Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/864

844 anew that happiness lies in the pleasures which abide and in the selection of permanent beauty and truth from the bitter-sweet of passing delights. . . . As the common mind of successive generations, by sifting and sublimating its experiences and conceptions, discovers its classic thinkers and its classic artists, so, in the life of the individual man, should experience be refined and conceptions enlarged until our desires and pleasures are purged of their grosser and more transient accidents." This is well put, and so is the following: "The discipline which leads us to avoid the eddies of the current and to move in the larger periods of human life and thought, which reveals to us the fugitive and deceitful nature of selfish gratifications, and the abiding joy of devotion to higher ideas, is medicine for neuroses. We preach no self-denial for its own sake, but renunciation of the harlotries and enchantments which minister to transient joys in oblivion of the future."

This is wholesome reading for those who, because they weakly yield to superficial impressions and momentary gusts of feeling, think themselves the victims of an extraordinary refinement of nervous organization. What such persons have, judging merely by the outcome in action, is an inferior nervous organization, one which is all activity on the surface and all inertness below the surface. Professor Allbutt seems to think, however, that in many if not in most cases the deeper regions of the nature might be stirred if a proper discipline were employed. He does not compare the too facile nervous responses which so many exhibit to the imperfect physical habits of breathing, eating, walking, etc.—which are also widely prevalent; but he evidently regards the former as a phenomenon quite akin to these, and therefore more or less remediable by proper measures. The only remedy that unaided Nature knows is suffering, which long centuries ago the sages of the human race saw and proclaimed to be the great teacher of virtue and wisdom; and possibly the function of suffering in this respect will never become wholly obsolete. Prof. Allbutt, however, thinks that proper educational influences might do a great deal to redeem human life from the sway of the momentary. One's heart does fail just a little at the thought of combating by educational effort anything like a general tendency—of trying to induce forces to take a Hue of greater rather than one of less resistance; and yet the duty of making the attempt seems to be plain. The evil with which we have to contend is in full sight. We see it in all the devices now existing in such profusion for reducing intellectual labor and the strain of attention to a minimum. We see it in flashy newspapers, in idle illustrations, in chopped-up articles, in manufactured witticisms of irredeemable and inexpressible inanity, in shows fit only for children offered for the entertainment of men and women, in vapid social amusements, in a general impatience of whatever is serious and solid, in the levity with which attacks on fundamental institutions of society and established rules of morality are regarded, and in numberless other signs of a prevalent disposition to treat sensuous pleasure, however fleeting and however unworthy—so long as it fills a vacant moment—as the one intelligible end of existence. The teaching, if we understand Prof. Allbutt aright, which he thinks might be greatly influential in mending this state of things, is the teaching of social duty. "I speak as a physiologist," he says, "when I say that, in the growth of higher and more penetrating conceptions of national life, and in the increasing sense of security, efficiency, and vigor which result from organization, we shall find the cure for the irregular nervous outbursts, moods of despondency, and waste of effort which we certainly have continual cause to lament." At present, he adds,