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. FOOTNOTES: