Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/863

Rh way we see how natural it is that they should act in unison, the first revealing more and more of the beauty and order of the world, the second giving its sanction and aid to what we may call the transcendent effort and impulse of the human mind. In view of this common ministry of blessing how petty seem all the disputes of the past! Let us hope that we have heard nearly the last of them, and that, henceforth, as the poet says:

 "Mind and heart, according: well, May make one music as before. But vaster."

a recent number of the Contemporary Review Prof. T. Clifford Allbutt discusses in a very interesting and instructive manner the question whether, as commonly alleged, nervous diseases are much more prevalent in the present day than they were a generation or two ago. His conclusion is that such is not the case. He disputes, in the first place, the statistics which seem to show that insanity is greatly on the increase; and, in the second place, maintains that in a great many cases in which the nervous system is affected the trouble is not primarily nervous at all: the nerves have been implicated through disorder in other regions of the body. He believes that some of the conditions of city life are unfavorable to the health and vigor of the so-called laboring classes; but he thinks that, on the whole, there is a marked increase of vitality and power in the more favored classes. "I do not hesitate to say"—we take pleasure in quoting this encouraging statement—"that when I look back upon the young men and women of forty and thirty years ago, I am amazed rather at the physical splendor and dashing energy of our young friends of to-day. The world seems to have filled with Apollos and Dianas; cheap food and clothing, improved sanitation, athletics that bring temperance with them, frequent changes of air and scene, and a more scientific regulation of all habits, seem since my adolescence to have transformed middle-class youth, and the change is rapidly spreading downward." Women, the professor says further, seem especially to be changed for the better. "Freedom to live their own lives and the enfranchisement of their faculties in a liberal education, which, physically put, means the development of their brains and nerves, seem not only to have given them new charms and fresher and wider interests in life, but also to have promoted in them a more rapid and continuous flow of nervous spirits, and to have warmed, and animated them with a new vitality both of body and mind." The professor is eloquent, but no one will affirm that on such a theme eloquence is misplaced. The question may now be asked. If there is so much cause for congratulation in the physical and mental condition of the present generation, where do we find the darker lines of the picture? Our headline speaks of A Disease of Modern Life. What is it?

The disease of modern life which Prof. Allbutt recognizes is lack of self-control. It is not that nerves are too excitable—their business is to be excitable, he remarks—but that a certain power of what may be called inhibition is largely lacking. What is wanted is not that there should be less sensibility, but that sensibility should not be confined so much as it is to the external parts of our nature. Let sensibility be more profound, and the whole man will be a gainer. We can not do better, however, than quote the professor's own words: "As we become more and more able to subordinate the impressions of the moment, and compare them with our stores of previous impressions, we learn that momentary realities, keen as they are, must take their places in the larger sequences of that beautiful instrument which harmonizes our joys and resolves our discords; we learn