Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/71

Rh every particular, he goes on his way freer than other men from the external causes of all the induced diseases, and better protected than most men from the worst consequences of those diseases which spring from causes that are uncontrollable.

I do not hold up this picture as an encouragement to avarice, for an avaricious world would truly be a sad one. "But there is a soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly distill it out," and, certainly, much goodness might be observed even in the perverted passion of avarice, if reckless and over-generous men would condescend to the distillation.

Some of the most extreme instances, at all events, nay, the most typical instances, of longevity with perfect physical health that I have met with, have been in those who are tinctured practically with the passion under consideration. It is true some have not been happy, and none eminently useful; but to the physiological mind they present a remarkable picture of the endurance of health and life under what are nearest to the natural conditions necessary for both. They suggest that if with this physical standard a higher and nobler mental development could be attained, with art and science and benevolent labors as the pleasures added to the life, the approach to perfection of existence would be closely realized, and the age, not of the man only but of the world of life to which he belongs, would be more thoughtfully conserved.

Of the passions I have enumerated as most detrimental to life, anger stands first. He is a man very rich indeed in physical power who can afford to be angry. The richest cannot afford it many times without insuring the penalty, a penalty that is always severe. What is still worse of this passion is, that the very disease it engenders feeds it, so that if the impulse go many times unchecked it becomes the master of the man.

The effects of passion are brought out entirely through disturbance in the organic nervous chain. We say a man was "red" with rage, or we say he was "white" with rage, by which terms, as by degrees of comparison, we express the extent of his fury. Physiologically we are then speaking of the nervous condition of the minute circulation of his blood: that "red" rage means partial paralysis of minute blood-vessels: that "white" rage means temporary suspension of the action of the prime mover of the circulation itself. But such disturbances cannot often be produced without the occurrence of permanent organic evils of the vital organs, especially of the heart and of the brain.

The effect of rage upon the heart is to induce a permanently perverted motion, and particularly that perverted motion called intermittency. One striking example, among others of this kind which I could name, was afforded me in the case of a member of my own profession. This gentleman told me that an original irritability of temper was