Inscribed to front free end-paper: "Til / Hr. Pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig / Ærbødigst / fra / Forfatteren" (i.e. "For / Mr. Pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig / most respectfully / from / the author". 

The Danish pastor Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872) is arguably, together with Kierkegaard (and perhaps Hans Christian Andersen) the most influential Danish author of all time. He holds a unique position in Danish cultural history, profoundly forming Danish society, the national spirit of which is still widely Grundtvigian. Danish national institutions are widely based on Grundtivg's ideals, and the new form of nationalism that his ideas gave rise to in the last half of the 19th century still permeates Danish society and Danish national understanding. 

In this foundational work "On Madness and Ascribing Responsibility:", Howitz claimed that those learned in the law (at that time led by Oersted) did not understand the relationship between the normal rational state of man and the mad state, and he thus initiated a discussion about the legal term of imputability, behind which he saw Kant's notion of liberty. With the thoughts of Hume, Howitz sets out to refute Kant's notion of human free will. He equals the relationship between motivation and act with the relationship between cause and effect, and thus, according to Howits, there can be no human act without cause. Like Hume, Howitz did not understand this natural necessity as being in opposition to freedom.

"The so-called “Howitz-dispute,” which arose in Copenhagen in the second half of the 1820s, represents a sort of tear in a monotonous and uniform ideological fabric, whose consequences are destined to last until the middle of the century and ideally join together with the strongest continental currents. The dispute takes its name from the Danish professor of forensic medicine, Frantz Gotthard Howitz (1789-1826), who wrote in 1824 the treatise On Madness and Ascribing Responsibility: A Contribution on Psychology and Jurisprudence, in which he considered a problem to which the entire post-revolutionary civil society was looking for a fair solution, namely, the problematic relationship between madness and the ascription of responsibility. The treatise immediately evoked a number of critical reactions, since the author “accused” the Danish law of the time of being based on Kant’s view of morality. Howitz’s treatise has the merit of originality not only because, from a chronological point of view, it comes before many of the most important writings on the theme of madness and imputability (and its author is thoroughly acquainted with the inter-national scientific literature on mental illnesses), but also because it shows how at the root of the Danish clinical and legal reasoning of the time, there was the Kantian moral doctrine." (Ingrid Basso: On Madness and Free Will: a Kantian Debate in Denmark in the First Half of 19th Century).