Excerpt from The Quarterly Review, Vol. 178: January April, 1894 To borrow a term from the arwinians, a civilized man's environment now presses upon him with a force some twenty or twenty-five times greater than it did before the age of steam. Since the Reign of Terror, a fourfold revolution has gone swiftly on its course, in religious, political, economic, and social ideas; nor have any but the inhabitants of sequestered villages escaped the influence which was bent on transforming them. But has the brain developed a power of resistance, or of reflex action, equal to the demands upon it? To keep the balance of humanity, as in the time of Goldsmith and Johnson, the present race of Europeans should have strengthened their nervous centres to a degree which would make them men of genius. Yet not only have they taken no pains to strengthen them, but, by the use of narcotics and artificial excitement, they have deliberately weakened them. Such was the judgment of Morel, - a high authority on mental deterioration. And if, with Bronardel, we take into account the concentrated evil influ ence of our large modern cities, it ought not to astonish us that such exhausted zemperaments breed hysteria or that from hysteria should result the 'intense self-consciousness' which runs, like a red thread, from beginning to end of the literature and the art now under consideration. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.