Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/461

Rh a strong argument would have been afforded, and would probably have been employed, against the extension of education at the present day to the working-classes. Nothing, however, in our facts or figures supports such an anti-progressive view; and, if the educated classes did not sin against their mental health in so many ways, they would doubtless compare more favorably than they do, in fact as well as in mere figures, with the uneducated poor. So again with regard to intemperance, and all that it involves, in spite of the difficulty of discriminating between the many factors which often go to make up the sum total of causes of an attack, we have no doubt of the large influence for mental evil exerted by drink—always admitting that where the constitution has no latent tendency to insanity, you may do almost what you like with it, in this or any other way, without causing this particular disease. A man will break down at his weak point, be it what it may.

Again, the lessons are taught of the importance, not of mere education, but a real training of the feelings; the evil of mental stagnation, not simply per se, but from the train of sensual degradation in one direction, and of gloomy fanaticism in the other, engendered, and the danger of dwelling too long and intently on agitating religious questions, especially when presented in narrow and exclusive forms, which drive people either to despair or to a perilous exaltation of the feelings. To true religious reformers, the physician best acquainted with the causation of mental disease will award his heartiest approval. Only as the high claims of duty, demanded from man by considerations of the dependence of his work in the world upon mental health, of what he owes to his fellow-men, and of what he owes to God, are fulfilled as well as acknowledged, will civilized man benefit by his civilization, as regards the prevention of insanity. Unpreventable lunacy will still exist, but a great saving will be effected for British rate-payers when that which is preventable shall have been reduced to a minimum by the widest extension of a thorough but not oppressive and too early commenced education, by the practical application of the ascertained truths of physiological and medical science, and by the influence of a Christianity, deep in proportion to its breadth, which shall really lay hold of life and conduct, and mould them in accordance with itself.—Macmillan's Magazine.