234 NUTRITIONAL PHYSIOLOGY 



not be inferred that he is stimulated in the best sense of 

 the word; it may be more accurate to say that an agent 

 which is essentially depressing in its influence has attacked 

 first of all the inhibitory centers. Loss of self-conscious- 

 ness is an obvious feature of the reaction, and loss of self- 

 respect is reached by an easy transition. 



A genuine stimulant should be an aid to application. 

 Alcohol, on the contrary, is hostile to perseverance. Our 

 word dissipation, which we use for intemperance, is a very 

 suggestive one. Scattering rather than concentration is 

 the essence of the mental state produced. A keen thinker 

 has said that we tacitly contrast alcohol with coffee, a 

 recognized stimulant, when we acknowledge the difference 

 between the feelings with which we should view the use of 

 one and the other by the engineer of a limited train. We 

 instinctively feel that coffee will favor his unswerving at- 

 tention to duty and that alcohol will make him less reli- 

 able. Alcohol in small quantities leads to inconsequence 

 in thinking and is a handicap to any steady pursuit. 

 On the other hand, the facile changes in the currents of 

 mental life, the lightness and the unexpectedness of one's 

 remarks, may promote social ease and the power to be 

 entertaining. If alcohol is the foe of application it is also 

 the foe of prosiness. 



Too much emphasis can scarcely be brought to bear 

 on the wide disparity between what a man thinks that 

 alcohol does for him and what an impartial study shows 

 that it really does. That "wine is a mocker" is a shrewd 

 observation. The subjective impression is often of an ex- 

 altation of capacity which objective testing fails utterly 

 to confirm. A subject does certain problems before taking 

 a drink of whisky and comparable ones afterward. He 

 says that the second task was done with greater speed and 

 with a nonchalant confidence in his results. The watch 

 says that he was slower, and checking up the work shows 

 that the errors were more numerous. It is evident that his 

 judgment of his own performances is unreliable. This is 

 true also of manual operations. The recent tests made 



