3o8 NATURE AND MAN. 



powerful attractions to the present gratification. On the other 

 side is an aggregate of moral deterrents, which, when the atten- 

 tion is fixed upon them in the absence of the attractive object, 

 have a decided preponderance, so far as the desires are concerned. 

 The slave of intemperance is often ready to cry out, " O wretched 

 "man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this 

 " death ? " — and he proves his sincerity by his readiness to take 

 every indirect precaution that does not interfere with his personal 

 liberty. But when the temptation recurs, the force of the attrac- 

 tion is intensified by its actual presence ; the direct sensory 

 presentation makes a more vivid impression than the ideal repre- 

 sentation of the deterrent motives ; and the balance, which 

 previously turned against the indulgence, now preponderates in 

 favour of it. What, then, is it within the power of the Ego to 

 do? On the automatist theory, nothitig. For not only is he 

 unable to call to his aid any motive which does not spontaneously 

 arise, but he cannot make any alteration in the relative strength 

 of the motives which are actually present to his consciousness. 

 He says, to himself and to others, " I could not help yielding ; " 

 and automatism sanctions the plea. Society may be justified in 

 imposing on him either restraint or punishment, alike for its own 

 security and for his welfare ; but no consistent automatist can 

 regard him as an object of the ?noral reprobation which we in- 

 stinctively feel for the self-degraded sot ; and experience shows 

 that the system of external repression almost invariably loses its 

 potency as a deterrent, as soon as the restraining influence is 

 withdrawn. 



Now, although I hold it beyond question that a state may be 

 induced by habitual alcoholic indulgence, in which the unhappy 

 subject of it loses all power of resistance, I affirm it to be 

 " the normal experience of healthy men," that the ordinary 

 toper has such a power in the earlier stages of his decadence, 

 and that he is justly held culpable for not exerting it. This power 

 is exercised in the determinate fixation of the Ego's attention on 

 the deterrent motives which he knows oitght to prevail, and in the 

 determinate withdrawal of his mental vision from the attraction 

 which he knows ought not to prevail ; so that the intensification 

 of the former, and the weakening of the latter give to the claims 



