I appreciate very deeply the honour of being invited to deliver this the seventeenth Maudsley Memorial Lecture. I also feel the responsibility of adequately fulfilling a task so well carried out by my predecessors and so brilliantly initiated by Sir James Crichton-Browne. I never had the privilege of knowing Henry Maudsley, but Sir James's description of his fellow York-shireman as having “a dash of Wuthering Heights about him” illuminated him for me as by a flash of lightning. It has been said that his last book, Organic to Human, embodies his philosophy, which may be summed up in the principle of unity of the human organism and its continuity with the rest of Nature's processes. His Pathology of Mind also bears abundant testimony to his deep and life-long interest in the subject on which with some temerity I am venturing to address you. Whether I should have been rash enough to do so in his presence is another matter. I recall the fate of “a certain clergyman” whom Dr. Samuel Johnson blasted into silence by a single thunderbolt, and I fear that Dr. Henry Maudsley's keen and logical mind would pounce on some loose joints in my argument. So I crave your indulgence.