MATERIALISM AND ITS LESSONS. 679 



punishment does not and can not in the least reform it, and is per- 

 suaded that there is some native defect of mind which renders it a 

 proper case for medical advice. Where, then, is the fault that a 

 human being is born into the world who will go wrong, nay, who 

 must go wrong, in virtue of a bad organization ? The fault lies some- 

 where in its hereditary antecedents. We can seldom find the exact 

 cause and trace definitely the mode of its operation the study is 

 much too complex and difficult for such exactness at present but we 

 shall not fail to discover the broad fact of the frequency of insanity 

 or other mental degeneracy in the direct line of the child's inheritance. 

 The experienced physician seldom feels any doubt of that when he 

 meets with a case of the kind. It is indeed most certain that men are 

 not bred well or ill by accident any more than the animals are ; but, 

 while most persons are ready to acknowledge this fact in a general 

 way, very few pursue the admission to its exact and rigorous conse- 

 quences, and fewer still suffer it to influence their conduct. 



It may be set down, then, as a fact of observation that mental de- 

 generacy in one generation is sometimes the evident cause of an innate 

 deficiency or absence of moral sense in the next generation. The 

 child bears the burden of its ancestral infirmities or wrong-doings. 

 Here, then, and in this relation, may be noted the instructive fact that 

 just as moral feeling was the first function to be affected at the begin- 

 ning of mental derangement in the individual, so now the defect or 

 absence of it is seen to mark the way of degeneracy through genera- 

 tions. It was the latest acquisition of mental evolution ; it is the first 

 to go in mental dissolution. 



A second fact of observation may be set down as worthy of con- 

 sideration, if not of immediate acceptation, namely, that an absence 

 of moral feeling in one generation, as shown by a mean, selfish, and 

 persistent disregard of moral action in the conduct of life, may be 

 the cause of mental derangement in the next generation. In fact, a 

 person may succeed in manufacturing insanity in his progeny by a 

 persistent disuse of moral feeling, and a persistent exercise throughout 

 his life, of those selfish, mean, and anti-social tendencies which are 

 a negation of the highest moral relations of mankind. He does not 

 ever exercise the nervous substrata which minister to moral functions, 

 wherefore they undergo atrophy in him, and he runs the risk of trans- 

 mitting them to his progeny in so imperfect a state that they are in- 

 capable of full development of function in them ; just as the instinct 

 of the animal which is not exercised for many generations on account 

 of changed conditions of life, becomes less distinct by degrees and in 

 the end, perhaps, extinct. People are apt to talk as if they believed 

 that insanity might be got rid of were only sufficient care taken to 

 prevent its direct propagation by the marriages of those who had suf- 

 fered from it or were likely to do so. A vain imagination assuredly ! 

 Were all the insanity in the world at the present time clean swept 



