many striking instances of the kind supplied by history, and the tendency is everywhere manifested about us to-day. The ordinary mind appears incapable of supplying its own initiatives: its activities must receive their direction from some external and stronger intelligence. The average man enjoys an enthusiasm, but is too indolent or feeble, intellectually, to find for himself an object sufficiently novel or imperative to induce in him this pleasurable emotion; when, therefore, a more energetic individual presents and recommends, however unreasonably, some idea or thing as worthy of enthusiasm, his proposal is quite sure to be accepted with acclamations of delight, and great masses of men may follow with docility the originator and his delusion. "Whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion. We see one nation, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire for military glory; another as suddenly becomes crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovers its senses until it has shed rivers of blood, and sowed a harvest of groans and tears to be reaped by its posterity." Examples of such wide-spread delusions are given by the conviction, in the tenth century, that the end of the world was at hand, from which the crusades derived their origin; the medieval belief in witchcraft, lasting for centuries; the commercial delusions known as the South Sea Craze" and the

1

1 Quoted by Chas. Elam, M.D., A Physician's Problems, p. 165. London, 1869.

Mississippi Bubble" of the eighteenth century, and the recent" South African Boom" of our own time. Allusion is often made to the gross superstitions and the strange psychic epidemics of the ages gone by as if they were childish manifestations which the human mind had now entirely outgrown; but we have ample reason to believe that our intelligence is little less prone to folly, than in the dark ages of the past. We know more than did our fathers, but are scarcely wiser than they. Fanatics are everywhere about us. There are individuals innumerable, reputed sane, who ardently accept doctrines, political, social, philosophical, and theological, upon evidence appearing absolutely worthless to the normal or "common-sense" mind. And sad to say, the men whose judgment we bring as testimony against the credulity of fanatics are themselves usually possessed of many crotchets, and must, in turn, be proceeded against, if we would indict all 66 cranks." When we reflect upon our proneness to delusion, the constant unreasonableness of our lives and the mad actions of sane men, there falls upon us some measure of that strange terror which is said to befall those who see their houses totter and feel the earth tremble under their feet, for the very foundations of our safety seem shaken.

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Many persons believe that periodic war is a necessity, if human society would preserve a fairly wholesome life; thus Ruskin holds that war is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men." It may be that, for the present at least, our 1 Appendix 8.

racial development stands in alternating need of both war and peace, although the one tends to brutalize, and the other to render vicious. Each of these mighty factors of civilization serves in turn to arrest the degenerative process induced by the other, and in this lies the main value of war; but to peace we must ascribe likewise another and a greater merit-opportunity for the exercise of man's highest attributes and an incitement to their expansion. The days of universal peace are not at all near, nor may we look for their coming until the base instincts of human nature have been eliminated or subdued by an intelligent self-control. Meanwhile,

whether a people be at war or peace, their deep discontent with the course of their life is strong testimony to the misery of human existence.

We have now touched upon many sad aspects of our life; others of still darker hue have not been broached, as unfit for the general reader. Glimpses of the brighter side are, for the greater number of us, but infrequent episodes. If our sympathies be wide, the moments of our happiness must take a sombre coloring from the general wretchedness of man. Depressing though the picture be, this presentation of human evils is not intended as a hopeless wail, but as an incentive to a vigorous reaction. I believe that the fate before which we now must bow is dependent upon ignorance of the true cause of our unhappiness, and not, in the nature of things, a fate which shall continue inevitable; and that, through a practical application of the knowledge now fast dawning, the race may attain to a far happier existence.

IT

CHAPTER III

THE CAUSE OF HUMAN WRETCHEDNESS

T has been held, from remote ages, that the fundamental cause of all our woe is an inborn tendency toward evil. In the light of modern knowledge, we still retain this old doctrine, although obliged to modify its current interpretation. By the term human evil we understand generally all that is hurtful to the best interests of man, as individual or race. The human tendency toward selfhurt is in part the result of undevelopment, in part of development in a wrong direction; but always it is incorporated within the physical structure wherewith we enter upon this life, and the variations in the degree and peculiar character of this tendency are, in the main, a matter of inheritance.

Until recently it appears to have been generally supposed that the inborn tendency to evil was of equal intensity in every human soul at birth, and that the great differences in the subsequent actions of men were to be explained by social conditions and education-in brief, by environment. This explanation is now unsatisfactory to all who thoughtfully consider it and has been quite generally rejected. We are compelled to believe that the congenital

tendency toward evil is not alike in any two human beings, and the opinion that human character depends essentially upon heredity '—the modifying influence of environment being fully admitted-gains constantly in strength and diffusion.

The writers who belittle the influence of heredity, and exaggerate the rôle of environment, maintain such an attitude, I think, because they are unacquainted with the vast array of evidence bearing upon the point in question; or are blinded to its true import through an unwillingness to accept any doctrine akin to predestination; or perhaps are so hopeless of altering the course of heredity and so sanguine as to what may be accomplished through modifying environment that the latter alone remains for them a matter of interest. Heredity is a difficult study, and its evil influences are obstinate factors in the problem of social reform: it is easier, therefore, to ignore its existence, and the plan of battle appears more promising, when the most formidable enemy is imagined out of the way. Our attention being diverted from the primary cause, we may soon come to regard the merely secondary as the essential. In point of fact, the influence which we must ascribe to environment is, if we exclude the element of inanimate nature, only the influence of heredity in previous generations, for the surroundings into which men are born have been made by those who

1 By the term heredity the author is always to be understood in the broadest sense, as meaning the sum of ancestral influences directly transmitted from parents to offspring, whether as specific tendency or deficient vitality.