Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/261

Rh carefully considered, encounters serious difficulties and only adds to the obscurity of the subject. Are we to understand that the desire for alcohol is due to the "demand for joy"? There never was a time in the history of the world when, quite apart from alcohol, joys were so abundant as they are in America at the present day. The rich have every comfort and luxury and the poor have every humane consideration, while laborers have shorter hours, better pay, better food and better clothes and more books, papers and other forms of entertainment than ever before in the world's history. We are comparatively prosperous, happy and well fed, have abundant leisure and countless comforts, yet it appears that we need 2,000 million gallons of alcoholic liquors yearly to complete our "joy." Furthermore, if this were the correct theory, it would be impossible to explain the lesser desire for alcohol among women, for although at present in America the lot of woman is a relatively happy one, this has not been the case among primitive people, nor in historic times, nor even in other countries at the present time. Her life has been relatively monotonous and laborious and her joys and amusements have been fewer.

But serious psychological objections to this theory appear also. Joy and pleasure are the mental accompaniments of physical wellbeing, of mental and physical health, while alcohol acts as a poison in the presence of all forms of life. Against this apparent contradiction little is gained by saying that the joy of alcohol is an abnormal joy answering to an abnormal or diseased condition. The desire is too universal, too fundamental, so to speak, for that. Or if we say that alcohol brings an immediate and temporary joy, while its poisonous effects are delayed, we encounter two difficulties, first the difficulty of showing what particular kind of benefit corresponds to the immediate and temporary joy, and second the difficulty of explaining on any principles of evolution the desire for a drug whose effects are on the whole injurious—a desire which is so strong and so universal as almost to merit the name of an instinct. This seems to be a kind of deadlock to any further progress in arriving at a theory of alcohol. But the joys of alcohol are evident and its injurious effects are equally evident. It is clear, therefore, that the "demand for joy" theory is only a superficial statement of a certain truth whose explanation lies deeper.

But leaving for the moment the "demand for joy" theory, let us consider the view that alcohol banishes care and drives away sorrow and pain, in other words, that it is narcotic in its action, a kind of. sedative or anesthetic. This theory seems at first sight to account for some of the facts. It is now generally, though not quite universally, admitted by physiologists that alcohol is not a stimulant but a narcotic. It apparently paralyzes the higher brain centers and in thus inhibiting the inhibitory centers produces effects resembling stimulation.