THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 37 



humanity rose to a higher level ; each great raovement being ac- 

 companied by social disturbances of great magnitude and seri- 

 ous import, but which experience proved were but temporary in 

 their nature and infinitesimal in their influence for evil in com- 

 parison with the good that followed. And what the watchman 

 standing on this higher eminence can now see is, that the time 

 has come Avhen the population of the world commands the means 

 of a comfortable subsistence in a greater degree and with less of 

 effort than ever before ; and what he may reasonably expect to 

 see at no very remote period is, the dawn of a day when human 

 poverty will mean more distinctly than ever physical disability, 

 mental incapacity, or unpardonable viciousness or laziness. 



♦»» 



THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 



Bt FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. 



A PHILOSOPHIC advocate of religious tolerance holds 

 that " the most effective way to explode a popular fal- 

 lacy is to explain it." If we should apply that method to the 

 exorcism of the mediaeval specters that still haunt the by-ways 

 of the nineteenth century, we might say that the moral aberra- 

 tions of the middle ages sprang chiefly from the tendency to 

 underrate the moral effects of physical causes. If the chronic 

 despondency of a mediseval dyspeptic reached the phase of sui- 

 cidal temptations, his confessor would advise him to defeat the 

 wiles of the arch-fiend by devoting his leisure to the recitation 

 of a few thousand paternosters. If peppered hash and want of 

 exercise had vitiated the temper of his wife to an unbearable 

 degree, he was instructed to consider the visitation a judgment 

 incurred by his unbelief, or by his opposition to an extra assess- 

 ment of the tithe-collector. The epidemic increase of the alco- 

 hol-habit was persistently treated as a disorder amenable to the 

 influence of prayer-meetings. For nearly a thousand years the 

 history of European morals was, indeed, the history of the 

 efforts and failures of visionaries who hoped to reconcile the 

 promotion of ethical reform with a total neglect of physiologi- 

 cal studies. 



Since the revival of naturalism, however, the tendencies of 

 educational reform make it probable that the progress of moral 

 philosophy will become identified with the development of a 

 new science, thus far only outlined in a few incidental treatises 

 on the interaction of body and mind. The possibilities of that 

 science are suggestively indicated by the results of the statisti- 

 cal studies devoted to one of its branches— the moral influence 



