Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 Excerpt: ...there is no individuality: as in one word are summed up the foregoing ages of human cultivation, so in one mortal are summed up the foregoing ages of human existence. Both in his knowledge and in his nature each one is the inheritor of the acquisitions of the past--the heir of all the ages. Take the word which represents the subtile and, as it were, petrified thought of a high mental culture, and trace back with analytical industry its genesis,--resolve it into its elementary production,--what a long succession of human experiences is unfolded! What a gradual process of growth, rising in speciality and complexity up to that organic evolution which the word now marks, is displayed! Take, in like manner, the individual being, and trace back in imagination through the long records of ages the antecedent steps of his genesis, or observe intelligently the resolution of his essential human nature as it is exhibited in the degenerate acts of the insane child--in this experiment thus obtruded on the attention by nature--and there will then be no cause for surprise at phenomena which the young creature could never have individually acquired, and which, so far as its conscious life is concerned, appear strangely precocious and inexplicable. There is the rapid undoing of what has been slowly done through the ages; the disruption and degenerate manifestation of faculties which have been tediously acquired; the resolution of what has been the gain of a long process of evolution; the formless ruin of carefully fashioned form. We are sad witnesses of the operation of a pathological law of dehumanisation in producing dehumanised varieties of tho human kind. CHAPTER VII. THE SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF INSANITY. Much discussion, into which I shall not enter here, has taken place at d...