educated man is
more liable to suffer from strong stimulants than the man who is not
educated. Never was there a greater or more dangerous fallacy than that so
often urged, that the thinking functions are assisted by the use of
stimulating liquors or drugs. O, say some, Byron owed a great portion of
his inspiration to gin and water, and that was his Hippocrene. Nonsense!
His highest inspiration came from the beauty of the world and from God.
Lord Brougham, it has been declared, made his most brilliant speeches of
old port. Sheridan, it has been told, delivered some of his most sparkling
speeches when "half seas over." Eugene Sue found his genius in a bottle of
claret; Swinburne in absinthe, and so on. But who shall say what these
great, men lost and will lose in the end by this forcing process? Dr. W.B.
Carpenter, in referring to the supposed uses of alcohol in sustaining the
vital powers, says emphatically that the use of alcoholic stimulants is
dangerous and detrimental to the human mind, but admits that its use in
most persons is attended with a temporary excitation of mental activity,
lighting up the scintillations of genius into a brilliant flame, or
assisting in the prolongation of mental effort when the powers of the
nervous system would be otherwise exhausted. Concede this, and then answer
if it is not on such evidence that the common idea is based that alcohol is
a cause of inspiration, or that it supports the system to the endurance of
unusual mental labor. The idea is as erroneous as the no less prevalent
fallacy that alcoholic stimulants increase the power of physical exertion.
Physiologically the fact is established that the depression of the mental
energy consequent upon the undue excitement of alcoholic stimulants is no
less than the depression of the physical energy following its use. In
either case the added strength and exhilaration are of short duration, and
the depression and loss exceed the increased energy and the gain. The
influence of alcoholic stimulants seems to be chiefly exerted in exciting
to activity the creating and combining powers, such as give rise to the
high imaginations of the poet and the painter. It is not to be wondered at
that men possessing such splendid powers should have recourse to alcoholic
stimulants as a means of procuring often temporary exaltation of these
powers and of escaping from the seasons of depression to which they and
others of less high organizations are subject.