Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/672

654 would be a wearing-out which would lead to a limited future. So with the body under these lethal spells; we may add a part, or we may take a part away, but we can not by them maintain the uniform and natural law of life.

These agents create a desire, a craving for themselves, a new automatic expression, a new sense of necessity which did not preëxist, and which never exists until it is acquired. This seems to me the most perfect evidence of aberration. Whoever craves for anything is aberrant, and much craving for one thing is the most certain sign of a mad mind. We all admit this truth when the craving becomes insatiable; but between the smallest persistent craving and the most lamentable insatiate there is nothing more than degree; the fact is the same, and the movement along the line from the moderate toward the insatiate is commonly too easy and continuous. Craving for purely natural things in the midst of them is an unknown phenomenon in healthy men. Craving for unnatural things in the midst of them is well known; but is that healthy? The sane man who wants water asks for it; the sane animal that wants water seeks for it; the aberrant man clutches wine; the aberrant animal, rendered aberrant by the acquired craving, grows furious. No man drinks wine as he drinks water; there is a furor in the drinking of wine which marks a phenomenal disturbance, and which is distinct from the simple act of drinking from necessity, in the act as well as in the object.

The establishment of the craving or desire for these lethal agents in one living body is the frequent origin of the same desire in bodies that are to be. The craving is thus sometimes begotten of a craving, like other hereditary taints which lead to physical and mental errors and diseases, a specific indication of aberration from the natural health into disease, depending on hereditary constitutional tendency, and singularly indicative of original departure from the natural life. A still more striking illustration of the position I am now supporting is afforded in another action of these agents. The tendency of their action is, as a rule, toward premature physical death: the tendency is also toward premature mental death. A sudden excess of indulgence by any one of them, save perhaps arsenic, is all but certain to lead to some form of acute mental derangement or stupor, more or less decisive and prolonged. A gradual excessive indulgence is almost as certain to lead to a confirmed condition of aberration more or less determinate. If we watch carefully the career of a man who is passing through the course of an alcoholic intoxication, and if, after analyzing each phase of that progress, we pass into a lunatic asylum and look at the various phases of insanity exhibited in the persons of the different inmates who are there confined, there is no difficulty in finding represented, through certain of those unfortunates, all the shades of mental aberration which have previously been exhibited by the single person in the course of his rapid career from sanity into insanity and into