it the ticking of
the clock in my room and the noise from the street, and no one will
call it harmful. As soon as my attention increases, and I read with
such passion that I forget my engagements with friends and my duties
in my office, I become ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact that
the unbalanced attention makes me by its exaggerated inhibition quite
unfit for my duties, is no proof that the slight inhibition produced
by attentive reading ought to be avoided.

The inhibition by alcohol, too, may have in the right place its very
desirable purpose, and no one ought to be terrified by such
physiological statements, even if inhibition is called a partial
paralysis. Yes, it is partial paralysis, but no education, no art, no
politics, no religion, is possible without such partial paralysis.
What else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm but a
re-enforcement of certain mental states, with corresponding
inhibition--that is, paralysis--of the opposite ideas? If a moderate
use of alcohol can help in this most useful blockade, it is an ally
and not an enemy. If wine can overcome and suppress the consciousness
of the little miseries and of the drudgery of life, and thus set free
and re-enforce the unchecked enthusiasm for the dominant ideas, if
wine can make one forget the frictions and pains and give again the
feeling of unity and frictionless power--by all means let us use this
helper to civilization. It was a well-known philosopher who coupled
Christianity and alcohol as the two great means of mankind to set us
free from pain. But nature provided mankind with other means of
inhibition; sleep is still more radical, and every fatigue works in
the same direction; to inhibit means to help and to prepare for
action.

And are those who fancy that every brain alteration is an evil really
aware how other influences of our civilization hammer on the
neurones and injure our mental powers far beyond the effects of a
moderate use of alcohol? The vulgar rag-time music, the gambling of
the speculators, the sensationalism of the yellow press, the poker
playing of the men and the bridge playing of the women, the
mysticism and superstition of the new fancy churches, the hysterics
of the baseball games, the fascination of murder cases, the noise
on the Fourth of July and on the three hundred and sixty-four other
days of the year, the wild chase for success; all are poison for the
brain and mind. They make the nervous syst