it is most likely to vary, not only ... in the pathological way of degeneracy, but also ... in physiological ways, according to the diversities of conditions in which it is placed.” (Maudsley, Body and Will, p. 266.)
[256]. Itard, Mémoire sur le sauvage de l’Aveyron, éd. Bourneville, pp. xlviii. sqq.