316 THE EVOLUTION AGAINST NARCOTICS 



531. "Extravagances of this sort, apart from such direct 

 error as they may engender, are likely to have a mischievous 

 influence, in that they divert attention from the real biological 

 aspects of the question, and make an unnatural divorce between 

 the organic and social causes of alcoholism, which, as we have 

 already pointed out, can only be understood in their mutual 

 relations. 



532. "For the proper apprehension of the question we must, 

 therefore, at the outset get rid of this figment of an inebriate 

 diathesis and replace it by the rational view, that the explanation 

 of inebriety is to be sought, not in any specific tendencies of an 

 abnormal brain, but in the reaction of the normal organism to 

 the ordinary physiological effects of alcohol." 1 



533. Now very obviously the foregoing passage contains 

 numerous very grave, if unconscious, misrepresentations of the facts 

 and reasoning which led to the belief that there is such a thing 

 as selection by alcohol and that it has resulted in protective 

 evolution. Doubtless the alcoholic diathesis, the susceptibility, 

 has often been regarded as a symptom of a diseased mind. 

 Indeed, in England chronic drunkenness is in many cases 

 associated with mental defect, 2 possibly because feeble-minded 

 persons have small powers of restraint. 3 But no reasonably 

 well-informed student of heredity has ever held, as is implied in 

 the passage, that mental defect is a normal accompaniment of 

 the alcoholic diathesis. Were the latter a symptom of a diseased 

 mind we should have to consider all primitive humanity and half 

 the races now inhabiting the world, including the whole of the 

 aborigines of the Western Hemisphere, as mentally diseased. 

 Every one knows men and women of great intellectual power who 

 drink to excess, and it is not believable that North Europeans 

 are on the average more defective mentally than South Europeans. 

 Doubtless, the diathesis, through the indulgence it tends to 

 provoke, is a frequent antecedent of disease, but by itself it is no 

 more a disease than temerity is a wound. 



534. Again, no students of heredity and evolution, not even 

 "less responsible students," have assimilated this hypothetical 

 drink-crave to a peculiarity of anatomical structure, unless by 

 that is meant the belief, common to all psychologists, that 

 mental facts are correlated to cerebral facts. If the " potentiality 



1 Op. cit., pp. 58-9- 



2 See Branthwaite, British Journal of Inebriety, Jan. 1908. 



3 See 699. 



