Health and Education | Page 6

have had the honour and the pleasure of knowing?
What if intellect, or what is now called intellect, did not make the
world, or the smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying
the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but

only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead,
like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of
brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We
must, in the great majority of cases have the corpus sanem if we want
the mentem sanem; and healthy bodies are the only trustworthy organs
for healthy minds. Which is cause and which is effect, I shall not stay
to debate here. But wherever we find a population generally weakly,
stunted, scrofulous, we find in them a corresponding type of brain,
which cannot be trusted to do good work; which is capable more or less
of madness, whether solitary or epidemic. It may be very active; it may
be very quick at catching at new and grand ideas--all the more quick,
perhaps, on account of its own secret malaise and self-discontent: but it
will be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake
capacity of talk for capacity of action, excitement for earnestness,
virulence for force, and, too often, cruelty for justice. It will lose
manful independence, individuality, originality; and when men act,
they will act, from the consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep
rushing over a hedge, leaning against each other, exhorting each other
to be brave, and swaying about in mobs and masses. These were the
intellectual weaknesses which, as I read history, followed on physical
degradation in Imperial Rome, in Alexandria, in Byzantium. Have we
not seen them reappear, under fearful forms, in Paris but the other day?
I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and shall hold,
to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me to blame and to
judge: because it tells me that these defects are mainly physical; that
those who exhibit them are mainly to be pitied, as victims of the sins or
ignorance of their forefathers. But it tells me too, that those who,
professing to be educated men, and therefore bound to know better,
treat these physical phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy;
who even exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the
weaknesses of fallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most
dangerous of public enemies, let them cloak their quackery under
whatsoever patriotic, or scientific, or even sacred words.
There are those again honest, kindly, sensible, practical men, many of
them; men whom I have no wish to offend; whom I had rather ask to

teach me some of their own experience and common sense, which has
learned to discern, like good statesmen, not only what ought to be done,
but what can be done--there are those, I say, who would sooner see this
whole question let alone. Their feeling, as far as I can analyse it, seems
to be, that the evils of which I have been complaining, are on the whole
inevitable: or, if not, that we can mend so very little of them, that it is
wisest to leave them alone altogether, lest, like certain sewers, "the
more you stir them, the more they smell." They fear lest we should
unsettle the minds of the many for whom these evils will never be
mended; lest we make them discontented; discontented with their
houses, their occupations, their food, their whole social arrangements;
and all in vain.
I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise deeply
with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--But are
not people discontented already, from the lowest to the highest? And
ought a man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy, sinful world as this
is, and always has been, to be anything but discontented? If he thinks
that things are going all right, must he not have a most beggarly
conception of what going right means? And if things are not going right,
can it be anything but good for him to see that they are not going right?
Can truth and fact harm any human being? I shall not believe so, as
long as I have a Bible wherein to believe. For my part, I should like to
make every man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with
themselves, even as I am discontented with myself. I should like to
awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their moral
condition, that divine discontent which is the parent, first of upward
aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that
aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the