BRAIN-WORK AND THE EMOTIONS. 421 



the typical clergyman we do not speak of such exceptionally liberal 

 men as one often meets in London holds as firmly as ever to the be- 

 lief that all discussions of moral perversion, which deal with it from 

 the side of mere bodily organization and health, are an insult to reli- 

 giona lapse into the black gulf of what he calls " materialism." 



It is not with such persons, however, that we are now concerned , 

 but rather with a class of writers, truly liberal and full of culture, 

 who, nevertheless, cannot get over what seems to them the hopeless 

 divergence between recent physiological doctrines and any systematic 

 teaching of the " higher ethics." To this estimable class belongs the 

 writer of a thoughtful article in the Spectator, on " Nervous Health 

 and Moral Health." His text is the recent discussion originated by a 

 remarkable leader in the Times, which declared that hram-icork does 

 not kill, but that brain-worry especially stifled emotion is the really 

 fatal agent in nearly all cases where overwork gets credited with a 

 death. Let us repeat here that the experience of medical men un- 

 doubtedly shows that this is no fancy, but (with comparatively trifling 

 exceptions) an important general fact. The Spectator does not ven 

 ture to deny this statement altogether, but, accepting it provisionally 

 as correct, argues that such teaching would lead to dangerous results, 

 unless we acknowledged that what is good merely for nervous health 

 may be bad for moral health, and vice versa. We certainly cannot 

 admit this, and we believe that the fears of the Spectator as to modern 

 physiology leading to bad ethics are quite groundless. 



To the writer in the Spectator the danger seems to be that medical 

 philosophers are proposing to extinguish human emotion, and reduce 

 all men to a dead level of intelligent but selfish complacency, reaching 

 the same point, for the sake of preserving health, as Goethe aimed at 

 for the sake of preserving perfect artistic culture or " sweetness and 

 light," as Mr. Matthew Arnold would call it. We cannot, of course, 

 stand sponsors for the original writer in the Times; but we cannot 

 see that this was what he intended to say ; and, at any rate, this is 

 not the voice of modern physiology as we understand it. What the 

 physiological psychologists do affirm is this: That, whereas serious 

 and calm intellectual work is only very slowly destructive to the ner- 

 vous health, emotion, unless directed into proper channels, is highly 

 destructive to the stability of the nervous system. And they further 

 say that the conventional ideas as to the propriety and utility of cer- 

 tain kinds of emotional excitement do visibly bear, in the experience 

 of medical men, the very worst fruit possible. They do not say, as 

 the Spectator hints, that the emotion of repentance for real guilt is a 

 thing to be shunned; but they declare that the habit of self-torturing 

 introspection, which the clergy and teachers are especially earnest in 

 recommending as a means of spiritual purification, is so far from pro- 

 moting the existence of a really high and pure standard of ethics, that 

 it ruins both body and soul, in the majority of cases, wherever it 



