Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/167

Rh superb and matchless systems of military organization are not perfected without thought and effort. Magnificent cities, fed by a network of smoothly running railroads, are not built without thought and effort. Improved systems of agriculture forcing the earth to produce fourfold more abundantly are not devised without thought and effort. Miraculously wonderful cinematographic machines are not invented without thought and effort, nor without thought and effort is every moving thing from the Arctic to the Antarctic in nature and in art photographed and brought in its living and moving similitude to our eyes. Large continental cities are not freed from graft and brought under elaborately perfect systems of municipal government without thought and effort. Great national and international systems of organized labor are not perfected without thought and effort. The day laborer does not hold himself hour by hour and day by day and month by month to his highly specialized and fatiguing work without thought and effort.

These illustrations could be extended indefinitely. In the work of scientific research, in philosophical study, in industrial and mechanical invention, in the building of great systems of schools and universities, in the management of great commercial and industrial enterprises, in journalism, literature and art, we see exhibitions of ceaseless thought and tireless effort. It is an age of hard work and almost without exception it is mental work of a highly specialized kind and involves stress of the highest and most recently developed brain centers.

It was inevitable that disaster of some kind, or a reaction of some kind, should follow upon this high-tension and one-sided life. Something was bound to snap and something has snapped. Nature has overreached herself in her new discovery of the survival value of intelligence. Intelligence, to be sure, has a survival value of almost limitless degree, but intelligence is, as it happens, linked inseparably to a brain, a highly complex, delicate and unstable mechanism, which was originally intended as a motor center for hand, foot and somatic muscles, and not as a center for thought and sustained effort. Furthermore, the brain itself is organically dependent upon stomach, heart and lungs, whose parallel development Nature in her haste to develop her new discovery has neglected.

The form that the reaction has taken in this case is the form which the psychologist sees it must inevitably take, namely, the temporary reassertion of primitive human impulses. The world has had a thinking spasm of unusual severity; it must have a fling. In America, where conditions were much the same as in Europe, the reaction has taken the milder form of amusement crazes. The dance, the moving-picture show, the automobile, the diamond and the gridiron have helped to relieve the tension. The dancing mania, which has swept over the whole western continent like an obsession, is a good illustration of Nature's