Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/437

Rh the typical clergyman—we do not speak of such exceptionally liberal men as one often meets in London—holds as firmly as ever to the belief that all discussions of moral perversion, which deal with it from the side of mere bodily organization and health, are an insult to religion a—lapse into the black gulf of what he calls "materialism."

It is not with such persons, however, that we are now concerned, but rather with a class of writers, truly liberal and full of culture, who, nevertheless, cannot get over what seems to them the hopeless divergence between recent physiological doctrines and any systematic teaching of the "higher ethics." To this estimable class belongs the writer of a thoughtful article in the Spectator, on "Nervous Health and Moral Health." His text is the recent discussion originated by a remarkable leader in the Times, which declared that brain-work does not kill, but that brain-worry—especially stifled emotion—is the really fatal agent in nearly all cases where overwork gets credited with a death. Let us repeat here that the experience of medical men undoubtedly shows that this is no fancy, but (with comparatively trifling exceptions) an important general fact. The Spectator does not venture to deny this statement altogether, but, accepting it provisionally as correct, argues that such teaching would lead to dangerous results, unless we acknowledged that what is good merely for nervous health may be bad for moral health, and vice versa. We certainly cannot admit this, and we believe that the fears of the Spectator as to modern physiology leading to bad ethics are quite groundless.

To the writer in the Spectator the danger seems to be that medical philosophers are proposing to extinguish human emotion, and reduce all men to a dead level of intelligent but selfish complacency, reaching the same point, for the sake of preserving health, as Goethe aimed at for the sake of preserving perfect artistic culture—or "sweetness and light," as Mr. Matthew Arnold would call it. We cannot, of course, stand sponsors for the original writer in the Times; but we cannot see that this was what he intended to say; and, at any rate, this is not the voice of modern physiology as we understand it. What the physiological psychologists do affirm is this: That, whereas serious and calm intellectual work is only very slowly destructive to the nervous health, emotion, unless directed into proper channels, is highly destructive to the stability of the nervous system. And they further say that the conventional ideas as to the propriety and utility of certain kinds of emotional excitement do visibly bear, in the experience of medical men, the very worst fruit possible. They do not say, as the Spectator hints, that the emotion of repentance for real guilt is a thing to be shunned; but they declare that the habit of self-torturing introspection, which the clergy and teachers are especially earnest in recommending as a means of spiritual purification, is so far from promoting the existence of a really high and pure standard of ethics, that it ruins both body and soul, in the majority of cases, wherever it