over-emphasis of the religious consciousness should be carefully avoided. The simple and sincere suggestion of religious conceptions which may safely be attempted should be joined with an equally wholesome mental and physical life, which is the best assurance of all right-mindedness in the later years of childhood. By such ways as these, and other ways that may be opened up, let us hope that it may be possible to make some small but significant advance in the realization of the part to be played by the home in the moral and religious life, as bound up with the physical life, of our youngest Americans.

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM OF THE INFANT IN RELATION

TO CHARACTER

GEORGE E. DAWSON, PH. D.

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, HARTFORD SCHOOL OF RELIGIOUS PEDAGOGY

The more we know about man's nature, the more it becomes evident that we must push the problems of spirit back to the ultimate sources of the psychical life. Science has long since discovered that the mind is intimately bound up with organic conditions. Such mental arrests as idiocy and imbecility, as well as all the various types of insanity, are known to be definitely associated with states of the brain. The treatment of these extreme abnormalities of mental life and character is based upon the principle of changing the brain-states that lie back of them, so as to secure a healthy discharge of nervous functions.

This modern, and entirely revolutionary, discovery that the soul is dependent upon states of the brain, and that it may be approached most fundamentally through a control of nervous processes, has as yet had little application to the development of the character of children. Most of our efforts in this direction are utterly superficial — as superficial, indeed, as were the efforts of our ancestors in curing idiocy and insanity by exorcising evil spirits, or by punishment. It will some time be realized, however, that moral and religious character depends ultimately upon a healthy development of the child's brain. Back of all our education of human beings is the nervous machine through which education must be accomplished, and through which the soul is to realize itself. If that nervous machine is of good quality in the elements that compose it, and is properly nourished and exercised, so as to insure sufficient vigor and responsiveness, then will the functions of mind and life be discharged in a healthy manner, and then will the soul be able to realize itself as a rational and spiritual being. This is not to reduce spirit to terms of nervous activity. It is merely to assert a demonstrable fact, that man's soul does not realize its powers of intellect, feeling, or will, except through the brain and other parts of the nervous system. The brain of the congenital idiot, or of the imbecile, has never yet permitted the development of a moral or religious character. The brain of an insane man or woman has as its correlate a moral or religious character that is correspondingly insane. The evidence derived from clinical studies of mental disease is conclusive that an imperfectly developed or diseased nervous system is always associated with an imperfectly developed or diseased mind.

If this be true, the moral and religious education of the child properly begins with the building up of a healthy and efficient nervous system. The first six or seven years of life is the period during which nature's work in this direction is largely accomplished. A child of seven years that has a brain healthy, vigorous, and responsive to the right kind of stimuli is far on the road toward a spiritual personality. For such a child has a nervous machine that is adjusted to the things and forces that condition life. Through this machine, the soul may feel and think and act in harmony with the laws of the universe, and thus realize itself in terms of infinite purpose and will. And this is morality and religion.

Such a view of the development of the brain as conditioning spiritual growth is a corollary of the more general scientific view of brain-development in relation to education. Dr. Donaldson, in his book, "The Growth of the Brain," says: "Education consists in modifications of the central nervous system. For this experience the cell-elements are peculiarly fitted. They are plastic in the sense that their connections are not rigidly fixed, and they remember, or, to use a physiological expression, tend to repeat previous reactions. By virtue of these powers, the cells can adjust themselves to new surroundings, and further learn to respond with great precision and celerity to such impulses as are familiar because important." Reuben Post Halleck, in his book, "The Education of the Central Nervous System," says: "Education may be something more, as the writer believes, than modifications in the central nervous system, but it is also true that without these modifications no mortal can be educated. If brain-cells are allowed to pass the plastic stage without being subjected to the proper stimuli or training, they will never fully develop." These writers, the one an expert neurologist and the other a psychologist and educator, are representative of scientific opinion as to the fundamental importance of nervous states in education.

The modification of an infant's brain in the direction of morality and religion depends upon the two great factors that enter into all life - namely, heredity and environment. Whatever may be our opinion of the popular or scientific conceptions of heredity, there can be no doubt that the lives of the parents determine to a great extent the fundamental quality of the child's nervous system. There is no scientific student of mental traits, whether normal or pathological, that does not take into account the hereditary aspects of his problem. If the father and mother have healthy nervous systems, free from natural and acquired defects, the brains of their children are apt to be vigorous and well balanced. Feeble and ill-balanced nervous systems in children have their hereditary

origin mainly in two causes: (1) toxic heredity, and (2) neurasthenic heredity. By "toxic heredity" is meant the inheritance of imperfect nervous structures and perverted nervous functions, due to the use of drugs by the parents or other progenitors. Of these drugs, alcohol is probably the most potent factor in the nervous degeneracy of offspring. According to investigations made a few years ago, over 54 per cent of the insane in Massachusetts had an alcoholic heredity. Drs. Beach and Shuttleworth, who investigated the causes of idiocy, found that, out of 2400 congenital idiots, 16 per cent could be definitely traced to intemperance in the parents. According to a recent Year Book of the Elmira Reformatory, 37 per cent of the inmates of that institution had an alcoholic heredity that was clearly traceable, and 11 per cent more had a doubtful heredity. These statistics are typical of a mass of similar evidence which proves that mental diseases and crime are largely due to the use of alcohol. The significance of such facts for the present discussion lies in this, that the extremes of alcoholic heredity which fill our insane asylums, idiot institutions, and prisons, merely write large what exists in every home where alcohol is used and where may be found children with unstable and feeble brains which no amount of formal moral or religious training can cure.

What is true of alcoholic heredity is probably true, in a modified way, of tobacco heredity. Considering the much larger number of men who use tobacco, and the much more insidious forms of degeneracy it produces, there is little doubt that, in American civilization, tobacco is responsible for as many unstable and feeble nervous systems as alcohol itself. In the Polytechnic School of France, it was found a number of years ago, that the boys who smoked continually lost grade. Dr. Siever's investigations in Yale University more recently showed similar results. Students who used tobacco were stunted in physical development and fell below their grade in scholarship. Such studies, and numerous others, prove that tobacco causes the deterioration of living tissues, and more especially of the brain-elements. Fathers, therefore, who use tobacco in any considerable quantity at least incur the danger of unstable and badly functioning brains. This must inevitably register its effects in the nervous systems of their children. Dr. Talbot, in his book on Degeneracy, says: "Tobacco, in its influence on the paternal and maternal organism, exhausts the nervous system, so that an acquired neurosis results in such a way as to be transmissible."

Nor are such popular and, supposedly, harmless beverages as tea and coffee free from dangers in this regard. The active principle in these beverages, caffeine, is a drug whose effects upon the human organ

ism are well known to physiologists. The head-pressure, nervous excitement, irregular heart-action, insomnia, etc., that result in some cases, even from a slight use of tea and coffee, are symptoms that every one may see and comprehend. But the nervous states that lie back of such symptoms are known only to the neurologist. They point to overstimulated nervous activity, followed by nervous depression and apathy, and ultimately to a deterioration of nervous elements and an enfeeblement of their powers. All writers on toxic degeneracy, such as Crothers, in his Diseases of Inebriety, and Talbot, in his work already referred to, agree in saying that tea and coffee have a distinctly injurious effect upon the nervous system, more especially of women. The Lancet, one of the ablest medical journals in England, stated editorially a few years ago that many of the nervous symptoms occurring in children during infancy are due to the practice of mothers indulging excessively in the use of tea. Convulsions and infantile paralysis are frequently noticed among the children of these tea-tipplers. Talbot says: "Tea produces a grave form of neurasthenia readily transmissible to descendants." Coffee exerts a very similar influence to that of tea. It stimulates the brain to over-activity, renders the nervous elements irritable and unstable, and gradually exhausts their energy. The result in sensitive mothers is doubtless to impair the nervous vigor of offspring and make the latter subject to nervous cravings and excesses of various kinds.

By "neurasthenic heredity" is meant the inheritance of impoverished brains from parents whose nervous vitality has been exhausted. Overwork, excessive child-bearing, sexual exhaustion, mental and emotional friction of all kinds, loss of sleep, luxurious living, and general overstimulation in the lives of men and women produce neurotic children. In both the lower and the higher classes of society, there are everywhere forces at work which devitalize parenthood, and bring into the world children with nervous systems having so little energy and tone that they can never be educated beyond the rudiments of intellectual and moral life, or with nervous systems so unbalanced and unstable that education itself merely exaggerates their eccentricity, waywardness, and perverseness. The poor overwork, bear too many children, and indulge in the grosser vices; the rich live in idleness, evade the responsibilities of parenthood, and indulge in excesses of pleasure until appetites and feelings are jaded and perverted. From both classes spring children nervously defective, which are everywhere the despair of educators and which constitute the greatest menace to civilization.

The fact is that until fathers and mothers have that degree of intelligence and moral idealism which will make them stop the use of all