DR. MAUDSLEY ON PERSONAL AND SOCIAL DEGENERATION.
MBE Materialists are very confident that they base them- selves selves on facts, while they charge the believers in spirit in basing themselves on mere dreams. We are far from deny- ing that they base themselves on facts; on the contrary, we cordially admit that they do so, and on facts which it is often most wholesome for those who hold with us to be forced to take to heart, and not allow themselves to forget. But what we maintain, on the other hand, is, first, that they select their principal facts most arbitrarily ; and then, that they often invent other facts in harmony with them, which are pure fancies, even when they are not positive fictions. Thus in the able and dogmatic book on "Body and Will" which Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co. have just published for Dr. Maudsley, that vigorous physician, after arguing that life results from the evolution of solar heat, and that that source of life must eventually dwindle, draws a most_powerful and hideous picture of the mode in which the gradual dwindling of vitality will show itself in the race,—a picture which gathers all its force from his minute and elaborate study of the phenomena of mental disease. He knows all about the process. "Once the dissolution of things has got full start and way, it will be vastly quicker than the evolution has been ; for the degenerate products of social disintegration will not fail, like morbid elements in the physio- logical organism, or like the poisonous products of its own putrefaction, to act as powerful disintegrants, and to hasten by their antisocial energies the downward course. Not that humanity will retrograde quickly through the exact stages of its former slow and tedious progress, as every child now grows quickly forward through them ; it will not, in fact, reproduce savages with the simple mental qualities of children, but new and degenerate varieties, with special repulsive characters,— savages of a decomposing civilisation, as we might call them,— who will be ten times more vicious and noxious, and infinitely less capable of improvement, than the savages of a primitive barbarism ; social disintegrants of the worst kind, because bred of the corruption of the best organic developments, with natures and properties virulently anti- social." And Dr. Maudsley goes on to illustrate this by descanting on the modern evidence of the degeneration of sound sentiment into what he calls egoistic hyperresthesia,—" howling displays of self-consciousness that are shown now-a-days with respect to the event and the circumstances of death."' This " modern incontinence of emotion " Dr. Maudsley contrasts with "the calm, chaste, and manly simplicity of Homer, as we observe it, for example, in his description of the death of Achilles." As we had never heard that Homer had described the death of Achilles, though be gives us a picture of the dis- satisfaction of Achilles with the world of Shades, we turned to Dr. Mandsley's quotation with interest, and found iu it one of a series of very beautiful modern poems by the Rev. 0. Ogle, one indeed which appeared in these columns nearly two years ago, the only fault of which, if it has a fault, is that, like other poems of the same series, it puts modern states of feeling into the mouth of an antique hero. In truth, Homer, when he deals with such subjects, actually does describe an "incon- tinence of emotion," as Dr. Maudsley would call it, far in advance of the modern sentiment which Dr. Maudsley condemns. Hector himself entreats Achilles to spare his corpse the last indignities in language which a modern warrior would not deign to use ; while the wailing which is raised for Hector is wailing such as Dr. Maudsley would denounce, in the most elaborate medical terms, as the hypermsthesia of sentimentality. Dr. Maudsley has fallen into a very curious pit of his own digging, in his eagerness to show that the disintegration of what he regards as the purely composite personality of man has already commenced. in modern society, and that we may even now see the beginning of the end. He has paid a very high compliment to Mr. Ogle, by gravely mistaking him for Homer ; and has imagined for him-, self in the early world a calm which is much commoner now, while he has attributed to the modern world transports of grief more characteristic of the childhood of society than of the present day.
This blunder of Dr. Maudsley's is, of course, only a blunder in the selection of an illustration. But it is, we think, itself an illustration of the fixed prepossessions and prejudices under which be writes. It is not easy to turn a page of his vigorous book without finding an assumption of the most questionable and absolutely unverifiable kind treated with respect, if it happens to be in keeping with his own materialistic convictions; while all assumptions resting on the opposite view, though there may be really a good deal more to be said for them, are treated with profound contempt. For example, in one place we find Dr. Maudsley suggesting that the sudden change some- times observable from profound depression to cheerfulness in patients with unhealthy brains, may, perhaps, be due to the sudden removal of some " polar displacement" in the" cerebral molecules." He tells us honestly enough that this supposition is wholly " fanciful," but he goes on to argue for it all the same, as "accord- ing with the singularly sudden and complete way in which the whole trouble" [of a melancholic patient] "vanishes sometimes," —which is only another way of saying that as you have a sudden effect you ought to discover a sudden cause, and that the sudden removal of a polar displacement might be such a cause. Yes, and so might the sudden removal of a malign spiritual influence. Dr. Maudsley is extremely contemptuous in speaking of such a hypothetic cause as that, and no one will say that it is a scientific one. But is it not just as scientific as the suggestion
of a polar displacement of which we know nothing, by causes of which we know nothing, and affecting cerebral molecules of which we know nothing P We do know what a malign spiritual
influence means, most of us having had experience of it. But of the polar displacement of cerebral molecules we have had no experience, and if we had, that would be no true cause of the phenomenon, unless we could find out what caused the "polar displacement," and what caused its cessation.
It is the same with the whole theory of social degeneration. Even granting Dr. Maudsley his solar hypothesis as to the true fountain of vitality, he assumes that the necessary result of diminishing vitality will be such a morbid degeneration of the human will, as he has been accus- tomed to observe in the case of mental disease. But since we have in the case of every aged person the unques- tionable phenomena proper to a dwindling stock of physical vitality, if Dr. Maudsley's theory were true that "in the will is contained character,—not character of mind only, as commonly understood, but the character of every organ of the body the consentient functions of which enter into the fall expression of individuality,"—we ought to find the signs of degenerating will in every aged person, no less than in a society fed by in- sufficient solar heat; and we ought to find these phenomena abundant in exact proportion to the decay of these physical powers. And as we understand him, Dr. Maudsley asserts that that is so, for we find him dilating thus on old age :-
"Among these effects [the effects of old age] are the extinction of the ideal in a contracted egoism ; an almost entire absorption in the present and its pursuits, or at any rate, a very small regard to the future, especially that great future which is so near at hand ; a life in sensations and habits ; obtuse or cynical indifference to the opinion of contemporaries or of posterity, if the natural vanity of a vain character has not grown to excess in the decaying soil of senility; oftentimes an intensely persistent grasp of what was possessed, and an obstinate desire to be what he has been, attesting the self- conservative struggle of failing vitality to hold that which threatens to slip from it; decay of all enthusiasms and of the finer moral sensibilities ; incapacity to feel real sympathy with the joys and sorrows of others, or, indeed, to feel deeply any sorrow ; overmuch deliberation in endless repetitions, without executive energy to resolve and accomplish ; no expansive desire or hope to propagate an esteemed name amongst living kind or through the ages, the desire, if any, being a joyless habit."
We can only say that if that is Dr. Mandsley's general estimate of old age—old age studied, not in lunatic asylums, but in the quiet homes of those whose working lives have been noble and pure—Dr. Maudsley has not eyes to see, and cannot be taken seriously as a psychologist at all, so full is he of the psycho- logical prepossessions which he has derived from the study of mental disease. Nor, indeed, is he in this sketch of old age quite consistent with himself, for how can he reconcile the " intensely persistent grasp " of what was possessed which he attributes to old age,—and rightly enough to the old age of selfishness, most absurdly to the old age of generosity,—with the absedce of all "executive energy to resolve and accomplish" which he also attributes to it ? A " persistent grasp " implies a strong resolve to retain, so that resolution in some shape is here attributed to old age and denied to it almost in the same breath.
But Dr. Maudsley's main drift in all this bitter criticism of old age, is to prove that in relation to the social de- generation which he predicts, " the disintegrating process may be expected to take effect first on the highest products of evolution," and we understand this picture to be an attempt
to show that in individuals at least the disintegrating process does begin in the highest functions of the mind.. We maintain,
on the contrary, that just the reverse is true,—that where once the conscience and disinterested affections are enthroned and
steadily served through life, the law is that they continue in
command to the very last--long after the sensations and even the mere sensibilities are decayed—and attest the falsehood of the theory that the personality is a mere compound of the various functions of the body and brain. We do not complain of Dr. Maudsley for holding this, though we do not know what it means, or how any amount of composition of different parts could ever give rise to an ego at all. But we do complain of him for ignoring so many of the facts which go
against his theory, and for giving us this strange travestie of old age as the prelude to his speculation that a similar degeneration may be expected. in man himself, so soon as the stock of vitality poured down upon the earth shall run low. What old age, in its normal form, appears to us to prove is that while sensibility dwindles, the guiding aims of life—whether these be high or low —deepen, and discriminate the true self in clearer and clearer lines. It is simply not true that the disintegrating process begins in the higher centres of life ; and the assertion that it is so, is justified only by the phenomena of disease, not by the phenomena of normal decay. It is as little true, indeed, as it is that the modern poet who has painted for us the calm of Achilles in death, was justified in doing so by any historical evidence that Homer's generation lamented less over such tragedies than our own. So far as we can judge, even if the physical degeneration of the earth under the loss of solar heat be as sure as some astrono- mers regard it, and as Dr. Maudsley seems to believe, the last and austerest portion of man's career on the planet would .pro- bably elicit at once the highest order of virtues and the most odious vices, and present greater characters, contending with their fullest strength against a worse class of antagonists, than any previous epoch. The degeneration would not begin at the highest point, but leave the highest point visible to the last.
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