Page:Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind - Benjamin Rush.djvu/362

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of the Mind.
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Chapter XIX.

Of Derangement in the Moral Faculties..

I took notice formerly of moral derangement in the will, and mentioned its symptoms, as they appear in several specific vices. This disease discovers itself only in the moral faculty, and exists with a sound state of the conscience and sense of deity. Under the present head, I shall make a few remarks upon moral derangement, as it appears in all those moral faculties of the mind.


For an account of the nature and offices of the moral faculty and conscience, and of the difference between them, the reader is referred to an oration delivered by the author before the American Philosophical Society, in the year 1786, and published in the first volume of his Medical Inquiries and Observations. For proofs of the existence of an innate sense of deity in the human mind, the reader is referred to Lord Kaims' Sketches of the History of Man. All these facul-