Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/29

 ONE ASPECT OF VICE I 5

functions to the harm of society, we instinctively call it bad. But the question remains over : Is not anything which furthers its processes of functioning in that measure good a natural good, if not a moral good ? But the process is harmful, desperately harmful, to society. Drunkenness is insanity. The period of stimulation is brief. Soon inflammation produces deterioration of tissues. One by one, in the order of their importance, the higher centers succumb to its spell, while the mad revelry of the lower centers increases. Drunkenness is indeed abnormal, but may we not also say that the abnormality existed first in the conditions upon which it ensues ?

Not only does the use of stimulants help on a necessary pro- cess, it also serves to preserve certain resultants of thought and feeling which, originally possessed as hopes, and failing to be enameled in action, are kept from falling out of consciousness by an emotional revival, in conditions where they appear more possible than they really are, thus treasuring them against the day of their actuality. Certain considerations, certain views, which appear in consciousness as felt truth, must be kept there. In the humdrum of life they tend to slip away and fall out of consciousness entirely. Yet civilization is dependent upon their retention, and upon their being felt. But ordinary life may fur- nish no experience akin to them to stimulate their reappearance. They are not realized, they are not achieved ; they become hope- less hopes and die. Yet the stimulant may do what stimulus and experience cannot do. It may revive the departing hope, and fill it with such warmth of worth and being as to make it seem no longer a hope, but a possession. One hardly doubts that Greece profited by the bacchanals. The orgies, vile as they were, yet may have loaned this value to the common life. As in remorse, if one could only cease to dream, he might forget ; so here, to cease to drink might be to lose a valued past, to bury it beneath a load of empty days.

And, if special and supplementary proof be needed, it may be found in the fact that all forms of cure which have been in any measure successful have proceeded more or less unconsciously upon this same principle. They have supplanted drinking