252 THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 



66. Effects of Alcohol on the Mind. Alcohol produces an 

 artificial insanity, in which, according to the quantity taken, 

 the various types of mental diseases are distinctly manifest. 

 The perceptions are bewildered, there is sleeplessness, loss of 

 memory, delusion, clouded reasoning power, and benumbed 

 moral sense following in the train of alcohol drinking. There 

 is also a monomania caused by the prolonged use of alcohol 

 a craving for drink that knows no bounds, and but rarely a 

 cure ; this is dipsomania, or thirst-madness. (Head -Note 14.) 



67. The Impairment of the Will. The direct result of the. 

 taking of alcohol is seen in the loss of self-control. " The worst 

 estate of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and gov- 

 ernment of himself." It is in the formation of the drinking 

 habit that alcohol too often works the absolute ruin of its devo- 

 tee, in both body and mind. It is apt to be a continuous habit, 

 having for its sequel the dethronement of the will. It may be 

 stated, as the rule, that after forty years of age, a man who 

 has formed this habit is unequal by his own strength of will to 

 abandon it. Many men of fine intellectual capacity and amia- 

 ble qualities have become intemperate, and have so continued, 

 as long as their efforts to get free again have not been supple- 

 mented by outside and enforced restraint.* It is for such as 

 these that inebriate asylums have been built. Other hard 

 drinkers drift into violence and crime, and finally find a cura- 



14. Alcohol a Poison of the Intellect. "In the normal state of a 

 man's mind, all the faculties, the imagination, the judgment, the memory, 

 the association of ideas, are regulated by another superior faculty, viz., 

 the attention. The attention of the will is the man himself ; it is the ego 

 which, being in the full possession of the resources of which it disposes, 

 takes them where it will, when it will, to do whatever it pleases. Now in 

 drunkenness, even at the very beginning, the will and the attention have 

 disappeared. Nothing is left but the imagination and the memory, which, 

 left to themselves, without regulation and without guides, produce the 

 most irrational results. " Charles Eichet. 



* " Alcohol in small doses super-excites certain intellectual faculties 

 the imagination, the memory, and the association of ideas ; but it para- 

 lyzes others, especially the will, the reflection, and judgment. Yet, with 



66. What changes are noticed in the mind ? 



67. Give effect of alcohol upon the will. 



