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A Treatise on Insanity in Its Medical Relations (1883)
A Treatise on Insanity in Its Medical Relations - 1883 Author:William Alexander Hammond Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: create and maintain that 1 vigor of mind which is able to contest the empire of habit' (Locke) may be rightly asserted as the chief end of all mental discipline.... more »" And the following from Lemoine:1 "Habit has sometimes been branded with the name of routine, because, as it were, it forms all actions in the same mould, and often usurps the place of reason and the will. But it is not habit which deserves this reproach, and which arrests the progress of science or the perfectionment of life. It is the bad use which is made of it, the idleness of mind and of will, when the agent which has acquired by habit an increase of force and capacity for acting is contented to do with the least effort that which is most easily done, and not to employ this increase of power to perform more difficult acts. If life, science, morality, civilization, progress of all kinds, are stopped at some point of their career, it is not habit which stands in the way; it is some extraneous cause which immobilizes at the same time that it arrests progress. There is nothing in the nature of habit, or in its laws, which can act as a cause of regression, of retardation, or of rest. It is essentially an augmentation of power, and it tends always to the elevation and the improvement of the human race." In the examination of lunatics, or suspected lunatics, the habits of the individual should form the subject of careful inquiry. Not only is much light thereby thrown upon the mental condition, but important data are supplied toward the formation of a correct prognosis. Chapter yni. TEMPERAMENT. The subject of temperament, which at one time was an important factor in medical literature, fell a few years ago into unmerited neglect, to be revived quite lately to a position almost equal to that which it occupied ...« less