MORALS. 121 



evidence : certain injuries of the brain have been 

 known to enfeeble the moral sense and leave the 

 intellect little if at all the worse, while other injuries 

 have impaired the intellectual faculty and not the 

 moral. 



If there are separate, set-apart, and specially appro- 

 priated clusters of nerve cells, it is easy to understand 

 what otherwise would be inexplicable, why the intel- 

 lect, under certain circumstances, may undergo im- 

 provement or deterioration or distortion, and the moral 

 faculty remain unchanged; and why, on the other 

 hand, the morals, under other circumstances, may be 

 elevated or lowered or perverted, while the intellect 

 may remain fixed and uniform. 



Probably the most significant characteristics of moral 

 nerve are its mobility, pliancy, and greater facility 

 for change as well as its perhaps narrower range of 

 action. Intellectual nerve power wanders over vast and 

 illimitable and diverse fields ; moral nerve power, less 

 wandering, less vague, lights up a more restricted area. 

 It has been pointed out in a preceding note that the 

 intellectual endowments permit of only limited increase 

 or diminution. It is otherwise with the moral endow- 

 ments. Intellectual nerve is more or less stable; 

 moral nerve is more or less unstable. Intellectual 

 nerve is capable of great and prolonged effort ; moral 

 nerve, well-doing nerve, temptation-resisting nerve, 

 is more easily exhausted. Well-inherited, well- 

 nourished, well- trained, massive moral nerve will it is 

 true tire slowly if at all. It is the reverse with poorly- 

 inherited or scanty or ill-nourished or ill- trained nerve. 

 A clerk of, perhaps, congenitally inadequate moral 

 nerve, or nerve already in some degree spoiled by, say, 

 alcohol, can still, through the instrumentality of his 



