A dissertation on the effects of partial insanity upon all the mental faculties of a testator : when exposed to the artifices of a cognizant, fraudulent player on disordered animal machinery, exhibiting a review and report of the trials of the last wills and testaments of Charles Hall & Michael Deaderick, of Davidson County, Tennessee : including a philosophical analysis of mind ... / by a medical observer of Nashville.

Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A dissertation on the effects of partial insanity upon all the mental faculties of a testator : when exposed to the artifices of a cognizant, fraudulent player on disordered animal machinery, exhibiting a review and report of the trials of the last wills and testaments of Charles Hall & Michael Deaderick, of Davidson County, Tennessee : including a philosophical analysis of mind ... / by a medical observer of Nashville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    to Ivvjid evil. It has long been contested by some philosophers a-nd certain divines, whether the Will acts by free agency or moral necessity. This cohtest will probably be finally settled by the physiologist and anatomico-medical philosopher, as it cannot be determined by the fanatic zealot, the hypochondriac religion- ist, nor the mercenary advocate, although endowed with the genius, the specious talents, and all the verbose display of flowe- ry diction, frothy metaphor and declamatory parade of a Joseph Gabell Breckenridge of Kentucky, opposed to the sound science and extensive literature of a Rush; and the clear and satisfactory judicial civil laconism of a Haywood, in the instances of White vs. Cox, and Keeble vs. Cumings, of Tennessee, and reiterated by the supreme court of our neighboring state, in the case of Johnson vs. More's heirs, after the fantastic display of their fo- rensic orator, ascribable to the mere flights of a fruitful imagina- tion, calculated chiefly to conceal the want of observation and the ignorance of'heir inventor, entirely in the dark as to the import of liberty or freedom in man's Will; and whose great ob- ject seems to have been, in his day. to unsettle the well digested English law on insanity adopted by the courts of the United States, for the purpose, like too many in our times, of multiply- ing litigation on a subject of so much interest to attorneys and advocates of a venal forum, and for which end he was prompted to publish his splendid and elaboiate speech under the opinion of court reported by Littell, of Kentucky. In that speech the author seems to have studied withholding from the mind of the court and jury all sound science on this subject, and-of guard- ing against the impressions that willing is a mode and conse- quence of the faculty of feeling, and that liberty is the power of executing our Will; that it is our first good and includes them all: that constraint, from the influence of any cause or causes, includes all our ills, since it is a privation of the power to satisfy our wants and accomplish our desires: that all con- straint is sufferance and all liberty is enjoyment: and the total value of the liberty of an animated being is equal to that of all his faculties united. A self moving power in the Will h as absurd as to say the body possesses a self moving power; and the acts of our Wills depend as much on impressions as animal life depends on stimulus the musical tones of the organist upon his fingers, and heat and light on our globe depend on solar influence. The Will certainly de- rives its resources from Memory and Imagination, and acts with and without the consent of the Understanding, through the instrumentality of the Passions; and these are to our minds in the language of that generous benefactor of the human race Benjamin Rush, the author of a treatise on Mind, remarkable