Responsibility and disease : an essay / by J.H. Balfour Browne.

Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility and disease : an essay / by J.H. Balfour Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    39/56 (page 39)
    consideration. Man is, as it were, two : he thinks and he acts. It is with the latter that law has to do, and it may seem wrong to choose a test of acts from thought which is partially dissociated from conduct. True, his thoughts do influence his acts, and his acts re-act upon his thoughts; still, many men know the good and choose the evil; and if that choice is dictated either by bodily fear or by Avhat has been called the duress of disease, he ought certainly to be held irresponsible for the crime committed. To fill up the notion of a crime, you require not only the knowledge of good and evil, but the power to choose the one and refrain from the other. Responsibility implies free will. If there is no real volition, there is no real criminality. Looked at in that aspect the present test of in- sanity seems defective. It is not in conformity with the facts which are capable of observation by the mass of mankind, for it is certain that unless the legal test, at the same time that it supplies a means of discovering the health or disease of the cognitive faculties, supplies a means of discovering whether the individual whose insanity is in question has the power to refrain from the wrong of which he is conscious, it would be open to numerous ob- jections, and there would be the most obvious and pressing necessity for a revision and alteration of the law in this respect. An engineer might as well