Religion and Lust: or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual DesireWeir, James, Jr.
Religion
Religion and Lust: or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire
Weir, James, Jr.
Sex -- Religious aspects
Psychos is the result of evolutionary development, and the chief reason
why insanity is not as prevalent in the savage as in the civilized man,
is because the brain of the savage lacks development. I do not wish to
convey the idea that insanity is purely psychical in its nature.
Insanity is the result of a material change in the structure of the
brain produced by morbific action. The manifestations of insanity are
merely the symptoms of a disease that involves the brain. The savage has
less development of psychical function, consequently he is less liable
to mental lesion. I mean by psychical function that portion of the brain
in which psychos has its origin. Alienists consider the habits of men as
being the factor in the production of insanity. Habits and heredity are
undoubted factors in the production of diseased minds, and, in fact, are
the chief agents. You cannot, however, expect to find a disordered
function where that function is absent. Savages have paresis, apoplexy,
and imbecility, seldom or never insanity. The reason is patent--they
lack the psychic function, that peculiar element, whatever it may be,
which raises civilized man so high above them. That this element can be
developed in savages I do not for one instant deny. The ploughshare of
evolutionary civilization will bring it to the surface sooner or later,
and when it does insanity follows. I have only to point to the American
negro to prove the truth of my proposition; even he is partially exempt,
simply because his civilization is of such recent date that his brain
has not yet acquired its full quota of the psychic element.
I will venture to assert, so true is the fact that insanity is the
product of civilization, that, if it were not for the combating
influences of social laws, assisted not a little by scientific medical
aid, all North America could not contain the vast and enormous army that
would constitute the civilized world's array of lunatics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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