
622 The American Naturalist. LJuly, 
principle, but recently discovered, that the presence of a degraded 
race devolves the degradation of neighboring races. 
The structure of the brain itself shows that expediency regard 
is intellect; the nervous system plainly rules bodily parts. In 
higher and still higher grades of intelligence the connecting 
strands of the brain, the countless tangles of telegraph lines that 
inter-relate these parts, are more complex and numerous ; and the 
main distinction between the idiot and one who is mentally sound 
is that the latter, by the integrity of his mental mechanism, is 
able to better adjust his inner to his outer relations. He is more 
in keeping with his surroundings. So goodness is a form of 
wisdom, after all. Habit and conscience make it possible for us 
to do right for right’s sake, but habit and conscience are the 
product of your environment and what you have inherited. Con- 
science causes the right thing to be automatically performed. 
You do instinctively, and perforce, what before required a motive, 
just as the engineer can manage his machine in the dark and 
without thought, but when he was learning to do so his every 
sense must be alert. This view explains the inconsistencies of 
our nature ; morality is but intellect, and no intellect is completely 
symmetrical. Ideas of propriety vary within wide limits. Disease 
may degrade mind in one way in one patient, and in other ways 
in other patients, depending upon the resistive strength of inher- 
ited traits, and what has been inherited. | 
And this brings us to a consideration of the old saw, “ mens 
sana,’ etc., from the anthropological or physical point of view. A 
superficial consideration would suggest that mind and body must 
be developed symmetrically to accomplish the best results, but 
while this may hold good for mediocrity in both, which is nature’s 
method of averaging things, we can readily see that athletes, 
gymnasts, pugilists unduly nourish and train their muscles at the 
expense of their brains, and that book-worms and thinkers gen- 
erally incline to too much passivity physically. The world has 
reaped advantage from its diseased and bodily imperfect Gibbon, 
Tom Hood, Walter Scott, Sam Johnson, and Byron, though in 
different measures, and from imperfect temperaments such as 
Bacon, Coleridge, Dean Swift, De Quincy. But we should only | 

