This article is the third in a four-part series of the same title. For the preceding articles, see July 1923 and August 1923; for fourth and final article see October 1923.
The revelation in modern psychology, for which we are mostly indebted to Sigmund Freud, is marked by the shifting emphasis and interest from the intellectual to the instinctive, from the descriptive to the behavioristic. It is based upon the application of scientific determination to the mental sphere. It tends to become more and more physiological and biological. It reveals the human mind as subject to natural automatic processes, with sex as the unconscious dynamic and motivating force in all the more important phases of human behavior. Drysdale was not merely a vague precursor of this modern point of view. Though his contribution in this field is slight, he realized the absolute interdependence of bodily and mental health, and cried out for a creative and illuminating psychology which might free individuals from their invisible chains. It was because of his insistence that this realm must be studied as scientifically as the human body, and his belief that mental science must be free of all theoretical and metaphysical tradition, that he may be called one of the true founders of the new psychology.
The spiritual and the physical life of man, he pointed out, are organically united. The one cannot be understood without the other. The physical enters equally with the psychic element in every human question. Insanity and all mental disease, of which there is a particular diseased bodily state to correspond with each one; should all come, he felt, under the patient investigation of the scientist. Drysdale foresaw the present development in psychology in indicating that the true analyst must be familiar not only with physical habits, but with mental habits also. Just as psycho-analysts are able to substantiate and illuminate their discoveries by examples drawn from literature and art, history and biography, so Drysdale pointed out that in studying human nature the scientists, to understand the general cause of health and disease, must become acquainted with the world of creative expression. True scientists "should seek to enter into the thoughts of religious and moral thinkers; for all of them are in their own sphere physicians, and their every thought has a physical and moral import." To make any advance in this field, he pointed out, perseverance and the combined effort of many workers are needed. Medicine must be combined with other sciences, and, until the public is as well informed on physical as on psychic subjects and as thoroughly conversant with their paramount importance, we cannot expect any true progress.
He also saw the advance of the method of analysis, in encouraging the patient to reveal himself. Any true understanding of mental disease or unbalance, he felt would be barren and incomplete without this self-revelation, just as morality and religion were barren and incomplete before men began to think on these subjects for themselves. He deplored the fact that very few medical men had ever thought of allowing their patients to speak for themselves in their diagnoses. Intent on arriving at physical facts and physical conclusions, physicians of his day paid apparently little attention to the mental state of the patient, which, as he pointed out, forms no less a part of the disease. In questioning a patient they sought to bring him as soon as possible to the physical point, "checking his digressions and the out-pouring of his suffering heart." On the other hand, the psychology of that artificial era was as barren and unfruitful, as we could well expect it to be. It limited itself, as any reader of the old textbooks remembers, to descriptive analysis of intellectual and mental processes, with no reference to the unconscious physical or instinctive behavior of the individual.
Drysdale was one of the first to see that these two things, to be of any real benefit to humanity, must be united and synthesized into a new science. The modern analyst has to base his therapy upon the ever-increasing revelations the individual is able to make. Drysdale foresaw some such method as this by speaking of the value of the patient's digressions, confessions and outpourings. He realized that the physician and science were losing in a great degree not only by the silencing of the feelings, but also by their lack of insight into the psychology of health and disease. This, he insisted, is as valuable a part of medical knowledge as any other, and as important for the prevention and treatment of disease and the advancement of health. Every physical state has its peculiar mental one, and to discover what this is, and the influence on the mind of all bodily states, such as hysteria and insanity, is a most essential branch of medicinal science. This psychology of health and disease is to be obtained only by a study of every individual's mind compared with his bodily condition, and a full knowledge of this can be arrived at only by his own revelations. We want a whole man to sympathize with, not merely a body or a soul.
"How few subjective records of physical life are to be found in history!" he exclaimed. "Among the numerous autobiographies that have been written by so many noble human beings, who has given us any but the most meager details of his physical life, even though its history may have been the most extraordinary, the most sadly eventful of the twin parts of his nature? Hence do all these men present to us most imperfect pictures. Through all the tissues of their loves we do not know what physical threads have been interwoven, and therefore we can pass no satisfactory judgment on themselves or their actions. But how immensely does the world lose by not having the fruits of their physical as well as their moral experiences! Had their penetrating minds been as keenly directed to the physical goods and evils they encountered as to the mental ones, had they used, each in his own case, the subtle insight which personal experience alone gives, would the world have been in as wretched state as it is, with so low a physical standard that health is not health, that there is a skeleton in every house, and a disease, secret or open, gnawing at the vitals of almost every one of us! Would we still be stumbling on from age to age in the same erroneous tracks, and falling one after the other, like sheep, into the same physical pitfalls? . . .
"If we will not remain thus ignorant, we must imbue our minds equally with physical knowledge. We must study the language of the body, a language not confined to an age or a nation, but wide and universal as humanity, in order that we may attain to a higher self-consciousness."
He reverts time after time, in the "Elements of Social Science," to this necessity of a new psychology. One chapter is entitled "Subjective Medicine," another "Mental Disease," while another chapter on hysteria seems to me to be fundamentally in agreement with the epoch-making study of Freud, published in 1895, the first book of the great Viennese pioneer. In his chapter on "Mental Disease," George Drysdale points out that the mind, exactly like the body, operates according to fixed natural laws. Sorrow in the mind corresponds to pain in the body. In Freud's first book "Studien über Hysterie" the point was made that "sexuality plays a leading part in the causation of hysteria." When we recall that Charcot was indifferent to the psychic side of his cases, that he regarded the recognition of a sex element in the causation of disease as degrading, and that Freud and Breuer in 1895 first launched the doctrine of sexual suppression, which is now the foundation pier upon which the whole structure of the new psychology rests, we can gain some sense of Drysdale's importance as the true pioneer of the whole modern outlook.
Verification of this fact is to be strikingly found in his chapter on mental disease and hysteria. He makes the unqualified statement that a morbid sexual state--both physical and mental--lies at the root of hysteria. Compare this with the statement made by Freud in his first book that "the great majority of serious neuroses in women arise from the marriage bed." With none of the equipment of modern psychology and modern science at his command. Drysdale nevertheless reveals a definite and concrete insight, stated in unequivocal terms, concerning the hysterical and neurotic character. He asks us to analyse the peculiar mental and physical phenomena of hysteria, and to consider the disturbing influences which the systematic denial and repression of natural desire must have on the delicate and susceptible girl. He says it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this suppression is the main cause of the disease: "The natural emotions are checked and thrown back upon themselves, and it is inevitable that they should become disordered and their disorder gradually implicate the whole nervous system." How closely he anticipates the very phraseology of the twentieth century psychology is indicated in this striking statement: "The stream of feeling, instead of being allowed to flow onward in its natural channel in the light of day, gladdening and fertilizing all around, is pent up in the gloomy secret caverns of the mind, to cause there a deluge and desolation. That, which should have been the young girl's pride and delight, becomes her shame and torture; she must conceal and studiously repress her eager and beautiful emotions; and can we wonder that bewilderment and timidity and impotence result? Nature cannot bear this constant state of slavery, and ever and anon she shows in the hysterical convulsions, in the wild delirious excitement of nymphomania, that she will not be repressed." He realized that an age of spiritual Puritanism and repression was responsible for the inevitable spread of hysteria and the increasing numbers of neurotic women. He saw that rank and morbid growth of sexual passions was the outgrowth of these suppressions. Happiness is a sign of moral health; joy and sorrow, according to Drysdale, are our guides to truth showing us where we are right and where wrong in the exploration of our being. He saw long before the advance of modern psychology that the mental element plays as important a part as any other in the causation of physical disease; and to cure the latter, it is just as requisite to apply remedies to the mental as to the bodily state. To do this, he said, we must first be able to recognize what is the mental disease and then to treat it according to the principles of mental health. Our ignorance of the laws of our minds has involved us, body and soul, in ruin. People pride themselves on their woes, and glory in their contempt of health. Even to-day we have not outgrown this pride in sorrow and disease.
But Drysdale insisted, like the most advanced of modern psycho-biologists, that the human body in its interacting mental and physical aspects is the touchstone of moral truth; that its health or disease is "tangible and demonstrable." We see that joy and all the allied feelings are linked most closely with the physical health and wellbeing, whereas sorrow and all its miseries cause derangement and ill-health of the bodily functions in a measure exactly proportional to their intensity and continuance." He saw that the great need of his time, as it is still of our own, was to attain a true idea of what is health and what is disease. The physician of mind and body cannot effect a cure if there is lurking in the physical or mental system, a disease or derangement which is not recognized, and which may be at the bottom of all the symptoms. He saw that the true origin of a great many physical diseases is in reality to be found in depressed or anxious state of mind. In this way he preceded the modern theories of complexes and suppressions, of morbid fears and compulsions. Thus he urged upon physicians to pay equal attention to mental disorder and to seek the true roots of physical and mental unbalance.
How wide-spread the action of conventional sexual suppression and repression as restrictive and enslaving agencies upon human nature, was fully realized by Drysdale. He saw this expressed in a morbid curiosity caused by the dense ignorance and inhibitions, which gave rise to the demand for prurient and stupid books published to gratify the sexually starved; in the degradation and corruption of minds; in the infantilism and underdevelopment of men and women. Because of this childish curiosity and ignorant imagination; because of the degraded feeling of mystery, shame or disgust, varied only by vulgar pretences of knowingness, the society of his time was grossly perverted on all sexual matters.
Drysdale insisted that the laws of mind are not one whit less definite and invaluable than those of the body. He saw that if psychology was to make any advance it must give up its metaphysical and supernatural assumptions. There is no thought, no emotion, no instinct within us that is not subject to definite mechanisms, as certain and invariable as physical or chemical reactions. He realized that the psychology of his day was still in a rudimentary and even stagnant state. "Its very first fundamental axioms are not admitted, but all is involved in a paradoxical mystic supernatural obscurity."
It was his idea that the two great natural guides to the understanding of mental health and disease are joy and sorrow, corresponding to the feelings of pain and pleasure in the body. The ordinary standards of moral excellence were obviously unhealthy, according to Drysdale. Many of the characters most admired by Victorian moralists were to him infected with disease. The great crying need in mind as well as body, he insisted, is not humility nor spiritual sentiment, but self-reliance, expressive energy and an active enjoyment of life--in a word, health. A true enjoyment of moral and spiritual nature, Drysdale claimed, could only be obtained by the comparative examination of the minds of all living beings and by tracing our faculties upward from their simple expressions in the lowest animals to the very most complicated state in humans. Until this is done, he was convinced that there could be no real psychology. "The science of comparative psychology," he wrote, "though it has yet scarcely an existence, opposed as it has been by our narrow conception of the human mind, will ultimately be recognized as equally indispensable with comparative anatomy in order to attain a true knowledge of our nature." In this statement we find in Drysdale a striking anticipation of the new psychology with its studies of myth, folk-lore and primitive man.
This article is the first of a five-part series of the same title. For following articles see Aug. 1923, Sep. 1923, and for art IV and V Oct. 1923.
George Drysdale is perhaps the greatest pioneer of our modern conception of Birth Control, because he was the first to approach this great problem from the point of view of individual and social psychology. He saw, more clearly than any of his predecessors, the great necessity of a new science and psychology of sex. He revitalized the theory of Malthus by lifting it out of the sphere of political economy, and vindicating Birth Control from the point of view of human and individual need. He discarded the old metaphysical preconceptions of political and theological dogma, and insisted upon the necessity of scientific and biological study of human instincts and needs. In studying this great and forgotten achievement, we must remember that it was wrought by a young man still in his twenties. Also, that "The Elements of Social Science" was first published in 1854, long before the crystallization of modern evolutionary science, in the very darkest days of the Victorian era. This explains why many of the most illuminating points in the vision of George Drysdale fell on stony ground. He was so much in advance of his day that by the time European thought had caught up to him, his great book had been discarded or forgotten. I hope to show, for instance, in the course of the present study, how closely Drysdale predicted the technique and aims of the Freudian school of psycho-analysis. Nevertheless, in spite of the neglect that Drysdale has suffered, we must not minimize the tremendous influence exerted by "The Elements of Social Science" throughout the civilized world during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Nietzsche remarks that every philosophy is, in a certain sense, a confession or an autobiography. If this is true, the "Elements of Social Science" reveals an unusually attractive, vigorous personality, uninhibited by the restraints and repression of the harsh and Puritanical environment in which he was born and brought up. Born in Edinburgh in 1825, the son of the Treasurer of the City of Edinburgh, Drysdale revealed from childhood all those exceptional qualities that we are accustomed to associate with the term "genius." He evinced such great power of intellect that his teacher, Mr. Musgrave, in the Circus Place School, named him, for his rapid progress in elementary studies, "King." He passed seven years at the Edinburgh Royal Academy, obtaining the highest prizes in all his classes. At the time of his death, November 19, 1904, his brother, Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, declared that the medals and books given to his brother for merit formed a collection and a library in themselves. After seven years at the Edinburgh Royal Academy, George Drysdale studied at the University of Glasgow, and obtained honors equally from all the professors there. Shortly after the death of his father, George, with Charles Drysdale and their brother-in-law, made a tour through France and Switzerland. The younger brother speaks of George's pre-eminence in all physical and outdoor sports, just as he was pre-eminent in his studies. This splendid love of physical perfection and activity, combined with intellectual pursuits, is expressed throughout his book.
Like all of the young thinkers of the early half of the nineteenth century, the Drysdales became interested in the study of political economy, which had become the center of most of the intellectual activity of that time. George Drysdale took copious notes of the works of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Chalmers, Whately and the two and Mills. Returning from the continent he resumed his residence in Edinburgh, where he graduated in medicine.
"The Elements of Social Science," written at the age of twenty-seven, is the living monument of his exceptional youth and joyous vitality. It has been criticized as being, from our modern point of view, unscientific. Yet in spirit it is truly not lacking in this quality. We must not forget that scientific details and discoveries keep changing our point of view; and we must at least credit Drysdale with an illuminating foresight into the discoveries and scientific interests of our own century.
The young man hurried down to London in the hope of immediately finding a publisher. It was not so much personality and egotistical pride in his own book that made him do this; he did it in a truly visionary spirit. He felt he had expressed the truths of which humanity was in dire need. Perhaps he did not realize the extent of his own iconoclasm. He felt that he was truly following in the footsteps of the great Malthus and the two Mills. A good deal of the "Elements of Social Science," it is true, is a restatement of the principles and convictions of those early pioneers in social reform. But imbedded in the closely printed pages of this astonishing book there is ample evidence of George Drysdale's realization of the great fundamental and central truths of human nature.
Needless to say, he found great difficulty in finding a publisher for his book. In 1853 Great Britain was laying the foundations of Victorian prudery; and it is not surprising that such a book as the "The Elements of Social Science" was refused by all reputable publishers. But at length, by a lucky chance, Drysdale discovered Edward Truelove, a free-thought bookseller, living at that time near Temple Bar. Mr. Truelove undertook the printing of the work. Edward Truelove, we may note in passing, possessed scarcely less courage and bravery in his own particular field than the Drysdales themselves. He was vitally interested in the neo-Malthusian movement. He suffered imprisonment for publishing, not the "Elements of Social Science," but other works of the same character. The dauntless courage of the early English Malthusians opens a fascinating chapter in the history of human thought.
The "Elements of Social Science" was published anonymously, not merely in its first edition, but in all the editions printed during George Drysdale's lifetime. An edition appeared in 1905 with George Drysdale's name in parenthesis under the pen-name of the author--"A Doctor of Medicine." In his preface to the first edition, Drysdale confessed that "Had it not been from fear of causing pain to a relation, I should have felt it my duty to put my name to this work; in order that any censure passed upon it should fall upon myself alone." The "relation," as we may guess, was his mother. Charles R. Drysdale, who inserted a brief memoir of his brother in the posthumous edition, tells us that George wrote anonymously, at first on account of his dislike to give pain to his mother by his avowal of heretical opinions in theology and traditional morality, and finally because, his health becoming weaker, he disliked those wordy disputes which interfered with "that philosophic tranquility so necessary for thinking out the different problems of social life."
George Drysdale devoted all the remaining years of his life (he died at the age of seventy-eight, November 19, 1904) to the translation of his book and its publication in the other European countries. To do so, he made himself familiar with most of the Continental tongues, even with Russian, a feat which was rendered possible only by his deep studies in language and science. He was thus enabled to criticize the style and expression made use of by his translators, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Danish. In later years, with the appearance of each successive edition, he added much material to the book, but the great fundamental truths remained unchanged. With his characteristic, challenging boldness, Drysdale confessed that he did not make the slightest pretention to have offered any comprehensive or adequate exposition of social science. He aimed instead to be suggestive and stimulating. He acknowledged his indebtedness to Mill's "Logic" and to Comte's "Positive Philosophy." He dissented from Comte on most of the vital points of moral and social doctrine, but he expressed the profoundest admiration for the manner in which the French Positivist carried out the leading ideas of his great work. He agreed that the first need was to emancipate the human mind from supernaturalism, to prepare the way for a great intellectual regeneration, when human life might be governed by sincere and openly expressed convictions.
In the years following its first appearance, this anonymously published book gained a wide European reputation; but due perhaps to its anonymous publication, this reputation became mostly an underground one. We find little reference to it in the revolutionary literature in which the great spiritual heretics of the latter half of the nineteenth century found expression. Drysdale, nevertheless, was a true precursor of the dynamic Dionysianism of Nietzsche, and of all our modern multiform striving for intellectual and psychological freedom.
By 1880, six German editions had appeared; by 1881 four Italian editions; while in France the book was published both in its entirety and in parts. Paul Robin spoke of it as one of the "bibles of humanity," while M. Robin's son-in-law, G. Hardy, himself made a translation of that section entitled, "Poverty, Its Only Cause and Its Only Cure." In Great Britain, the British colonies and America, more than 19,000 copies were sold. The great virtue of the book, according to Havelock Ellis, is that it brought to the attention of many, who had no means of intelligent information, the importance of sexual science.
Charles Bradlaugh recommended it to the members of the International Workingmen's Association (the first Internationale). The
Examiner spoke of it as "the only book that has fully, honestly and in a scientific spirit recognized all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and fearlessly endeavored to find a practical solution." The British Journal of Homeopathy in 1860 spoke of Drysdale's book as the most remarkable one in many respects the writer had ever read. This conservative editor thought that some of Drysdale's remedies tended rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction of society; but nevertheless admitted the benevolence and philanthropy of its motives.One of the great admirers of the book who was undoubtedly influenced and stimulated by its ideas was the distinguished Paolo Montegazza of Florence. Montegazza wrote of Drysdale in the Medico Di Casa, 1874: "A foe to all hypocrisy and prejudice, the author of the 'Elements of Social Science' calls things by their real names, and shrinks only from the excessive sufferings and privations to which the poor children of Adam are condemned. He is firmly convinced that to measure human fecundity in accordance with the economical production of families and nations is the most certain means of destroying pauperism and all forms of want; and in this perhaps he is in error, for the evils of modern society have many sources, and with the drying up of one (perhaps even the most fruitful), another and another would present themselves, which only the combined and constant labours of future generations will, perhaps, be able to overcome. However this may be, the courage with which the author faces one of the most formidable problems of human society is most praiseworthy. Human morality is gradually changing its centre of gravity to rest upon a more solid and durable basis. In this new morality, the doctrines of Malthus and those of the author of the 'Elements of Social Science' must also have a large share. In the place of the alms-giving which humiliates, in the place of that charity which caresses an evil that it does not know how to cure, there will be substituted preventive philanthropy, which by studying want and suffering in their most hidden and deep-seated springs, will be able radically to remove them. Jurisprudence, medicine and morality follow the same movement, are aiming at the same end--to prevent rather than to cure."
In Germany and Holland likewise, the book aroused much discussion, praise as well as adverse comment. Though little spoken of in public, it was, nevertheless, to produce a quiet, lasting effect. The Konigsberger Hartungsche Zeitung (December 4, 1871) confessed that "whatever may be said against this fearless laying bare of the most intimate relations of social life, and against his whole theory--purely and undisguisedly materialistic as it is--even the opponent of Dr. Drysdale will be unable to deny him the merit of scientific closeness of reasoning; and what is quite as important, of warm and zealous philanthropy. He will rather honor the moral courage and mental energy with which the author must have had to work his way out of the bewildering maze of hitherto unsolved problems and conflicts to a conviction so logically consistent, so luminous and yet so opposed to established institutions and to the moral sentiments in which men have been brought up."
In probing into the deepest causes of human misery and unhappiness, in pointing the way to a new emancipation, a truly spiritual and physical freedom, Drysdale is never irritated, never fault-finding, never seeking to blame individuals or classes. This is a point well worth remembering, when we compare his work with that of other leaders who use the weapons of invective and angry attack against their enemies.
Further evidence that this remarkable mind was truly "future piercing" is to be found in his essay on war, published in 1881. George Drysdale was fully conscious that the great principle of restrictive fecundity might give, if put to practice, new orientation to individual and social activity. The intensive culture of the human race, as opposed to nationalistic and racial imperialism, eliminating the need and controlling the cry of national expansion and territorial aggression, might do much to wipe out war as a fearful remnant of barbarism. He saw that international relations were then in an essentially chaotic state, and that war was the natural and inevitable result of competitive armament and of international relations based on secret agreements. He discussed the question of the general reduction of armaments, of a league of nations or confederation of states and of the place of international armies. He saw that disarmament could be only a palliative, and not a cure, for present evils, which today, as we know, are even more aggravated than in the days when he was writing.
This is the final article in a five-part series. For parts I to III see July 1923, Aug. 1923, and Sept. 1923.
Bound up with this illuminating and suggestive idea of joy and sorrow as the natural guides to the understanding of health and disease, is Drysdale's inspiring yet thoroughly well based comprehension of woman's nature and needs. His feminism is not based upon sentimental chivalry or romantic ardor. His defense of women is the logical outgrowth of his penetrating understanding of sexual science and human nature. Just as the age-long ignorance and stupidity concerning sex have held men's minds in bondage and subjected their bodies to pain and disease, so their waste of the great creative power of women has hindered their own mental and physical development. Mankind, wrote Drysdale, can never have a comprehensive view of any subject until the mind of woman, equally with that of man, has been brought to bear upon it. He foresaw the danger of attempts to lessen or minimize constitutional differences in men and women. The two sexes have different points of view, different thoughts, feeling and modes of judgement; and no theory of life, nor of any part of it, it was his contention, can be complete until the distinct views of each have been formed on it, and mutually compared. In enslaving and degrading woman, in limiting her sphere of activity, men in ages past just as surely enslaved and degraded themselves. Freedom, for Drysdale, is its own reward; and if men could only be brought to realize how much they would benefit by freeing women from ancient bondage, there could be no opposition to political, economic and psychological emancipation. " No religion, no moral or physical code, proposed by one sex for the other," Drysdale wrote, "can be really suitable; it must work out its laws for itself in every department of life." Much of our contemporary propaganda defeats itself or remains purely superficial, because it confines its activity to methods devised by men. Women, as Drysdale says, must work out the laws of their own nature in every department of life. Women continue to regard themselves and the universe through men's eyes, Drysdale pointed out. They have developed their own natures most imperfectly. The great need is for them to discover their own moral, intellectual and physical relations to all parts of nature. While there is no subject which man has conceived or shall conceive and pursue that shall not be open to woman, nevertheless into all these fields she must bring her own individual and feminine power. "Innocence, purity, chastity, delicacy–-let us rather read, ignorance, morbidity, disease and misery! How long shall these symbols of moral character hang about the neck of woman?"
Drysdale's vision of the new woman, the creature of a new and healthy race, was first of all as person in the deepest sense of this word, and individual of dignity, liberty and independence; and, as such, equal companion both of men and of children. He protested as vigorously as anyone who has since written or thought on the subject, against the terrific waste of women's lives and energy. Generations of women enslaved by education and tradition, by the crippling idea of chastity and female decorum which bound them like a chain wherever they moved, and prevented them from daring to think, feel or act freely or impulsively! "She must not do this. She must not study that. She has nothing to do with a knowledge of her own frame or its laws. She must not read the works nor acquire the knowledge that is open to men. She must not sport, not play boisterously, nor go out unattended, nor in the evening walk along the street, nor travel alone, nor make use of a thousand and one privileges which are open to the more fortunate sex." Customs have surely changed in the sixty-six years since these words were written; yet in the deepest, most important phases of women's lives, women have not yet attained the essential and all-important freedom. Drysdale at least saw that no true feminine morality could be based on an existence spent in hiding from the inevitable–which, in spite of convention, meets us at every step through life. By their enslavement to man-made conventions, he saw sorrow and mental disease blighting the young women of his time. Of the slow, wasting tortures endured for centuries by humanity there was none more painful for George Drysdale to contemplate than those endured by generation after generation of women.
He saw everywhere the same poignant tragedy; everywhere happy young girls, full of life and hope, entering womanhood–-and year after year condemned to an aimless existence without any outlet for the expression of their passions and affections. He saw their natural beauty and enjoyment of life in innumerable cases droop and fade, replaced by uneasy, discontented and unnatural restraint. He saw fretfulness and capriciousness take the place of buoyancy and health. He saw hysteria and all the gloomy train of sexual disease claim these women as their prey. He saw their short-lived dream of romance and poetic love converted into the dull reality of a monotonous and unhappy existence. He saw the iron of their invisible chains eat into their very souls.
He saw women doomed to the futile attempt of animating and making real the meaningless "virtues" imposed upon them by men, when they should have been filling their birthright of expression and creation. He wanted to substitute for this shadowy sentimentality and other-worldliness "a healthy and happy worldliness." "Here is the scene of all our human joys and sorrows, our real trials and triumphs," he was led to exclaim, "not for women only, but for all of us is Mother Earth our paradise, our everlasting abode, our heaven and our infinity! It is not by leaving it and our real humanity behind us and sighing to be anything but what we are that we can become ennobled or immortal. Is this our gratitude for all that has been done for us, for the grandeur and sublimity with which our life is surrounded?"
"We cannot be happy," Drysdale cried to the men of his time, "unless women be happy, and it is impossible for women to be so if they cannot study and reverence their relation to all the rest of nature."
The great thing for women, as well as for men, to realize was, according to this Victorian heretic, that nothing can come to us from another. Everything we have we must owe to ourselves. Our own spirit must vitalize it. Our own heart must feel it. We are not passive machines–-women any more than men–-who can be lectured, guided, molded this way or that. We are living beings with will, joys and comprehension to be exercised for ourselves at every step in life.
All the sciences, all the arts, wait at present woman's hand and thought to give them new life and impulses, and none solicits her attention more imperatively than medicine. We are just beginning to realize the deeper truth of this statement of Drysdale's. But he did not, we must emphasize, believe that woman's freedom, physical as well as mental, could ever be attained merely by political action, by the exercise of suffrage, or any of the other steps that have since been publicly taken. Women, he knew, must awaken themselves, must voice and create new demands and new interests. He saw that after the first flame of self-reliance and independence had been kindled by her intense feelings there usually ensued a period of doubt. Irresolution, long passive habits, and traditional attendance upon the opinions of others usually reassert themselves after a short and agonizing struggle. Even the woman who has asserted her freedom often falls back into the accustomed beaten tracks, and her noble aspirations for the unknown and untried are dissolved like melting vapor. Man has been for ages shaping his model of the female, physically and psychically, dwelling upon and endeavoring to elevate and perfect this ideal, as it appeared to him, instead of permitting woman to develop and express her own inherent nature.
Just as we can only arrive at a true and complete understanding of our psychic nature through a complete understanding of sex in its most unpleasant as well as its sublimest forms, so woman can only attain complete understanding of herself by facing the realities of life. Drysdale thought that the study of medicine would be of the greatest advantage to women. The mysteries of the body with its thorough study of its decays, its putrescences, all of these subjects from which woman's uncultivated imagination had hitherto shrunk in alarm or disgust, would be, he realized, with great spiritual insight, the surest and most complete way to break down the wall of restraint and inhibition which had bound her.
Woman must learn to shrink from nothing and from no human being; she must learn to regard all with love and reverence, totally irrespective of their actions, for in this consists the true character of the physician of the soul or the body–-not to hate and reproach any, but to love and succor all.
Many of Drysdale's ideals are already well on the road to becoming realities. He was one of the earliest Victorians to protest against the system of education which prevailed in those days for girls, and which was derided, as we know, by most of the great novelists. He knew that this educational system must be scrapped. The first essential, he thought, for girls and young women was that their bodies should be strengthened, just as those of boys and young men, by active sports and exercises such as all young people delight in. "They should be taught that physical strength, courage and blooming health are as excellent and desirable in women as in men, and they should learn to take as much pride in the physical as in the mental virtues. It is not for themselves alone that they love their bodily powers, but for their future offspring also. Pale and sickly mothers beget pale and sickly children." He protested against the ignorance and spurious delicacy artificially created and fostered in women, and which necessitated the same deplorable qualities in men. Freedom is the dynamic motive in everything that Drysdale advocates, and he comes back again and again to the necessity for absolute freedom in the discussion of sex. Woman, he emphasized, must be able to discuss the great central facts of life equally with man, because to her they are more essential than any other. It is imperative that woman's point of view must be considered more predominantly than man's. If girls are thus trained, in possession of a powerful and healthy frame, a healthy mind invigorated by sound knowledge for their guidance in life, they will enter upon womanhood with the fairest prospect of happiness, development and self-expression.
It is not necessary to interpret Drysdale's championship of Birth Control and neo-Malthusianism, except in so far as he reveals it as a method of individual physical and psychic emancipation. This phase of his work is full of suggestion and anticipates our modern point of view, but throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with Malthus and John Stuart Mill, men and women were thoroughly in the habit, in dealing with this subject, of thinking and speaking in the terms of politics and economics. They spoke of the "population" question that stemmed from Malthus and the Malthusian doctrine; and whatever interest they had in individual and feminine emancipation was rather with the object of making the Malthusian theory workable and adaptable than of approaching the idea of Birth Control from the point of view of inherent human needs and deep-rooted desire.
Drysdale himself was perhaps not thoroughly conscious of the immense advance he himself had made over his predecessors and contemporaries; yet throughout his book there is ample evidence that he realized the futility of purely political action or even economic and industrial action in preventing and curing widespread poverty. He fully realized the futility of organized charities or the Christian virtues in meeting this growing and complex problem of the human race. It is useless to narcotize any others with the opiate of Christian resignation. We cannot dissolve the realities of human misery, and steep ourselves in emotional idealism–-"we may form wild dreams of socialism, universal brotherhood, red republics or inexplicable revolutions. We may struggle and murder each other; we may persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break through our unnatural moral codes. . . we may break our own and our neighbors' hearts against the adamantine laws that warn us, but not one step, not one, shall we advance till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed."
Drysdale foresaw the danger of the proletariat's attempt to shift the blame of its own distress to its environment or to the external industrial structure. He saw that it is useless to blame the low rate of wages, to accuse the community for its tardy and scanty assistance, to decry the avarice of the rich, and, in short, to get into the injurious habit of looking upon itself and its too numerous family as the victims of external circumstances. In this way, as Drysdale realized, the working man develops an unhealthy and debilitating spirit. "The last person he would think of accusing is himself, on whom, in fact, the principal blame rests, principally because in bringing a too numerous family into the world he is following the advice given by the very people he holds responsible for his miseries."
Drysdale foresaw as keenly as most advanced thinkers today that political efforts, however firmly based they might be upon social idealism, are inevitably foredoomed to failure if they seek to realize themselves in a milieu of over-population and fluctuating masses of humanity. It is because of this, he pointed out, that free governments tend constantly to their own destruction, that so many efforts in the cause of freedom have failed, and that almost every revolution, after a long and bloody struggle, has ended in military despotism. When an established government has been destroyed and a new political constitution has been set in operation, the poor, finding their evils unabated, turn their resentment against the new conquerors of political power. Political remedies, according to this point of view, have too often been based upon a short-sighted optimism, upon the belief that there is some self-adjusting power in nature or some merciful guiding providence by which human ills all work for good, and are ultimately, by the blind chance of evolution, to be overcome. There is hidden in our natures, a pernicious belief with which we console ourselves, that the human constitution will gradually undergo a change in our favor. These optimists bid us to wait helplessly till the stream of misery has flowed past us. Then we shall enter the promised millennium. We might as well expect, George Drysdale warned us, that the river will return to its source, or that the seas cover the mountain tops, as that the fundamental character of the human frame will alter. However little we may expect of human progress, our first necessity is to base our efforts upon an understanding of human instinct and human behavior, not as these express themselves under special and favorable conditions, but as the inherent and dynamic mainsprings of all human activity.
In ignoring the physiological and psychical aspects of life, socialism, he found, was not less short-sighted than other claims of progress. The socialism of this time, we should remember, confined itself to various methods of increasing the products of human industry and of equalizing distribution. But in ignoring the fundamental factor of overpopulation socialism failed to recognize that its aims were foredoomed to inevitable cancellation.
In short, the reader of the "Elements of Social Science" will discover that George Drysdale sought to justify the principle of Birth Control, not merely upon the ground of economics and politics, but essentially as a physiological and psychological necessity of the human race. This phase of his work has been forgotten or neglected; and even the defenders and exponents of family limitation continued practically until our own century to defend it solely in the terms and language of economic and political policy. Unlike most of those who preceded him and followed him, Drysdale possessed a keen perception of the fundamental fallacy of looking for advance upon the basis of any program which confined its endeavors to religious or political action or to economic and industrial panaceas.
Whatever amelioration or revolution we may expect or hope for, he has taught us that it must be based not upon propagation of any single doctrine in the political or economic field, but must be the outgrowth of the direction, the control, and the development of our deepest interests and desires.
The peculiar error of the socialists of Drysdale's time was that they attributed to the constitution of society and to competition (as politicians do to forms of government and theologians to man's original sin) the evils which really spring from unchecked and uncontrolled breeding. Socialism, as he saw it, fell into the inveterate and almost universal error of ascribing the chief ills of mankind to human institutions, instead of to uncontrolled instincts. "It urges the adoption of a complete change in our social fabric, but to what end? After all this trouble there would not be one of the great human difficulties removed."
Not that Drysdale was in any sense a pessimist or a reactionary. He was as intransigeant and as relentless a critic of society as any of the earlier or later sociologists, but he had a deeper and more widespread knowledge of human nature. He saw that all those celebrated Victorian poets, writers, statesmen, orators and moralists were themselves suffering and limited by the inhibitions of tradition. "We ask for bread and they give us a stone, for love and they give us a futile or religious shadow of it. Poetry, painting, architecture, fine writing, oratory, religion, to a world plunged in population worries are like music in the ears of a drowning man. They may dazzle our judgment and they may gild, but they cannot cheat our miseries. It is the necessaries of life; it is food, love and leisure that are at present for every human being, man or woman, necessaries; it is of little avail to talk of luxuries."