628 PSYCHOLOGY. 



The way of ' experience ' proper is the front door, the door 

 of the five senses. The agents which aifect the brain in 

 this way immediately become the mind's objects. The other 

 agents do not. It wouhl be simjily silly to say of two men 

 with perhaps equal efi'ective skill in drawing, one an un- 

 taught natural genius, the other a mere obstinate plodder 

 in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to their ' ex- 

 perience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly 

 disparate natural cycles of causation.* 



I ivill then, with the reader's permission, restrict the 

 word ' experience ' to processes ivhich in/Iiience the mind by 

 the front-door -way of simple habits and association. What 

 the back-door-effects may be will probably grow clearer 



* Principles of Biology, part in. ehaps. xi, xii. — Goltz aud Loeb have 

 found that dogs beconae mild in character when their occipital, aud tierce 

 when their frontal, braiu-lobes are cut off. " A dog which originally was 

 cross in an extreme degree, never suffering himself to be touched, and 

 erveu refusing, after two days' fasting, to take a piece of bread from my 

 Land, became, after a bilateral operation on the occipital lobes, perfectly 

 trustful aud harmless. He underwent five operations on these parts. . . . 

 Each one of them made him more good natured; so that at last (just as 

 Goltz observed of his dogs) he would let other dogs take away the very 

 bones which he was gnawing " (Loeb, Pfluger's Archiv, xxxix. 300). A 

 course of kind treatment and training might have had a similar effect. 

 But how absurd to call two such different causes by the same name, and 

 to say both times that the beast's ' experience of outer relations ' is what 

 educates him to good-nature. This, however, is virtually what all writers 

 do who ignore the distmction between the ' front-door ' aud the ' back- 

 door' manners of producing mental change. 



One of the most striking of these back-door affections is susceptibilitjf 

 to the charm of drunkenness. This (taking drunkeuness in the broadest 

 sense, as teetotalers use the word) 's one of the deepest functions of human 

 nature. Half of both the poetry and the tragedy of human life would 

 vanish if alcohol were taken away. As it is, the thirst for it is such that 

 in the United States the cash-value of its sales amounts to that of the sales 

 of meat and of bread put together. And yet what ancestral 'outer rela- 

 tion ' is responsible for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only 'outer 

 relation ' could be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speaking, came 

 into the environment but yesterday, aud which, so far from creating, is 

 tending to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting 

 only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong. The love of 

 drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain, evolved for 

 entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought in the moleculai 

 realm, rather than in any possible order of 'outer relations.' 



