Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/21

 the fittest methods of restoring the lost reason. The drunkard is regarded in the light of a victim of alcoholism, often, rather than as a responsible member of the community.

To criminal classes the medical psychologist lately has been particularly attentive. We have learned from this devotion that there exists a profound and demonstrable connection of mystery between the Will and a nervous organism, rapports between heredity and tendency to crime. We are willing to believe that felony may be a process of disease; even to our perceiving murder, arson, theft as involuntary acts. We have grown into pitying the suicide as a creature who is far less a moral sinner than an unhappy monomaniac; his psychologic equilibrium is so impaired that there is merely a fraction of moral responsabilityresponsibility [sic] in his hanging himself in a wood, or putting a bullet through his heart. The world no longer regards epidemics as having theological mysteries in their origins; as expressing any immediate visitation of divine wrath. Scientific plumbing, the sanitary care of water-supplies, the bacteriologist with his microscope, the antiseptic treatment of surgical operations; more than for these relatively outward results is the doctor, as a practical scientist, to be thanked. Taking such a school of medical thought at its best, we realize how vigorous, not to say supreme, a factor the psychologic doctor can be, and also that his higher and most modern influence is hardly more than begun as to many further processes affecting public opinion and intelligence. The just concepts of human nature, the traits of man as the psychical and temperamental product which he is, the analysis of his responsibility to himself and to his fellows, present topics immediate to our day, to be viewed with a clarity not hitherto achieved. The process is dual. It brings destruction of many of the old fabrics, and a building-up of entirely new ones, through materials not