Two Registers of Madness in Enlightenment Britain. Part 2

Abstract

In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that in Augustan and Georgian England it was widely understood that madness could have two more-or-less distinct meanings. "Moral" madness was the subject's own fault, and he/she remained accountable for actions commissioned under its effects. The "morally" mad individual's thoughts and actions were understood to be self-directed; at base, in moral madness, delusional ideas arose in the mind, and by definition remained within the moral province of the individual. By contrast, in "real" madness, the sufferer was the passive recipient of body-based sickness. Correspondingly, he/she was understood to be innocent, but paid for this exculpation of moral accountability by surrendering full personhood. In Part 2, I shall examine various ways in which eighteenth-century Britons approached and assessed insanity's two meanings. I shall then remark on the late eighteenth-century attempt to develop a psychological (i.e., moral) rendering of insanity's characteristics and its treatment.