Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/269

Rh is also, and, perhaps, more characteristically, shown in the religious, social and other vagaries that often bring to light strange perversions of human energy. The movement towards the emancipation of women during the past few decades, with all its numerous and positive merits, abounds, nevertheless, with examples of mental and emotional distempers that find their psychological explanation in the strangulated intellectual energies of its votaries. Much of the current unrest among intellectual women is probably due to specially cultivated mental organs that find no adequate function to perform. All these forms of neuropsychical strain and instability are, I submit, at least partially explicable in terms of the useless and parasitic culture, which has become more dangerous to modern society in proportion as it has been extended to the masses of men and women. In earlier generations, when fewer men and women were subjected to the artificial culture of the schools, the general detriment to society was not so obvious. But now that thousands and tens of thousands of boys and girls, and young men and young women, are having their nervous and mental lives fashioned for activities they never have a chance to perform, it may happen that higher education, instead of being a means of racial advancement, will become a means of racial deterioration.

To summarize:

1. It is a law of the biological world that unused organs become parasitic upon the life, draining off the energy of the individual and tending to become diseased.

2. It has been found that physical culture which leads to the hypertrophy of special muscles, entails a drain upon the general vitality. As in life in general, so in physical education, organs that can perform no adequate function are wasteful of human energy.

3. Experimental psychology is showing that the culture of particular intellectual organs and functions can not be transferred to other organs and functions, except where there are elements in common. Histology and pathology of the nervous system confirm the conclusions of psychology in this respect.

4. Intellectual culture not being transferable must become parasitic and a cause of mental disorganization when it fails of application and usefulness in the life of the individual. Illustrations are to be found in the over-refinements of culture in academic communities, in the nervous instability frequently met with among educated men and women, and in the religious and social vagaries and perversions that crop out in the older and more highly cultivated centers of population.

5. The artificial culture of the secondary schools and colleges in our democratic society, in proportion as it is diffused throughout larger sections of our population, is likely to develop a cultured proletariat, ill-balanced and inefficient as individuals, and a source of danger in our civilization.