290 ALCOHOL 



who think it is in conflict with their schemes of temperance reform, 

 endeavour to push it as much as possible into the background. 

 At any rate it was and is quite ignored in all discussions on intem- 

 perance. Men are supposed to be temperate or the reverse solely in 

 proportion as they exercise, or do not exercise self-control ; or, 

 what is very much the same thing, in proportion as they have or 

 have not been well trained. 1 But since there are men who, very 

 plainly, are intensely tempted by alcohol, this hypothesis carries 

 the corollary that all men who drink at all crave furiously for the 

 sensations awakened by deep indulgence, and differ among them- 

 selves only because some of them exercise strenuous restraint. 

 But let the reader turn to the best of all guides for him, his own 

 experience of life. He is sure to have known many inebriates, 

 men whose desires for alcohol were as those of a shipwrecked 

 sailor for water. Some of them he has seen to struggle desperately 

 if unavailingly against an overwhelming desire. As much as any 

 man they seek to exercise self-restraint. Next let him examine 



1 " It is often alleged, it is still more often assumed that the difference between 

 the sober man and the drunkard is that the one possesses and the other lacks 

 sufficient self-control to enable him to overcome his urgent and masterful desire 

 for drink. The repetition from mouth to mouth, and from book to book, of this 

 obviously false doctrine is one of the most striking instances of the ovine imitative- 

 ness of the human intellect, and of the ingrained habit of yielding unquestioning 

 assent to authority. There are countless millions of sober men and women in 

 the world, all of whom are ready to utter the parrot cry that they are sober 

 because of their superior self-control, because they have the strength to resist 

 temptation ; and this they say in perfect good faith, when, if they would only 

 think for one moment and interrogate their own consciousness in their own 

 experience, they could not fail to know/with irresistible conviction, that in fact they 

 are not tempted to drink at all. Drink has no temptation for them. It offers 

 them no allurement. It yields them no delight. It satisfies no craving. The 

 taste of it finds them as indifferent as it leaves them. They are drink-proof, not 

 because of any superior virtue, not because of any superiority of self-control, 

 but because drink holds out to them no temptation And, not being tempted, 

 they do not fall. They are no more meritorious for not getting drunk than a cat 

 is meritorious for not wetting its feet, or a child is meritorious for not falling 

 to the ground. Many such persons could not get drunk if they tried. The 

 sensations produced by the ingestion of alcohol are to them so unpleasant that 

 they are compelled to leave off long before they have taken enough to make them 

 drunk. If, then, the difference between the drunkard and the sober person is not 

 a difference in self-control, what is it ? . . . The facts are that, on the one hand, 

 when alcohol is applied in solution in the blood to the brain tissue of one person, 

 there arises in that person pleasurable feeling. When applied in solution in the 

 blood to the brain tissue of another person, there occurs in that person no such 

 pleasurable feeling. The feeling is neutral, or is unpleasurable, or is displeasur- 

 able." (Mercier, The Presidential Address on the Physical Basis of Mind, delivered 

 at the sixty-seventh annual meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, 

 July 23rd and 24th, 1908.) 



