BETTER FOR NERVES.

 TRAGEDIES OF THE STAGE.

"HAPPY ENDINGS" CRITICISED

Few delusions are more widespread than that which has particular reference to the so-called "happy ending." The mistake is natural, owing to the great novelty of psycho-analysis and of the truths which, by means of it, are emerging more and more into the light of modern psychology. The exploration of man's hidden, subconscious emotions has brought out clearly the need, if he is to be kept sane, of what the Greeks called "catharsis"— that is, a purging not only of the body, but of that combination of psychic states which we call the soul.
It is as dangerous to clog the mind with ideas, with fancies that check the flow of the stream of ideation, as it is to clog the alimentary canal with an objective impediment. Consciousness may be likened to a stream or a current, which ought to flow easily and naturally. A thought, an idea, a fancy which is held out of the main stream of consciousness— a repressed complex to use the technical term —may induce such maladies as hysteria, nervous prostration, and even insanity.
Now it is the function of tragedy to act as a temperamental emotional, psychic catharsis. "Tragedy attracts us," in the words of that able young student of psychology. Mr. Albert R. Chandler, "because it depicts situations which our suppressed complexes demand." Shakespeare, whose fame as a poet seems soon to be eclipsed by his greatness as a psychologist, realised this truth perfectly. He sets it down in "Hamlet" rather simply. The guilty king is to be wrought up to the pitch of confession by "a dumb show." Confession thus induced is in reality a blessing, because it releases the suppressed complex. We quote the words of that famous psychologist, Doctor Isador H. Coriat, who has paid special attention to the subject.
"It appears that the ancient Greeks were markedly free from hysteria, although the disease was well known to the Greek physicians, who had a vague conception of it as a form of erotic symbolism. Many of the conditions of furor depicted on the Greek stage were probably epilepsy and not hysteria, as even the excellent descriptions of Hippocrates did not clearly distinguish between the two diseases. Hysteria is the result of unconscious conflicts of complexes, but the Greek stage, by reason of its unique function as a kind of national catharsis, provided an outlet for these repressed conflicts, and therefore served as a protector of the national mental heath.
"It was for this reason that Aristotle defined the function of the tragedy as an aesthetic or emotional catharsis. Tragedy, therefore among the ancient Greeks, was of such a peculiar nature that it provided a channel into which their surplus or repressed emotions might easily flow. The Greek drama arose out of folk festivals dedicated to Dionysus and possessed a more or less sexual or erotic character. It is well known that sexual repressions are the greatest of all repressions and are pre-eminent in producing hysteria."

THE REPRESSED COMPLEX

Highly scientific, therefore, is the impulse of those women who crowd the theatres when plays of the highly emotional type, plays dealing with the problems of life, and of human experience in a spirit of realism, hold the stage. So much is evident in the light of the essay on the subject in the "Monist" by Mr. Chandler, whom we have to some extent, inadequately followed. The idea has been hitherto that audiences, especially the women, seek only as the phrase is, to "live vicariously." They long to observe guilt, passion, crime, as revealed by the mirror of the stage. They want to know what life is like. In reality the impulse is deeper. The personality craves a catharsis. Many plays subserve the purpose of psycho-analysis. They drive the repressed complex to the surface of consciousness by inducing confession, by affecting the spectator as the guilty king was affected through the "dumb show" conceived by Hamlet.
The whole play of "Hamlet," indeed, with its tragedy within a tragedy, shows how carefully Shakespeare has dived below the stream of human consciousness. Dr. Coriat would have us believe that Shakespeare was perhaps one of the greatest psychologists of all times. He understood the repressed complex even if he did not give it that name. To quote the words or Coriat:
"The relentless fate of Greek tragedy, of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Rosmersholm, also dominates the tragedy of Macbeth. In Lady Macbeth there is a constant battle between free will and determination. Determinism is triumphant because Lady Macbeth cannot emancipate herself from the suppressed complexes which inevitably led to her mental disorder. She thinks she chooses her actions, whereas in reality they are chosen for her by the unconscious complexes. Macbeth is likewise the victim of the same mental mechanism.
"This ethical relentlessness of the tragedy is due to the hysteria of Lady Macbeth, with its strong deterministic factors. Because Lady Macbeth in her somnambulistic state was different from Lady Macbeth in her waking condition, she suffered from a disintegration or a dissociation of the personality. In fact, it has been particularly pointed out by Morton Prince that all hysteria is a mental dissociation. Lady Macbeth's personality was doubled, normal and abnormal, alternating, but at the same time co-conscious. The dissociation resulted from repressed, unconscious emotional shock but to a series or repressed complexes"

AND EMOTIONAL REVULSIONS

It is obvious that a play in which the theme subserves no purpose of this kind— a play which cannot unburden the mind by a process of psycho-analysis— is not efficacious from a psychological point of view. The plot may be new, the situation laughable, the comedy brilliant, but it can have no such effect upon the nerves, the mind, the seat of disturbance, as a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense or in the Greek sense. "When laments are presented on the stage," to quote again Mr. Chandler, "our vitality is not depressed, for the disaster has not fallen upon us but our suppressed tendencies to emotional revulsions are satisfied." The whole modern attitude to tragedy is in great need of revision. We are beginning to perceive that the Greeks with their Euripides and their Aeschylus and the Elizabethans with their Shakespeare and their Marlowe were truer psychologists than are we. The tremendous tragedies of the Elizabethan stage account plausibly for the gay, optimistic, light-hearted spirit of the age. The greater freedom of the German stage in reflecting life as it is explains, seemingly, the cheerful temper of the Teutonic peoples not only at Berlin, but at Vienna.
It might be said that the tendency to acquire a complex, or rather to suppress a complex, is checked by familiarity with the supreme themes of tragedy on the stage. Complexes are in the main of the sexual type. It happens that the themes repressed on our stage have to do with the theme of sex. Now the great tragedy enables the beholder in reality to discuss his own griefs, his own loves, his own sexual repressions under cover of a discussion of the play which handles these themes. It is a form of confession. It may in the end induce the kind of psychological state which frees the spirit. The light thrown by these considerations upon literature and the stage is unexpected.

DRAMA MADE TO TEACH A LESSON.

In the creation of poetry, as in the creation of drama, two mental mechanisms are uniformly at work— an imaginary wish fulfilment, or a tendency in that direction and a repression of painful experiences and memories in to the unconscious. As Mr. Chandler presents the matter:
"The structure of tragedy is like the structure of a dream, since its fundamental motives are derived from the lower stratum and these motives are formed to express themselves in a guise acceptable to the upper stratum. The complexes which produce the dream are often survivals from the experiences of early childhood. So in the case of tragedy, the legends on which it is based have come down from the childhood of the race. And since each individual has to recapitulate the development of the race in his own development, these ancient legends remain significant to every generation.
"Tragedy may also be compared, not to the symptoms of hysteria, but to its cure. In the cathartic treatment of hysteria the purpose is to secure a vigorous emotional expression of the suppressed complex that shall drain off its energy and restore serenity to the mind as a whole. This is precisely what tragedy does for us. It furnishes an emotional outlet for our suppressed complexes. The relief which follows constitutes a sort of catharsis. "But the tragic catharsis is not merely relief; it also has a higher aspect, that of sublimation. Tragedy does not merely release the energy of the suppressed complexes, but turns it into more profitable channels. That is why tragedy gives us a sense of expansion and elevation, and makes us feel that our taste for it is not merely permissible but salutary.
"Many of the devices for conciliating the upper stratum consist in appealing to some of its component complexes.
"When disaster is depicted as due to moral or natural law, a strong appeal is made to our ethical and philosophical interests. It is vividly impressed upon us that man is mortal and must think thoughts that benefit morality, that revolt against the state brings disastrous results, and the violation of family ties is horrible in the extreme, that oracles are sure to be fulfilled at last, and that the gods must be reverenced. The drama is thus made to teach a lesson, but the lesson is effective only because the play has held the attention and stirred the imagination.
"When once the dramatist has us under his spell we are receptive to his message, but the spell of tragedy depends on its appeal to our suppressed complexes. It is they that furnish the energy which rivets our attention on the drama, which in turn embodies the message. A channel of discharge is thus established, leading from the suppressed complexes to those complexes of the upper stratum which centre in ethical and philosophical interests. The former are therefore made tributary to the latter. The lower complexes are relieved and the higher are strengthened and stimulated. Discord is replaced by harmony.

Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), Saturday 28 June 1913, page 16

MAN, MIND, AND HEALING

 (MR. RANDOLPH  BEDFORD)

No.3— The Flesh and the Spirit.

 

The curative effect of the strong spirit on the weak body have their instances by the thousands. The effect of the sick spirit on the physical man is told in the histories of every hospital and asylum; in the delusions of the spiritualist asking to be fooled.

The fire of genius—a spirit which, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says is within us, but not of us—which was the muse of Homer, the demon of Socrates, and the inspiration of Angelo, who could see the finished statue in the block of stone yet in the quarry— is related to the hallucinations of the insane, and often accompanied by similar physical ills. For human genius is a god of gold with feet of clay; a not bad thing, for, if it were perfect it could not be human or know human beings as they are. Genius as a manifestation of energy is of more obscure origin than insanity; for how can we know psychology before we knew physiology?
Psychology is still the most inexact of sciences; but gradually we learn to draw the chart and tabulate the facts of such cases as, say, that sonnambulist who asleep showed a wondrous memory, but who was dull and stupid when awake. The psychical accident called genius often manifests itself in many commonplace people, for perhaps only half a minute in a lifetime; flashing a second of sense and eloquence as if for that briefest period of time a light gleamed once, to be forever after hidden by the curtain of the conscious and the flesh. It is something beyond training and study—for education did not make Shakespeare a poet, nor prompt Reynolds to paint, nor give Darwin his desire to be a naturalist.

Civilisation has done worse than clothe the body, it has swaddled the mind, bound the soul with inhibitions and restrictions; covered up sex with convention, made the nakedness of children shameful to themselves, and so repressed nature and stifled natural desire, that nature, stronger than its binding conventions, breaks out in insanity. Our asylums are full of cases representing the wowser "don't"—the repressed wish, that was thought to be dead because it was buried in the subconscious soul, fighting invisibly until in the struggle reason is destroyed.

In 1920 there were 19,402 people in asylums of the commonwealth, or 3.58 for every thousand of the population. In Great Britain the proportion is about the same, and in both countries 33 per cent, of the cases recover; but in Australia the asylums are more availed of voluntarily, producing a greater number of entries proportionately, and so we have proportionately fewer lunatics at large than in Britain (although the fact of certain politicians being at liberty would seem to contradict the fact).

Most people have delusional insanity, more or less, dependent on lack of education, superstition, or naturally low intelligence. These may gravitate to church revivals or spiritualistic seances, which are exciting causes of insanity in susceptible natures during adolescence. To that youthful period that should be joy, if man then were taught to know himself really, and not merely lies about himself, his world and his soul, comes illusional insanity charging its subject with being incapable, unworthy or unnatural, accusing itself of imaginary crime and unpardonable sin, and therefore for ever dammed.

Of such were the early followers of John Wesley, himself an epilept. One of these, troubled with colic, said: "Satan hath followed me day and night; I carry the body of Judas fastened to my neck," and another youthful superegoist said, to explain a great storm, "The Earth is accursed for MY sake." Wesley himself occasionally saw things, and he relates:—

"Sixty of our brethren were present at our love feast. At about three in the morning as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground," and at all his field meetings the same thing happened; "Many sank to the earth; they dropped on every side as if thunderstruck."

Youth is mostly affected in this way, its humility being in the ratio of its inferiority complex. It is generally the adult patient who suffers the exaltation of being God, devil, king, or millionaire. The unhappier unbalanced adolescent believes that God has deserted him; he hears accusing voices—the voice of the sub-conscious, the still small voice of conscience megaphoned through his delusions, and the more horrific in sound because of the patient's depression produced by excessive blood pressure. Precocious dementia is by some authorities ascribed to auto-intoxication from internal sexual secretions or other toxins; in fact almost all mental unbalance has sexual origin; although Freud, in ascribing all emotions to sex, seems to become himself unbalanced in judgement. But the suggestive nature of the catatonic state and auto-hypnotic trance are of such similar mechanism as to contradict the presence of toxin or cerebral lesion as the cause of precocious dementia.

The witch burners (who are with us still if public opinion permitted) were faith healers of themselves; burning or drowning the witch so that a village child might be cured of diphtheria (then unrecognised) or a cow be cured of rickets. In that revenge on old women there was something of sex perversion too, for cruelty is sex qualification. In America masked murderous cowards of the Ku Klux Klan rave of their love of God and their determination to preserve the chastity of woman; and their methods are the flogging, branding, and murdering of negroes, white trade unionists, of men who do not attend church, and of men who do drink beer. The female vigilantes, or woman K.K.K'.'s, still flog their witch, if they do not burn her; kidnapping young women to the woods, stripping and tying them to trees, and flogging the "devil" out of them—the "devil" in the patient being in most cases the possession of youth and beauty the moralists never knew.

The primitive people's idea of the mad man as one under the direct protection of God certainly hinted at the subconsciousness they did not know. Hysteria is a disorder of the subconscious mind—a peculiar mental state in which the psychical and physical symptoms are largely due to auto-suggestion. There is a splitting of consciousness— the subconscious mental life develops into a spurious second personality which the reacted conscious self cannot control. There was one case recorded of a girl who was three people; and they fought each other like brothers of a large family, and hated each other bitterly. Behind all these phenomena there is the devil of fear, a paralysis of will leaving the subject in trivial cases tortured by little fears and doubts, and in grievous cases driven by fear to death. Many of these subconscious fears that at last dominate are known and labelled. One case of Agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces) is that of a girl, who, although she had a large apartment, insisted on sleeping in the bathroom and locking herself in.

Hysteria imitates almost every disease. Whatever part of the body it attacks it will create the proper symptom at that part. There are hysterical forms of paralysis—the forms most often cured by the faith-healer —of rythmic chorea; there is a convulsive hysteria which yields when the human soul is wracked by a great and sincere emotion. Asthma is produced in some people by smelling the odor of a horse or a cat, and diabetes is more often fatal than it should be because the patient is told that it is incurable. Tell a diabetic the fact that most diabetic patients die, not from diabetes, but from intercurrent disease, and he will improve.

Let Sursum Corda! be the slogan of every man! up heart!

"I am an old man," said the centenarian hermit. "And I have had many troubles, but most of them never happened."

The world wants hope; and to find it it has but to see clearly. We are not at the end of the world, but at the beginning; man cannot disappear until he knows himself as well as he knows his clothes. The lying and the prurience and the false modesty of sex that, at their worst, causes introversions of natural impulse, ending in madness, and at their best making externals shameful and secret prevent him examining his soul, and keep him content with hearing his soul mentioned casually on Sundays by a man who doesn't know his own.

The perfection of man will arise when all, or at least the majority of men, shall need no professors of psychology. That isn't possible with this generation, but with the next, or the next after that, it will be given that psychology takes its proper place in education.

With its Greek infection the European mind is a poor transmitter of faith, whose apotheoses is found in the ascetic religions of the East—a fact which the latest faith doctor to win Australia senses, probably unconsciously, when he says that Australia is more materialistic and less spiritual than India. "Yet Europeans accepted the fraudulent Mrs. Eddy and the Mormon Jo Smith, although Mr. Smith's popularity was greatly due to his advocacy of the harem.

So then, the hope of psychology is in the new, in the children who when they are grown shall say they have obeyed the wisdom that said "Man, know thyself." To give the coming generation their chance their education must teach them to despise fear; it must prevent the repression of children, of which the least result is to force them to wear hated dresses and to eat hated food, and to teach them to beware of their own bodies; it must recognise that the reaction of barriers against normal sexuality produces most homo sexual outbreaks. In man good and bad are inextricably woven, so that evil is done that good might be, as in many known cases of youths committing suicide so that they might "return to their mothers." Behind all fetiches, luck charms, traditions, prayers and rituals, is the fact that all animals, primitive men, and present civilisation depend on bluffing; and that only the very strong can afford to be true and speak truth, and be hated therefore by most people, who would like to be true and, dare not.

The base of some religions, and the common dream of the sexually repressed, is that the world shall be destroyed by fire; and the dreams of the world on fire are only repressed wishes for sexual abandonment. Often an individual reveals by what he hates or refuses to accept, that which he has himself repressed, and why he has repressed it. The panic terror of the youth of an inferiority complex produces perversion in the attempt at protective compensation, making them sometimes hideous beasts instead of attractive lovers, and sunk in despair by the scorn of the normal. Great pitifulness can imagine, to take a less serious case, the terror of the butt of the school or the community; the withdrawal into that inner self so foreign and impossible to understand, and the fear at the first knowledge that mental control is lost.

Children must be released of this necessity to bluff in order to survive. The father who determines to "break the spirit" of his son is doing it all too literally, depriving the child of the habit of protest against the evil and jealous world he must later meet, and which would deny him his struggle for happiness. The home tyrant fathers the obsession that God wants the boy to suffer for his "sins", induces a crazy humility and a strong reflex that, in the youth too strong to be beaten, produces hatred and haughtiness and that generally stupid thing called "dignity"—merely as a defence against the feeling of inferiority, which over-repression bred in him.

In extreme cases that defensiveness becomes the delusion of omnipotence as protective compensation, as an unusual resistance to normal sex cravings ends in madness, the resistance being insurmountable because the patient has been taught, by the beloved people in whom he has faith, that any wish pertaining to sex is horribly licentious and disgraceful. Herein comes the value of the faith in the physician, in "the open confession that is good for the soul." Said one case of youthful dementia, at the beginning of his improvement. "By confessing your sins to the world you can make the world like yourself. By keeping them in, you go mad."

Many cases of kleptomania showed that only articles which might have sexual symbolism were stolen, and our asylums are filled with the victims of repression and of active sub consciousness or "soul", victims of prudish parents, of super-moral preachments, of the wowserism which places clean youth in chains and stifles its naturalness under terror of the pangs of conscience and the fear of Divine punishment and human ridicule.

Man has searched for the truth from the moment he began to think, and for all time the truth has been in himself, hidden beneath the cloak of convention, of superstition, and of fear, which convention and repression had assisted himself to weave.

Daily Herald (Adelaide, SA : 1910 - 1924), Saturday 16 June 1923, page 4

The Psychology of Toleration.

By J. M. Kennedy.

It is not so very long since the first anti-Jewish riots which have taken place in England in modern times were reported from certain districts in Wales. That Wales is a hot-bed of Nonconformity is known to most people, but few, apparently, have sought to trace the connection between Nonconformity and anti-Semitic riots. Nevertheless, to the psychologist the connection is clear, and it is a connection which is of profound philosophical as well as theological significance.

If we seek to ascertain what particular characteristic has distinguished Jews from the earliest records we possess of their wanderings, we are bound to answer that it is their exclusiveness. Only one race in history has had the moral courage to cut itself off from other races. The Chosen People brought no "message" to the ends of the earth, and undertook no foreign missions. They did not seek to make converts by cunning dialectics and by appeals to the lower instincts of man, like so many mistaken Christians, or by the bolder method of the sword, like the Mohammedans. They were frankly exclusive. They regarded themselves as a high caste among the other nations and races of the earth in the same way as the Brahmans formed themselves into the highest caste among the Hindoos.

Now, this characteristic of Jews is a distinctly aristocratic trait—the trait of a superior people. But, like other aristocratic traits, it naturally fails to meet with the approval of those whose religious principles incline towards democracy in the worst sense of the word. If the characteristic of an aristocratic sect, class or race is exclusiveness, it is obvious, and is amply proved in history, that the characteristic of a democratic people is what Nietzsche has called the herd-instinct ; the passion for equalising, for lowering rather than raising, the "all men-are-brothers" spirit—the very opposite of exclusiveness. If we find Jews at one extreme we find Christians at the other. Jews, following an instinct which has unfortunately been lost in Western Europe, endeavour to keep their race pure just as the Brahmans endeavoured to keep their caste pure. But the genuine Christian cannot conceive such a thing ; he will not be satisfied until the whole world has become Christian. This means, when carried to its logical conclusion, that Christians will not be satisfied until the world has become one vast brotherhood, whose leading principle shall be equality : a torpid, dead-level sluggishness without ideals or ambitions, an equality such as the most daring Socialist never dreamed of.

Although this is the genuine Christian spirit, however, it by no means follows that all Christians conform to it. The Roman Catholics of Southern Europe never lost their magnificent paganism, the traditions of which they took with them to the New World, for centuries of Roman and Greek culture could not fail to have its effect on the development of their imagination. But in the hard, cold north, with its severe climate and difficult soil, no imagination was to be found. The environment of the inhabitants of the northern countries, on the contrary, conduced to the development of what may be called the mechanical faculties and qualities of man, and these qualities are represented, spiritually speaking, by the reason rather than by the imagination. Unleavened by the imagination brought to bear upon it in the south, the New Testament was accepted literally in the north, and with Luther the rationalists gained the victory over the more artistic quality of the imagination. A natural consequence followed—the rise to power of the most democratic sections of the Christian faith and the resultant persecution of the Jews. For at the very time when Jews were beginning to be much better treated in the southern countries, they were persecuted more bitterly than ever in the northern countries. Let the student compare, for example, the treatment meted out to them by Luther and his followers with the treatment meted out to them by one of the greatest Lutheran antagonists, Pope Sixtus V.

And it needs no very recondite study of history to explain this. The period of the Renaissance in the Latin countries restored the old aristocratic feeling of paganism, of Greek and Roman culture, but the almost coincidental period of the Reformation in the Teutonic countries simply meant that the essential principles of Christianity, which are likewise the essential principles of democracy, became much more pronounced. It is a remarkable fact that Jews have, as a general rule, thriven in aristocratic countries, i.e., countries such as Poland up to the time of the partition, where aristocratic instincts predominated—and that they have been abused in democratic countries. The average Christian instinctively recognises that the Jew is his superior in strength of character, and the result is a feeling of envy. But the aristocratic Christian, such as a Polish or English nobleman, feels that his aristocratic instincts set him on a level with the Jew, and the result is a sentiment of equality. Again, people who have disregarded their Christianity altogether (such as Hellenists like Nietzsche and Goethe), or who profess a religion which is essentially aristocratic in its character (such as Mohammedanism, or even the Japanese Bushido), feel themselves to be above even Jews, and the result is toleration. In a word, we are either beneath our enemy, on a level with him, or above him, and our psychological manifestations in the respective cases are envy, respect, and toleration. Envy springs from a feeling of inferiority, respect from a feeling of equality, and toleration from a feeling of contempt.

The psychologist, then, will not be surprised at the anti-Semitic outbreak in Wales, for the Welsh Nonconformists are typical representatives of Christianity carried to its logical conclusions. As a sect they are permeated with all the defects of Christianity—hatred of anything exclusive, superior, or aristocratic. These characteristics, of course, are also exhibited towards the German Jews by the Lutherans, for the national Church of Germany corresponds to our Nonconformist sects, and not to the more aristocratic and Roman Catholic Established Church of England. An admirer of Jews will thus find consolation in times of persecution in the fact that that very persecution is an indication that they are not degenerating to the level of the people among whom they happen to be living. On the other hand, all friends of culture, all those who are interested in raising the human race to higher levels, are glad where they see Jews respected, seeing that this indicates that the people among whom they are living are gradually discarding the teachings of Paul for the teachings of Moses, and becoming more aristocratic.

Let us see, speaking philosophically, what we mean by the words aristocratic and democratic. Taking Nietzsche as a basis, we find that he defines life as "will to power," i.e., not the mere "will to live" of the Christian-minded Schopenhauer, or the "struggle for existence" of Darwin, but a continuous, intense longing and determination to acquire power over others. This is the instinct which, although we may not be aware of it, and usually are not, underlies all forms of living things, and especially the human kind. Any principle that helps us towards the realisation of this ideal is aristocratic ; any instinct that drives us to an opposite ideal is democratic. Starting from this point of view, the point of view which Nietzsche established once and for all in modern philosophy, the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament, between Judaism and Christianity, between aristocracy and democracy, will become tolerably clear. The Jewish work is, in spite of apparent lapses here and there, on the whole of an aristocratic tendency ; the Christian work is of a democratic tendency.

While this is obviously not the place for a detailed examination of both Books, a few quotations will show how Christianity deprives us of one of the means of becoming aristocratic, viz., by deprecating our virile fighting qualities, and endeavouring to make us tame. "And the Lord spake unto me, saying .... 'Rise ye up, take your journey, and pass over the river Arnon : behold, I have given into thine hand Sihon the Amorite, King, of Heshbon, and his land : begin to possess it, and contend with him in battle.' " Thus the Hebrew ; while the Christian says on the contrary : "Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be called the children of God." Again, as we read in the Chronicles, the Jews "made war with the Hagarites, with Jetur, and Nephish, and Nodab. And they were helped against them, and the Hagarites were delivered into their hands, and all that were with them ; for they cried to God in the battle . . . there fell down many slain, because the war was of God." This is the true, virile, aristocratic spirit; but compare it with the words from Matthew ; "Blessed are the meek ; for they shall inherit the earth," " blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." One more instance, which, if read aright, will show the thinker why our aristocrats are high-spirited and our democrats morose (''kill-joys"). Said the God of Battles : "Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine ; and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates." However religiously significant this feast may be, it could only have been devised by people full of the joie de vivre. We find nothing like it in the mournful collection of Christian writings, but we do find a precept which could only have originated among the impotent : "Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Could the guiding principle of modern democracy be summed up more concisely ? Could the feelings of the Lutherans and the Nonconformists be more accurately described ?—"Jewish World."

Jewish Herald (Vic. : 1879 - 1920), Friday 2 February 1912, page 11

LIFE IN GERMANY.

LIKE CORRUPT IMPERIAL ROME.

 Discontent with the Kaiser.

The Tausch trial, which ended in the acquittal of the late chief of the secret police, can only result in the diversion of public attention to those "psychological influences" which, in the opinion of the jury, formed an excuse for the charges of intrigues in which Von Tausch was undeniably implicated. It is a blow for the Foreign Minister, Baron Marschall ; but it is also a damaging exposure for the whole system of political espionage which has grown up round the Emperor.
 In the Contemporary Review there is an article by "Germanicus" which expresses the discontent felt now in Germany in many circles against the Kaiser : —
The Emperor leads a double life, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde existence. In theory he acknowledges that the present age represents progress and forward movement, but in practice he recognises no other will but his own, in every sphere, in every department of public and, as far as possible, of private life. The King's will, and nothing else, is the law of the land; this maxim forms the guiding principle of all his actions. Omniscience he claims as one of the attributes of his kingly majesty; popular wit expresses this in the words, "God knows everything, but the Emperor William knows everything better."

 THE EMPEROR AND HIS SPIES.

 Woe betide the poor German subject, says the writer, who dare criticise his Emperor. Lese-majeste and years in prison can alone atone for such a crime : —
Political spies, like the delatores of corrupt Imperial Rome, prowl about in all parts of the Fatherland, and denounce the unwary citizen. Sycophantic Byzantine public prosecutors indict him with the greatest zeal and official fury for some lese-majeste, which was very often nothing but the hasty expression of an ill-bred person or the remark of a sharp tongue. These pushing young King's attorneys demean themselves by taking up cases in which, perhaps years ago, a man in the presence of his own family made an unguarded remark about the Emperor ; it is now denounced to the police by a servant or a bad relation from spite or other infamous motive. Well these Staatsanwaelte know that by such zeal they ingratiate themselves in the highest quarters. They are sure to "arrive," as the French put it. Their lord and master has a good memory for such magistrates. And the poor wretches, who in a moment of excitement or, perhaps, in a drunken fit, have used bad language concerning the Emperor — for in nine cases out of ten it comes to nothing more — are sure to be punished severely, without the slightest hope of pardon. Whereas the noble man, the officer, who killed a private citizen, is let off after a short imprisonment. Thus the middle classes see, with sullen discontent, that the administration of justice, formerly the brightest spot in Prussian public life, is tarnished as soon as the slightest question arises between the feudal nobility and the members of the citizen class.

 TREPIDATION IN THE ARMY.

 Discontent is not limited to the Social Democrats; the middle classes also grumble and complain that the Emperor fosters and favors the pretensions of the feudal nobility, that even the administration of justice is tainted, wherever there is a conflict between feudal pretensions and the rights of the citizens. Thousands are thus driven into the ranks of the Social Democratic party ; every election shows this more clearly, and the Emperor thinks that reactionary laws, repression, and violence will stem the tide, which they can no more do than Mrs. Partington's broom. One would think that the military class at least would unreservedly admire the Emperor. But even this does not happen to be the case. The highest military circles are continually in a state of trepidation, lest the Emperor in one of his unaccountable fits of energy should plunge the country into war and then insist on taking command of the army, being his own General-in-Chief, Chief of-Staff, and commander of everything under Heaven.
 The Vossiche Zeitung, in an article which is sure to attract considerable attention, attacks the habit of the German police in prying into Press matters, especially when the object is to discover the writer of an unpleasant article, for which the editor is legally responsible. The leading Radical organ says the Government which approves this system is weak and degenerate. The Vossiche praises English methods. In England (it says) trials for lese-majeste are impossible. The Queen may be libelled daily by obscure newspapers, but the authorities only shrug their shoulders. The Government is not alarmed or excited, the Court is not in a state of confusion, nor are spies sent on the track of the writer. The nervousness and uneasiness of the authorities on this particular matter has lately been the subject of discussion in papers representing Liberal views. — Reynolds.

Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 - 1930), Sunday 25 July 1897, page 8

DOES HAECKEL HESITATE?

A Defence of the Monistic Philosopher

A letter from Wallace Nelson:— "The Sunday Times" of November 12 contains the following paragraph:—

"Haeckel, the great prophet of Monism, the Archbishop of Materialism, is hesitating in his ripe old age. He has hesitated so far as to write a very interesting article on 'Psyche and the Soul,' which was published in a recent number of the New York 'Independent.' Nor does he smash the idea of a soul with lumps of old red sandstone of reasoning. He plays with it gently as if he had evolved a fond regard for it, and after asserting that if 'Pure Reason' (Kant) 'remains free from all seductions of Eros, it will remain, in proud self-sufficiency, encased in its unworldly speculative case or cocoon.' He goes on:—"But we are of opinion, that not only the enjoyment but also the deeper knowledge of life is far greater in an intellectual hero like Wolfgang Goethe, who looks with open eyes into all 'the depths of the world, and who penetrates like a winged butterfly not only into the perfumed heart of the flower, but also into many secrets of life.' That is getting pretty close to the intuitive philosophy of Bergson. Soon Wallace Nelson will be left solitary on the barren sandpatch of monistic dogma."

* * * * * *

Will you permit me to say that there is not the slightest justification for asserting that Haeckel is hesitating in his ripe old age, or that he is any nearer the intuitive philosophy of Bergson to-day than he was when he wrote his "Riddle of the Universe ?" And, strangely enough, he expressly says so in the very article which is cited as proof, of his change or modification of opinion. The article entitled "Psyche" was originally contributed to the September issue of the "Literary Guide," the organ of the Rationalist movement in England. In the course of the article the great biologist thus finely sums up the fundamental difference between the dualistic and monistic view of the soul or mind :—

"If we set aside all secondary distinctions, the manifold ideas regarding the human soul may be brought into two large fundamentally antagonistic groups—namely, a dualistic and a monistic group. According to the older dualistic or two-fold view—which is still held by the great majority of mankind—the human organism is a double entity, consisting of a mortal body with an immortal soul, which inhabits it during life and leaves it at death. Thus teach most of the philosophers and theologians since Plato proclaimed in profound dialogues his dualistic metaphysics, and Christ, in the Gospels, his world-conquering religion.

"The newer monistic or unific view of the psychic life, on the contrary, contends that man, like every other vertebrate animal, is a unific being in which body and soul are inseparably bound together. Our 'psyche,' therefore, is not an independent being, but the collective idea of the sum-total of life activity which, like all other functions, of our organism, are regulated by the structure of the organs, and, further, by the work of the millions of microscopic cells which constitute these organs. This natural conception of the human soul, however, could not obtain widespread scientific acceptance until after the tremendous progress of natural science in the nineteenth century had placed at the disposal of investigators a mass of hitherto unknown empirical evidence."

Haeckel then, proceeded to say : — "My views on the subject are presented in the second volume of my 'Riddle of the Universe,' chapters vi-ix." If we turn to these chapters we find Haeckel summing up his position in the following words:—"If we take a comprehensive glance at all that modern anthropology, psychology and cosmology teach with regard to athanatism we are forced to this definite conclusion: The belief in the immortality of the human soul is a doctrine which is in hopeless contradiction with the most empirical truths of modern science."

Haeckel declares in his "Psyche" article that that is his view of the soul. And yet that very article is cited as evidence that he is hesitating in his old age and going over to the intuitive philosophy of Bergson! As a matter of fact, the article is written for the express purpose of showing, by an illustration taken from the insect world, the superiority of science over metaphysics. The following quotation from the article places that beyond all rational question:—

"Since the mythology of the old Greeks compared the psyche to a butterfly, it is now permitted to modern biology to use the above remarkable facts in the history of the development of Psychinæ as symbols of psychology. It sees in the two sexes of the Psychinæ an ingenious allegory upon the two antagonistic camps of soul knowledge. The winged males fly about far and wide, look at the beautiful world with open eyes and gather in experiences. They follow the ways of psycho-physics (in its broadest sense), according to the empirical and monistic philosophy. The wingless females, on the contrary, seclude themselves from the outer world, lose the organs for its contemplation, and meditate, entombed in their case of wisdom, only about themselves and their inner existence. They remain captive to the introspective method of psycho-mysticism, the speculative and dualistic philosophy. They become fruitful only when they pair with the more highly developed mate."

* * * * *

Haeckel cites Goethe, who was a scientist as well as a poet, for the express purpose of showing the superiority of the open-eyed poet philosopher who contemplates all the facts, physical and psychical, objective and subjective, over the theologian, who shuts out one half of the truth and vainly hopes to discover the facts of the infinite universe, not by searching for them everywhere, but by spinning them out of his own imagination as spiders spin cobwebs out of their own bodies.

* * * * *

Permit me, in conclusion, to say that it is absurd to refer to Haeckel as the "Archbishop of Materialism." Haeckel is not a materialist; he is a monist. There are three fundamental theories of ontology. They are as follow:—

(1) Spiritualism: The doctrine that mind is the cause of matter.

(2) Materialism: The doctrine that matter is the cause of mind.

(3) Monism: The doctrine that mind and matter are not casually related, but are different aspects of one fundamental reality.

The latter is, in essence, the view of Haeckel. And it is the view which, in some shape or form, is accepted by an overwhelming majority of modern thinkers. It is not a dogma; it is merely a view of the universe, accepted because of its apparent reasonableness and harmony with all the discoveries of science, which seem to confirm Diderot's great dictum that "the universe is one fact." Far from being dogmatic, those who accept the monistic position are generally the readiest to recognise the mobility of the infinite intellect, to comprehend the infinite universe and to agree with the profound agnosticism of the man who wrote—

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our
little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
. . . . .


Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 - 1954), Sunday 19 November 1911, page 9

GENIUS AND CONVENTION.

Maxim Gorki, the great Russian revolutionary writer, was requested to leave a big American hotel because the lady accompanying him was not legally his wife. The facts of the case are that Gorki was legally divorced from his first wife, but the Czar-bossed Greek church in Russia refused to declare his second marriage legal ; though it is so regarded by his divorced wife, his present wife, and all their friends. The Russian authorities not daring to send Gorki to Siberia, appear to have used their power through the church to wound and handicap a dangerous opponent. And the plutocratic press of America, which has never said an unkind word about the wealthy Chicago sausage-makers, howled in unison that Gorki was 'not respectable.'  
A. M. Thompson, in the CLARION (Eng.), deals with the question interestingly:
 Not even the terrible calamity of San Francisco has sobered the fury of plutocratic America against poor Maxim Gorki. The American millionaires, 'prodigies of turpitude,' as Lombroso calls them, 'anomalous creatures reared in the hotbed of poverty and ignorance, and urged along by an insatiable thirst for gain,' have been outraged to spluttering madness by the discovery that the great Russian writer lives with a lady who is not his wife.
 'Rend him ! tear him ! spit on him !' they scream. Nothing will do for them but that the whole 'putrid cancer' of the fallen hero's work shall be cut off from the public knowledge for ever.  'He has never written a wholesome sentence,' shrieks one; 'poison lurks in everything that he has said,'  screams another. Which is certainly not true, as those who attended the performance at Gorki's 'Bezsemenovs' at Terry's Theatre on Monday will enthusiastically testify.
 And it is worth while to point out that if great literary works are to be expunged because of their author's offences against conventional standards of morality, the interdict must destroy not only the bulk of the Greek and Latin classics, but the works also of Clement, J. J. Rousseau, Diderot, Richard Wagner, etc.  The American literary critics, in denouncing Gorki, seem to have forgotten Virgil, Martial, Catullus, Anacreon, and Socrates.
 Yet it was worth while to hear them tear the air, if only for the delight of hearing them splash softly back afterwards into the oozy slush of their respectable self-righteousness. As thus :
    Happily for America the superiors of our country have not been 'degenerates.'  Never were there healthier minds, minds freer from every form of taint or morbidity, than those of Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, or those of Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell. Whether we turn to public affairs or to literature, our men of genius have been singularly free from every form of degeneracy.

 This list of 'men of genius,' it will be observed, prudently omits the only two 'men of genius' American literature has produced. Walt Whitman is ignored because his evidence might not support the tenor of the argument ; and Edgar Allan Poe because neither his work nor his life could be described as 'free from every form of taint or morbidity.'
 But in the matter of ordinary 'morality,' there are many of the 'truly great' whose lives will not bear inspection. We learn of deeply philosophical woman-hating Schopenhauer's subjugation by a little ballet-dancer. We read of Petrarch's sonnets to the eyebrows of a portly married woman, the mother of a large family, and recall how utterly he neglected his own wife and daughter.
 Sallust's exposure of the vices and follies of Rome is admirable and improving; but his own debauchery, corruption, and felony are not edifying.
 Seneca's refined sentiments and virtuous precepts leave nothing to be desired ; but there are writers who pretend that it was Seneca who initiated Nero in those unspeakable vices which have made that Emperor's name notorious for ever.
 Casanova, the friend of Rousseau, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Catherine, was a charlatan and swindler, with strong 'convictions' from the Courts.

    If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,
   The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,    

Scarron, the husband of Madame de Maintenon, and author of the 'Roman Comique,' led so licentious a life that it shocked even his dissolute age. Francois Villon, 'the prince of all ballade-makers,' is said in his fifteen years' career to have contrived to win more fame and more infamy than a whole generation of lesser poets.'  And Byron was not the sort of character to whose constant companionship a careful wife would care to entrust her husband.
 From archbishops up to plough-boys we all worship Shakespeare, but would it have pleased the American Shakespearolatics to choose Will Shakespeare, the creator of 'Jack Falstaff,' to direct their children's studies ?
   Amongst the Elizabethan poets there was indeed one of habitual chastity of diction and absolute sobriety of deportment.  Meres, Lodge, Carew, Drummond, Harrington, and Spenser, all commend his strictly proper Muse, and he himself wrote, saying :—

 I know I shall be read among the rest,
 So long as men speak English, and so long
 As verse and virtue shall be in request
 Or grace to honest industry belong.

 But Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that 'Daniel was a good, honest man, had no children, but was no poet.'  And Daniel, the 'admirable Daniel,' as Coleridge calls him, is now forgotten.
 Is there any rector in Britain, though he were as Scotch as Sir Walter himself, would be content to trust his Sunday school to the unguarded charge of Bobby Burns?
 Alas! alas ! there is no greater illusion extant than the young ladies' boarding-school notion that great men must be 'nice men' !
 As one poet has prudently exclaimed:—

 Ah ! spare your idol ! think him human still.
 Charms he may have, but he has frailties too;
 Dote not too much, nor spoil what ye admire.

 Yet many great men have told the people the truth of this matter.  Walter Scott wrote : —

I have read books enough, and observed and conversed with enough, of eminent and splendidly cultivated minds too, in my time ; but I assure you I have heard higher sentiments from the lips of poor, uneducated men and women, when exerting the spirit of severe, yet gentle, heroism under difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their simple thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of friends and neighbors, than I ever yet met with, except in the pages of the Bible.

 Perhaps Moreau de Tours was right when he formulated the sentence that 'le génie est une névrose.'  At any rate it is a fact that the exquisitely strung nervous system indispensable to genius is more readily subject to derangement than the placid, turbid slab of grey matter which regulates the comings and goings of Wordsworth's multimonial hero : —

A primrose on the river's brim
 A yellow primrose was to him,
 And it was nothing more.

 'Common sense' says Mirabeau, 'is the absence of too vivid passion ; it marches by beaten paths, but genius never.  Only men with great passions can be great.'
 ' Extreme mind,' says Pascal, 'is close to extreme insanity.'
 Says Dryden :

 Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

 Diderot says the same thing.  'How close the insane and the genius touch,' says he ; 'they are imprisoned and enchained, or statues are raised to them.'
 And Democritus declares that 'insanity is an essential condition of poetry.' Which is probably the reason why I, alone among the CLARION men, never write any. [Q.E.D.]
 Aptitude for literary work more or less resembles intoxication. The dull mind may be whipped into the frenzy of invention by strenuous self-torture, or it may counterfeit the genuine rapture with the aid of musical, narcotic, or alcoholic inebriation.
 We owe Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' and much, doubtless, of Poe's work and De Quincey's to opium.  How many other masterpieces, I wonder, must we set down to the credit of alcohol ?
 'I am compelled to believe,' says Tasso, 'that my insanity is caused by drunkenness and by love ; for I know well that I drink too much.'

 And Socrates the wise, they say, of yore,
 Amongst boon blades, the palm of drinking bore.
 And of the elder Cato it is said
 He often went with a hot pate to bed.

 Was Dick Steele always sober when he wrote?  Was the author of the 'Vicar of Wakefield ' ?  Was Addison?  Sheridan?  Savage?  Jas. Thompson? Chas. Lamb?  Burns?  Alfred de Musset?  or— place aux dames— Madame de Stael?  How much did Jan Steen and Morland Turner owe to artificial inspiration?  how much Gluck and Handel?  how much Alexander the Great? and how much Bismarck?
 'Great men should drink,' says Shakespeare, 'with harness on their throats.' and the caution has been in all ages and all countries sorely needed ; teetotal poets are as rare in history as midsummer snow.
 No, it is not true that :

 Lives of great men all remind us
 We can make our lives sublime ?

 The inflammable constitution and sensitive minds in which genius subsists have been commonly a prey to passions which have left colder, harder natures untouched ; have been always more or less defiant, sometimes needlessly defiant, of conventional standards of morality ; have been daringly apt to lead their own lives in their own way, and to make their ethical codes for themselves to the measure of their own requirements ; and have in many cases bred as luxuriant a crop of rankest weeds as of wholesome flowers.
 But outraged American plutocracy has nothing to do with that. The millionaire, according to Lombroso, is destitute of moral sense, kindliness or justice.  A successful money-getter 'must not mind ruining his friends, or breaking his wife's heart.  'He makes gain from other people's ruin, and he is only removed from the commonplace type of man by his near approach to the criminal.'
 But, thank God, the plutocrats have a religion, which, as Charles Dickens puts it, 'is a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that never were their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions.'


The Clipper 16 June 1906

SPURZHEIM ON PHRENOLOGY.

Last evening Dr. Spurzheim commenced his course of Lectures on Phrenology, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. He began by explaining the Greek etymology of the word Phrenology, which signified the doctrine of the mind, but whatever the title of his science might seem  to imply, the Phrenologist did not undertake to explain the nature of the mental faculty. There was nothing in the universe of which we know the intimate constitution ; we were ignorant of the elementary nature of bodies which were present to our senses ; then how could it be expected that we should be acquainted with the nature of mind. But in the absence of all positive knowledge with respect to its nature, we should observe the operations of mind, and trace their connexion with cerebral organization. All manifestations of of mind were made by the intervention of the brain; without the brain there was no indication of mental power ; so that it must be considered as the origin of the intellect. This point was easily and universally admitted ; but if the brain were defined the organ of intellect, that definition would constrict within too narrow limits the extent of its functions and the range of its proper actions : in truth, mind was not confined to intellect, it had other and abundant sources of activity ; sentiments, feelings, and passions— whatever, in short, could actuate a sentient being, were considered by the Phrenologists as the result of cerebral organization; the word Mind being taken with this latitude of interpretation. Phrenology might be defined "the manifestations of mind, of conditions under which they are developed, and of the measures of their energy." Was not this, he asked, an interesting study ?
If it was gratifying to observe how the vital functions were carried on, or to anatomise the organs of sense, how much more interesting might to be the examination of the brain, the organization of which was so delicate. There were many systems invented to explain the science of mind, but no satisfaction could attend on moral or metaphysical researches, amidst so many and conflicting opinions. Phrenology, however, promised fair to build up the science of mind on the solid basis of experience. Phrenology deserved also the particular attention of the medical profession. It was necessary that a medical man should be well acquainted with the organs and functions of the human system, before he could pretend to understand its derangements ; hence he could not understand the nature of insanity without a competent knowledge of Phrenology. Thus it appeared that this science was one of practical utility, and likely to become the foundation of a branch of medicine. But Phrenology was likely to be of use not only in teaching us how to remedy the derangements of the mind, by showing us how to rear and strengthen its natural powers. It was a general complaint that education was very ineffective. From this it was to be concluded, either that the human mind could not be improved by instruction, or else that the proper system had not been adopted. This last was the truth, and a more appropriate mode of instruction, founded on a knowledge of the organs, would be the result of Phrenology. He then proceeded instate the first principle of the science. A defective brain indicated a detective mind ; this be exemplified by two casts of the heads of idiots, both of which were remarkably deficient in the forehead. There was no examples he said of a defective brain connected with any manifestation of talent. As the brain decreased, the manifestation of mind became proportionally feeble. It was said by some that talents were the result of circumstances, but this he denied ; external circumstances might develope, exercise, and strengthen, but they could not give birth to them. As the brain diminished, the mind faded away, although the other functions remained quite perfect.
In opposition to the heads of the idiots, he instanced, in the bust of Lord Bacon, the great development of brain, as shown by the size of the forehead. He believed, however, that that feature in the bust of our great philosopher was exaggerated, it was not natural ; but we might safely conclude that Lord Bacon was remarkably large, and his forehead capacious. This peculiarity characterised all who had ever distinguished themselves, either as conquerors or, philosophers; who had ever exerted a paramount influence on human affairs, or had enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge. Those first principles of Phrenology were known to the ancients, and observed by them in their statuary. The sculptors never gave similarly formed heads to gladiators and to philosophers. Among then divinities they observed the same discrimination, and gave to Jupiter the greatest development of forehead. These opinions were also favoured by ordinary language. It was usual in common conversation to make a reference to cerebral organization —in such expressions as a narrow mind, a low mind,and unelevated mind. The preference given by the ancients and by poets, to high and ample foreheads, had in those phrases been sanctioned by the people. It was, however, to be understood, that the form of the head and brain varied in the same individual from infancy to age. It also differed in the sexes, so that all the principles laid down were subject to modifications, arising from age, sex, or nation. He next proceeded to distinguish between the result of cerebral organization and temperament; the latter was for a long time believed to be a main source of character; thus it used to be said that a man of lymphatic or bilious temperament might have solid judgment, but no memory ; or that one of sanguineous temperament was lively, and bad a good memory, but no judgment. But the Phrenologists rejected those opinions. At the same time they acknowledged the influence of temperament, they denied that temperament could be the source of any of the mental powers, while they admitted that it might modify the health and activity of those powers, just us any modification of one of the vital functions will effect the health and vigour of the whole constitution.
If he were asked whether the size of the brain could be assumed as a measure of talent, he would answer no ; the quality was to be regarded as well as the quantity ; just as the muscular strength of a man could not be accurately estimated from his size, without taking into account his nervous irritability, so the constitution of the brain was as much to be considered as its magnitude. Physiologists were ready to admit, that the brain was essentially necessary to intellectual operations, but they denied that it was necessary to feeling or sentiment. If any one, however, would endeavour to satisfy himself on this point by observation, he would sooner be convinced of the latter proposition than of the former, for he would find that a larger portion of the brain was destined to sentiment and feeling than to the purely intellectual operations. Superficial observers were led to suppose that certain viscera, as the heart, the spleen, or the liver, were the seats of certain feelings, from the pains which some emotions caused in those parts ; but these might be better explained by the derangements of emulation or nervous affections originating in the brain. It is a rule of Physiology that all the animal functions have a mutual influence ; as, for instance, anger and other emotions will cause a change of colour in the skin; an over-loaded stomach will cause a head-ache, and reciprocally, mental labour or anxiety will impede the digestive process ; some affections of the mind will produce disarrangements of the senses, such as smells or even blindness. This general sympathy would sufficiently explain the effects of certain emotions on the viscera, supposing that those viscera were the seats of the feelings. A confirmation of this principle may be found in idiots, who have seldom any feelings, though all their physical functions are perfect, and their viscera unimpaired.
 But, returning to the original proposition, he said we could not measure talents by the size of the the brain either in animals of different species, or in different individuals of the same species, the dog had less brain, in mass, than the ox, and man less than the elephant, but in these instances the smaller brains of the dog and of man have greater energy. Any small insects have frequently great muscular force ; the eagle had a smaller optic nerve than man, yet saw much better, and that same might he said of the turkey. So that the size of organs was not the only thing to be considered, and what was here said of animals of different species might be equally applied to individuals. 
It had been objected to Phrenologists that the brain might receive injuries, and yet the manifestations of mind continue. The answer to this was,that the cerebral organs were all double, a fact which was known to Hippocrates, so that, if one side were taken away, the other might still continue to support the same mental action. In like manner it had been said that, in cases of hydrocephalus the brain had been wholly absorbed in water, and yet the indications of mind remained, but he denied the destruction of the brain so long as there remained a vestige of mind. In the case of James Cardinal, a patient of St Bartholomew's, whose head he had seen opened on his first visit to this country, the cranium was swollen to an immense size, but the brain, instead of being absorbed, sunk to the bottom. Experiment had convinced him that alterations in the convolutions of the brain might take place, without any destruction of their substance. The proportion which the head bore to the body was by some considered of great importance ; it certainly deserved the attention of the artist, but yielded no certain indication to the Phrenologist. There was no constant proportion found in the species; the heads of middle-sized men were usually larger in proportion to their bodies, than those of larger men.
   He then adverted to the head of the Venus de Medicis, which was too small. The face was extremely beautiful, but could hardly be called expressive while so totally deprived of brain. Talent, therefore, it was evident, could not be measured by the proportion to his size, yet this animal was thought remarkably sagacious ; on the other hand, many small birds, which evinced no particular activity of mind had comparatively large brains.
 The Doctor then proceeded to describe the facial angle of Keemper. If a line be drawn from the middle of the orifice of the external ear to the upper lip, and another from that last point to the external protuberance of the forehead, the obtuseness of the angle contained  by these two lines would be a measure, it was said, of intellecttual eminence, but he denied that assertion ; the advocates of the facial angle overlooked all the modifications which the scientific Phrenologist weighed carefully. He made no distinction between the European idiot and the intellectual negro ; for the facial angle would be acute from the projection of the jaw as well as from the retreat of the forehead.
The Doctor then briefly recapitulated the substance of his lecture, concluding with the simple truth that the brain is the organ of the mind.


The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser  9 September 1826

PHRENOLOGY.

How materialism clings with almost rapacious tenacity to our very nature in the present enlightened age, often under the cloak of science and the advancement of popular knowledge! Every silly opinion that catches the vulgar mind, from the multitudinous phases of German pantheism to the absurdities of table-turning, gets its votaries and admirers. By those who doat on phrenology in its attractive semblances of truth, or who are bumptious enough to believe in its reality as a science, from Gall and Spurzheim down to George Combe and his followers, man, to say the most of it, is treated in his nature merely as if he were considered as the highest development of the animal creation — simply as possessing a higher and fuller organization of brain than other living creatures of God's earth. The illustrations of this new science, as it is called, brought before the public notice in all apparent truthfulness, and plausible explanations of its principles, is just the thing suited to captivate the illiterate multitude, to whom this wonderful discovery is so complete a novelty. So is it with every new opinion that is started, and which bears on its front the bright colours of attraction, to suit the vanity, the feelings, or the misguided religious principles of men. "Hence we see," says a modern philosopher and an able critic, refuting the absurdities of George Combe and his Phrenology, "why a new and quack science is so popular. People soon get sick of subjects they cannot use for small talk, and on which they know their opinions are worthless. A new system arises, of which nothing is known ; about which any spoony may be as wise as the wisest, and every sciolist may chatter : it is the harvest field of humbug, the arsenal of ignorance ; so it becomes at once the talk of the nation. In our own days we have seen the rise of such new sciences. Take, for example, in medicine Morrison's hygeian system in metaphysics, positivism ; and in morals, phrenology.
 What makes phrenology so popular, but because there is free exercise allowed to man, by science, for his judgment upon his fellow-man ? Who can not trump the quackery in every crowd, if he will but take the trouble to examine into the lives of men whose skulls may happen to lie at hand, and exemplify their misdeeds and their vices by appealing to their bumps ? What wonder is it that thousands of people are gulled, when the science of phrenology, as it is told them, will reign supreme, and that the development of the future man is to depend on the bumps that undulate his skull? The simple inspection of bumps is to determine the future statesman, the science of politics — is to regulate the whole system of religion, education, and morality. In fact, it is to be the real key by which we are to learn how to put in practice tho precepts of the Gospel, how to acquire virtue, practice charity, and regulate our intercourse with our fellow-mortals ; and all by the delicious rule of private judgment which phrenology affords. Its blinded votaries, alas ! do not consider for a moment how it materializes what ought to be spiritual, and how it reduces to sight and the perception of the external senses what ought to be only the objects of thought. We do not see how we can arrive at the knowledge, as phrenologists would have it, of human nature, by gauging the skull and brain. We can look upon phrenology as assuming the brain to be the organ of the thinking soul, whose different faculties act through, and use as instruments, the different cerebral convolutions. Every one who believes in the existence of a soul believes that it is one and the same soul that thinks, perceives, and feels, and that these feelings and perceptions are as intimately a part thereof as thought itself. These feelings and perceptions of the soul act through certain media or organs ; why therefore may not thought do the same ? The soul acts through the brain ; the brain being matter, consists of parts ; why then may not each part of this organ be appropriated to a different act or faculty of the soul ?
 Admitting that this is the assumption of the phrenologist, he has yet to determine the peculiar localization and division of thought — that tho brain is a necessary appendage to a thinking being. We see organs in some of the animal creation which serve the purpose of brain, and yet the same manifestations are made by the former as by the latter. Could not then the soul of man think without organs, or at least with organs of a totally different composition from that of the brain ?
 In its practical application to individual cases the difficulties of phrenology are yet more insurmountable. Who can tell whether the bumps of the skull correspond to the rises and falls of the surface of the brain ? who knows whether these rises and falls are always sure indications of the volume of the brain beneath ? who can decide what allowance is to be made in each case for "temperament," for coarse or fine fibre, for high or low organisation ?
 Yet phrenology is "the most complete and correct exposition of the nature of man yet given." Then what are its peculiar virtues ? First, it alters the field of observation : instead of examining the faculties of the mind, as expressed in actions, thoughts, and words, it dissects the organs of the brain, through which it assumes these manifestations to be made. Not that it goes so far as to affirm that mere examination of the brain can reveal its use. " No person by dissecting the optic nerve could predicate that its office is to minister to vision," nor deduce the laws of vision, and still less find out what the man had seen, from the appearance of tho fibre ; any more than by examining a brick he could tell whether it had been made by a man or a boy, whether it had arrived by water or by rail, and whether the cart which conveyed it was drawn by a horse or a mule. The phrenologist must therefore either take the old " exposition of human nature" ready made from the metaphysicians — and then what becomes of his new discoveries in that line ? — or else he must put away phrenology for the time, turn metaphysician, observe his own consciousness and the laws of his reason, and thus, without phrenology, concoct a new "exposition of human nature" on the old metaphysical principles. But, objects Mr. Combe, this will not teach us phrenology; "by reflecting on consciousness, which the metaphysicians chiefly did as their means of studying the mind, we can discover nothing concerning the organs by which the faculties act, and run great risk of forming erroneous views of human nature by supposing mankind in general constituted like ourselves." But does not the phrenologist run the same risk ? does he not put forth a model head, with all the divisions marked ? and does he not assume that every man approaches more or less to that standard, has at least the germs of every organ, and a high development of several of them? The "metaphysician" runs no other risk ; he never supposes that all men are equally endowed by nature; but he supposes that each man, qua man, has a certain complexus of faculties, all of them existing at least in their rudiments, some highly developed ; the difference between him and the phrenologist is in their respective methods of estimating this development. The old-fashioned philosopher judged of a man's capacity by his works, of what he is by what he does, of what he can do by what he has done ; the phrenologist pure puts all such considerations aside, and determines a man's whole value by an inspection of his bumps.
 Man is composed of a body and soul. Phrenology establishes a sort of link between them. It does not advance our knowledge of what human nature is, but tells us only how it acts, just as the examination of the optic nerve is no revelation of what the sense of vision is, but only of the organs through which it acts. Its mode of action remains undetermined.
 The same writer continues :—
 Phrenology, then, is only the science of the organs of the brain, the uses of which are not discovered by phrenology, but by a previous meta physical analysis. But if so, what did Mr. Combe mean by asserting that his science showed "the subordination of the animal propensities to the moral and intellectual faculties?" or that all the faculties of man are in themselves mere instincts, mere emanations of the organism ; the moral sentiments and intellect being only superior secretions, as bile might be superior to mucous ? that will or volition is nothing in itself, but only a result of the action of several of these instincts in combination, the choice necessarily following the preponderating pleasure? that the higher instincts seek the welfare of others as their aim, and desire purely and disinterestedly the happiness of their objects? We should have liked to see Mr. Combe behind his lecturing table, with a brain before him and a scalpel in his hand ; and to hear him demonstrate from the size of the convolutions, the direction of the fibres, the colour of the material, or any other sensible quality of the brain, any one, or any fragment of any one, of the above propositions. To any man acquainted with the forms of logic the attempt is as evidently futile as that of a poor crazy antiquary named Pococke, who a few years ago professed to prove that the centaurs were real beings, "not by any rationalising process, but by the very unpoetic evidences of latitude and longitude." It is just as rational to divine the future by pitch and toss, as to determine whether benevolence is purely disinterested, or is only a more refined selfishness, by tracing the course of a nerve or comparing the bulk of a couple of bumps. Mr. Combe came to phrenology with a mind already imbued with the then current Scotch psychology, and soon became unable to separate what he owed to the one from what was due to the other. He had already learned to cut up the mind into a number of faculties, before phrenology taught him to cut up the brain into a similar number of organs. Dugald Stewart had taught him to omit will from the list, before he thought of proving its non-existence by his having failed to establish a bump of will. Calvinism had taught him that our faculties are mere instincts, and that we had no self-determining and controlling power over them, before he drew the same conclusion from their acting through organs which are necessarily put in motion by external impulses. He had learned from the civilisation in which he was nurtured that the passions are subordinate to the intellect and the moral faculties, before he boldly ventured on proving the same proposition by the fact that the organs of passion occupy more space in the skull, and are heavier and larger than the organs of intellect and the moral faculties united. So, when he said that "phrenology shows the relations  and uses of the faculties of mind," he did not mean phrenology, but that compound of metaphysics, psychology, Calvinistic tradition, and civilised opinion, with which his head was furnished before he applied himself to his favourite study.
 We cannot consider phrenology as aught else than the philosopher's stone of the materialist. It is a science unestablished, undetermined, and one that has exhausted its popularity in England and on the continent. Its professor has still the freest scope for opinion, though beyond the limit of the corporal organs of the brain he cannot enter ; he cannot by phrenology investigate the modes of consciousness, nor arrive at a know ledge of the soul's anatomy. There are certain fundamental truths which form the basis of the science, but which are no more novel to us in the nineteenth century than they were in the time of Æschylus. It only helps us to form an estimate of people's characters, or of those of our sheep, dogs, and horses, when safer and surer grounds are wanting. It is a mischievous quackery to suppose that it ought to enter into the business of education, or the vocation of children to the varied walks of life, for of all sciences, if it is deserving of such a title, it is decidedly the most fallible, and often most unjust in its results.

Freeman's Journal 30 April 1859

MOSTLY FOOLS.

(Abridged from the Saturday Review.)

The immediate result of reading "The Man of Genius," by Cesare Lombroso, Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Turin, especially the early chapters of it, is to make one doubtful if one is not oneself insane, and quite certain that all one's friends are. Indeed, the signs of insanity are so numerous, that it is very difficult to avoid possessing one or more of them. Anything, from regular hand-writing to regular features, will suffice ; and just as the nervous person who glances at a medical work immediately endows himself with all the diseases he reads of therein, and hies him to a physician, so, after reading "The Man of Genius," the weaker vessel will immediately resign hope,and set to work to seek one comfortable asylum. We are at least cheered by the knowledge that we shall be in good company. For, in the words of our fashionable argot, " everybody will be there," and in Professor Lombroso's world you can only choose between madness and monotony, between the people who are so dull that they are unfit to talk to, and the people whose brains—or whatever it be that constitutes genius—will not allow them to be safely at large. When, therefore, we are haled to Bedlam, we shall know at least that there will be a distinguished company to receive us—everybody, in fact, from Moses to Musset. Shakspeare, Byron, Shelley will represent poetry ; Schopenhauer and others will reply to the toast of philosophy ; Disraeli, and possibly more modern statesmen than he, will supply the political element; Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, and all the plagues of our schooldays will be paying the penalty of their crimes against us in strait-waistcoats. The English poets will be there en masse, with the exception apparently of Mr. Lewis Morris. All the others our author, with exquisite frankness, expressly includes. Scotland comes especially under his ban, for do we not read that " The hills of Judea and of Scotland have produced prophets and half insane persons gifted with second-sight" ? Happy are they who dwell upon the plains, for madmen inhabit the mountains ! Better to be dull than demented. Professor Lombroso has striven in every way, by careful research, elaborate consultation of authorities, and noting down of personal observations, to make his knowledge and the data for his hypothesis as exact as possible ; and if his theory is a somewhat cynical one—it is annoying at first to find we owe the writings of Pascal to "the grave lesions of his cerebral hemispheres," and those of Byron "to premature ossification of his sutures" —yet it has a very considerable basis of truth. In his own words, "Genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid group." In fact, genius may practically be expressed in terms of epilepsy ; and he brings forward a mass of examples of prophets, poets, and artists of all kinds who were not only liable to these seizures, but whose genius seems to be the direct result of such a disease. Almost anything unusual apparently suffices for the purposes of the theory, from "pallor" or "rickets" to actual mania or fits; and even if you bear an exemplary imputation during life, like Sesostris, you are not exempt from the danger of having your skull dug up and pronounced to be of the criminal type. So great are the capacities of his net that, in despair of finding any educated sanity in the world, one is inclined to lock up all the sane people that our great men may be permitted to remain at large, the theory being that "the normal," of which we hear so much, is in reality an arbitrary line drawn between two classes of insanity—one class, which is " off the normal" in one direction, being dubbed genius ; the other, which errs in the opposite direction, being considered mad.

The distinction seems to rest purely on expediency. If a man is merely a nuisance and irresponsible, we call him imbecile ; if he is a brilliant writer, actor, speaker, statesman, we call him a genius ; if he is violent or murderous, we call him a maniac. But, as the hatter said to Alice, " They are all mad"—mad or mattoid, it does not matter which—and often the two are sadly mixed, as in the cases quoted where stupid men during a fit of temporary insanity become brilliantly clever or even geniuses. Moreover, we gather that, if only we could perfect our knowledge of abnormal states of the brain, we could produce genius to order as required by tampering with its lobes. At least chance can do so, according to the following statement :—

" It has frequently happened that injuries to the head and acute diseases, those frequent causes of insanity, have changed in very ordinary individual into a man of genius. . . . Gratry, a mediocre singer, became a great master after a beam had fractured his skull. Mabillon, almost an idiot from childhood, fell down a stone staircase at the age of 20, and so badly injured his skull that it had to be trepanned ; from that time he displayed the characteristics of genius. Gale, who narrates this fact, " knew a Dane who had been half idiotic, and who became intelligent at the age of 18 after having rolled head foremost down a staircase."

The preponderance of epilepsy in religious maniacs is treated at great length ; for, indeed, here the professor is on his safest ground, and his sympathies being anti-clerical and anti-religious, he takes a keen pleasure in analysing these forms of mania. His instances are taken from every age and faith, from Mahomet to Luther, from St. Paul to Savonarola. He gives no examples of English religious epileptics, assuredly not from any lack of such, but perhaps because, for modern instances in support of his theories, he turns instinctively rather to Italy. Otherwise he might have found several—Wesley, Whitefield, and many more recent names. In fact, we can present him with an admirable theory of Whitefield's extraordinary influence, culled from a Diocesan Conference, wherein a clergyman, himself an epileptic, arose to defend his fitness to continue his ministry. After quoting many instances of epileptic preachers, he added the following remarkable words on the subject. " Whitefield," he declared, " was not merely epileptic, but had moreover a cast in his eye, and since the power of epileptics rests largely on the commanding power of their eyes, could by transfixing two persons at once, by reason of his squint, use his power of drawing converts with double effect !" The author's standpoint throughout the book is sternly scientific. He will accept nothing supernatural. Prophets and priests are an abomination to him. We quote one or two of his sneers at inspirational folk:—"One tendency (in mattoids) overpowers all others—one which we find predominant in insane genius—namely, personal vanity. Thus out of 215 mattoids, we find forty-four prophets." Again, "Mahomet had visions after an epileptic fit ; 'an angel appears to me in human form, he speaks to me. Often I hear, as it were, the sound of cats, of rabbits, of bells; then I suffer much.' After these apparitions he was overcome with sadness, and howled like a young camel!" The picture of the prophet of Islam "howling like a young camel" is exquisite. As examples of amnesia, the author relates how " One day, when performing an experiment during a lecture he (Rouelle) said to his hearers, 'You see, gentlemen, this cauldron over the flame ? "Well, if I were to leave off stirring it, an explosion would at once occur which would make us all jump.' While saying these words he did not fail to forget to stir, and the prediction was accomplished; the explosion took place with a fearful noise ; the laboratory windows were all smashed, and the audience fled to the garden. Babinet hired a country house, and after making the pavements returned to town ; then he found that he had entirely forgotten both the name of the place and from what station he had started. . . . Of Bishop Münster it is said that, seeing at the door of his own ante-chamber the announcement, 'The master of this house is out,' he remained there awaiting his own return." The story of Klaproth is worth quoting. In examination a professor once said to him, " But you know nothing, sir !" Excuse me, he replied, " I know Chinese !" Puns, by the way, and plays on words are strong evidence of monomania or insanity, at which we are not astonished, and "anagrams," in the words of Hecart, who made them, and therefore ought to know, " are one of the greatest inanities of which the human mind is capable. One must be a fool to amuse oneself with them, and worse than a fool to make them." Sometimes the professor's humour lies in the curious way in which he expresses himself. Thus :— " He [Bolyai] provoked thirteen officials to duels, and fought with them, and between each duel he played the violin, the only piece of furniture (!) in his house."
Brisbane Courier 7 Mar 1892

SOME OF THE CAUSES OF INSANITY

Sir,-I send you the following extract from a lecture delivered by Dr. Maudsley three or four years ago, on " Some of the Causes of Insanity." I believe it to be worthy of earnest consideration by the spiritualist and the orthodox—in fact, by all who interest themselves about religion—one of the most conspicuous elements in human life :—

"The question of religion as an agency influencing in a powerful manner the minds of men for good or evil; and therefore, predisposing or not to mental degeneracy, I must leave untouched, not only because of the difficulty and delicacy of the subject, but because of the impossibility of doing justice to so important a matter in a brief and incidental manner. If the task were attempted, it would be necessary to consider the effect of the religious creed professed on the thoughts, feelings, and conduct of men—in other words, on the intellect, the emotions, and the will. It has been said by no less a person than Emerson that as men's creeds mark a disease of the intellect, so their prayers mark a disease of the will. Now, without giving in our adhesion to that opinion, it would be permissible, and indeed desirable, soberly to attempt to estimate the influence of religious belief upon the common mind ; and this might, perhaps, best be done by systematically discussing three principal questions,—first, What influence a belief in the supernatural has upon the growth and progress of human thought—whether its natural tendency is to strengthen or enervate the intellect? Secondly, What is the practical effect worked on the hearts of men by the fear of punishment and the hope of reward after death—whether their feelings and desires are beneficially influenced, or are influenced at all, by possibilities which always seem afar off ; or whether, on the other hand, as some argue, their feelings are deadened and themselves blinded thereby to the certain laws by which their sins or errors are always avenged in this world on themselves or on others? And lastly, what is the practical effect produced on the character of the many by the belief that through prayer they may obviate the effects of their own want of foresight, or want of self-renunciation, and may rely on supernatural aid where the will fails. Also, what is the effect on their character of the profession of a belief in moral maxims and precepts which they cannot always reconcile with the exigencies of actual life—whether the natural tendency of these beliefs is to justify the will, and to fashion a strong character well qualified for the consistent conduct of life? According to the way in which these questions are answered will be the answer to the question, whether the religious creed of a nation, as entertained by the masses, predisposes, or not, to mental degeneracy."

. . . . . .-Yours,

Jan. 8.
N. A.

 The Argus 10 January 1872,

DRINK MADNESS.

WHAT HAPPENS IN INEBRIATE REFORMATORIES.

A TERRIBLE PROBLEM.

Painful in the extreme is the report of Mr. R. Welsh Branthwaite, the inspector under the British Inebriates Acts for the year 1905. He describes the connection between alcoholism and insanity with the relentless detail and the psychological force of a Maxim Gorky. "It will be well to bear in mind." he says, "three very important points— first, that all cases, in addition to actual drunkenness, have been convicted over and over again of offences resulting from their habits, such as disorderly conduct, assault, wilful damage, theft, attempted suicide, or neglect of children; secondly, that with few exceptions, all have been sent to and fro between Police Court and prison for many years as ordinary offenders before being specially dealt with as inebriates; and, thirdly, that up to the present the importance of affording drunkards an early enough chance of reformation, has not been, sufficiently realized. In these circumstances it will scarcely be surprising to find that many committals are in the lowest possible state of unimprovable degradation, and that it has become necessary to set apart some of our institutions as little better than moral refuse heaps for the detention of the hopelessly defective at the lowest possible cost to the country."

—"Born to Insanity."—

Upwards of 62 per cent, of the committals of habitual drunkards are found to be insane or defective in varying decree. It is certain, in the opinion of the inspector, that the large majority of inmates of the inebriate reformatories were either actually insane during their Police Court history, or in a state bordering on insanity. ''I am satisfied," continues the inspector. ''that the majority of our insane inebriates have become alcoholic because of congenital defect or tendency to insanity, not insane as the result of alcoholism. It is morally certain that many of these lunatics might have been prevented from becoming insane if they had been taken charge of, restrained from drunkenness, and properly treated earlier in their career. . . . Perhaps the most conclusive evidence of congenital defect from a scientific point of view is the presence of certain physical signs of arrested or distorted development. Many instances of stunted growth can be found among our inebriates, abnormally small heads, mis-shapen heads, and case after case of developmental arrest or irregularity in upper and lower jaw. . . . Common in women is the heavy, repulsive masculine type, with a tendency to violence and brutality, beady eyes, square jaws, and dull, flabby, expressionless face. . . . In, short, the same physical abnormalities are to be found in defective inebriates as are present among idiots and imbeciles, only in less degree, because the defect is less severe."

And here is a fearful picture of those who require constant supervision: — "They are always restless, uncertain, excitable, and ready to take umbrage on the least provocation, or on flimsy pretexts which would not be considered provocation by reasonable beings. A glance, a word, an innocent action, not intended to give offence, is construed as contempt, vituperation, or meditated attack, and is resented accordingly. These inmates, always full of grievances, are constantly hatching schemes to obtain 'justice,' they never allow a member of the visiting committee, or the inspector to pass without a lengthy interview full of complaints, and they are eternally writing to the Secretary of State to appeal for the redress of imaginary wrongs. There is usually no sign of sorrow for the disorderly results of their inebriate habits, both the drunkenness and disorder being denied or justified. Drunkenness is justifiable, prostitution is justifiable, crime is justifiable, any course they choose to adopt is justifiable, so long as they can show (to their own satisfaction) some 'reason' for such conduct."

— The Frenzy Stage. —

This is during their quieter moments. When they give way to one of their recurrent outbursts of uncontrollable anger— "The mad fit while it lasts is not pleasant to witness — utter abandonment in passion, wanton destruction of anything handy, unmeasured violence against all who happen to be near (especially if they attempt to restrain), absence of all sense of decency, and use of the vilest possible language, are some of its chief characteristics. A large number of persons, now under control in reformatories, subject to these passionate, impulsive attacks, only need the possession of a lethal weapon at such times to cause injury, even death, to any person against whom their anger is directed. In fact, many of them have served years of punishment for violent assaults or at tempts to kill, and at least two have been sent to penal servitude for manslaughter since leaving reformatories — one woman for killing her husband during a drunken quarrel, and another for contributing to the death of her child by violence. The physical demand for something to moderate restlessness and excitability, or cause temporary oblivion during the early stages of an attack of mad passion, accounts for their resort to alcohol; or, during an attack, the same ungoverned impulse which prompts them to the committal of other unreasonable notions prompts them to drink madly, regardless of result. How to keep these excitable inmates at any regular occupation gives rise to constant perplexity. The restless craving for change and excitement, which always possesses them, effectually prevents their ever becoming adept at any useful work. "So much for the persons who are found most difficult to control; it now becomes necessary to turn our attention to the quieter section of defectives. Suspicion and delusions of persecution are as common among the quiet as among the violent, only, the reiteration of wrongs by the quiet defective leads to tears, depression and despair, not to excitement. Intelligence generally, in these cases, is of an extremely low order. The mental vacuity which is met with in defective inebriates only varies in degree from the more conspicuous inattentiveness of idiots and imbeciles. Untruthfulness is also a marked symptom. Much difficulty is met with in enforcing habits of personal cleanliness in these cases. The word 'morality' has no meaning. The pilfering, hiding, and hoarding up of apparently useless trifles, a recognised trait in imbeciles and feeble minded persons, are common among the quieter section of defective inebriates."

—Prison Treatment Useless.—

Mr. Branthwaite says that it is hardly realized how potent ordinary disease and ill-health are in the making of inebriates : in a few cases it has been possible to trace the connection between inebriate habits and accident. The hardening effect of gaol life upon habitual drunkards is fully realized by these whose duty it is to deal with such persons; repeated short sentences have no deterrent influence over the confirmed inebriate. Imprisonment of drunkards is useless, says the inspector; "an absolute waste of public money." "Cannot prison be avoided altogether in the majority of cases?" he asks. The committal of habitual drunkards to prison, he concludes, has proved useless and inhumane, because it leads to moral degradation, causes or increases mental defect, and removes all hope of reformation. The only chance of reformation depends upon their early committal to special medical treatment and avoidance of prison routine. Chronic drunken recidivists,"irreclaimables," should be committed to reformatories for full terms.— Daily News.


The Register 4 January 1907,


[This analysis may be applicable to neo-fascists, and modern social misfits; a la London riots.
But can anyone reform a tory?]