SUSCEPTIBILITY TO ALCOHOL 289 



sexual craving. The latter are instincts, ' inborn ' characters, which 

 develop inevitably as the body develops, and which, though they 

 may be awakened to activity by fitting stimulus (the presence of 

 food, water, or a particular mate), are not then created by it in the 

 sense meant. In other words, they are not, like the drinker's longing 

 or the boy's desire for tobacco, necessarily dependent on memory. 



481. Mental differences in relation to other narcotics are just as 

 marked as in relation to alcohol. For example, some natives of 

 China are satisfied with a very moderate indulgence in opium ; in 

 others the craving is so strong that, in effect, they commit suicide 

 to gratify it. The insensibility which follows the inhalation of 

 chloroform is a form of intoxication. Most people who have 

 experienced it only once or twice describe the sensations of ' going 

 off' and 'coming to' as horrible. But often pleasure attends 

 wider experience. Some people find pleasure even from the 

 beginning. Once a woman, who was inhaling the drug for the 

 first time, said to me, " You are sending me into heaven." I knew 

 a doctor's servant who was in the habit of stealing her master's 

 chloroform and rendering herself deeply insensible. 



482. The individuals of every species vary from one another in 

 every particular. Probably there is not on earth an individual 

 who is exactly like another in any character. We have seen that 

 men manifestly vary in the sensations aroused in them by alcohol 

 in the amount of pleasure which drinking confers, and conse- 

 quently in the degree in which they are tempted to repeat the 

 remembered experience. Some men who have taken alcohol all 

 their lives experience, apparently, not much more pleasure from 

 the act than they derive from the eating of an apple. Their 

 temptation to deep indulgence is of the slightest. From first to 

 last they are attracted more by thirst or taste than by the cerebral 

 effects. But beyond question the longing awakened in other men 

 is very intense. A woman inebriate, in desperate straits for drink, 

 once procured alcohol by a trick the amputation of her own hand. 

 Pathological specimens in hospital museums, gruesome prepara- 

 tions of cancers, diseased intestines, and the like, have been spoilt 

 because people who had access to them drained the methylated 

 spirits in which they were preserved. 



483. Until very recently the vitally important fact that the 

 degrees in which men are tempted by alcohol differ greatly was 

 hardly recognized. 1 Even now very many well-meaning people, 



1 As far as I am aware it was not recognized before 1896, when I published 

 The Present Evolution oj Man. 



19 



