Decrease

“ But it is an essential principle of life that a faculty to which circumstances do not allow full exercise diminishes; and that a faculty on which circumstances make excessive demands increases. And so long as this excess and this deficiency continue, there must continue decrease on the one hand, and growth on the other. ”

“ Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent. ”

“ George IV. Sec. 37, Cap. 112.—"And whereas some sorts of Goods are liable in Time to decrease—and some to increase—and some to fluctuation of Quantity—by the effect of the Atmosphere or other natural Causes, and it may be necessary in some cases, that the Duties should not be charged upon the Deficiency arising from such Causes ”

“ In proportion as vigor declines, not only do the causes of pain multiply, while the tax on the energies becomes more trying, but the possibilities of pleasure decrease; many delights demanding, or accompanying, exertion are shut out; and others fail to raise the flagging spirits. So that, to sum up, lowering the average type of constitution to a level of strength below that which meets without difficulty the ordinary strains, and perturbations, and dangers, while it fails eventually to diminish the rate of mortality, makes life more a burden and less a gratification. ”

“ In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. ”

“ Is it not manifest, that while the demands upon the vital force have been increased, the supply of material has been decreased? If this have been the case, she arrives at the period when the third and last demand is to be made on her growing power, with not force enough to assume the additional work, and in consequence she shows signs of disease. ”

“ On the contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions is [115] going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than those of life and order. ”

“ One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature. With stealthy inevitableness, there is degradation of energy. The sources of activity sink downward and downward. Their very matter wastes. ”

“ The fatigue-rest rhythm, the alternation of fatigue and rest, I have already phrased by the metaphor of earning and spending. You can phrase it also by a metaphor very close to the physical facts as we know them, the metaphor of building up and tearing down. During the daytime, from the point of view of physiology and the workings of the body, we burn up tissue. In us oxidation processes are going on which are really burning, as really as if we saw the flame. Tissue is being destroyed, broken down, going off in the form of heat, energy, and life. ”

“ The threshold of the associated system rises, but on the other hand, the chances for activity increase, while the liberation or discharge of energy with the consequent evil effects of extreme fatigue, exhaustion and ill nutrition is checked and guarded against by the inhibitions and the rise of threshold. ”

“ Any undue exaltation of a particular function—excessive brain-action, excessive muscular-nutrition, excessive deposit of fat—is a symptom of lowered life, in which the co-ordinating control of the whole system over its several parts is diminished. Stimulus, on the other hand, implies an increase of the co-ordinating and controlling power. ”

“ The intolerable depression that, in those days, we felt—that all those millions were the playthings of ants busy in the miles of corridors beneath the domes and spires that rise up over the central heart of our comity, that intolerable weight upon the brain and the limbs, descended once more on those two men lying upon their elbows. ”

“ And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become dead; as all Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do! When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within, become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier ”

“ Well, we have an unending quantity of work and wear—no very acute bothers but a continuous strain, the strain of actual work, of uneasiness, of seeing people, of uncertainty, of great expense, of doubt and fear at times, of inability to make any plans—all which is only the common lot now all over the world, except that most persons have up to this time suffered incomparably worse than we. ”

“ From time to time this chance must fall unfavourably, and will cause a deficiency in some of the structural elements, and a consequent deterioration of the race. If the loss be vital, this particular line of descent will of course be extinguished at once; but on the more favourable supposition, the race will linger on, submitting to successive decrements in its constituent elements, until the accumulation of small losses becomes fatal.”—loc. ”

“ This loss, this change, which commences with life and terminates only with death, is compensated for by the constant renewal of the whole frame by the deposition and assimilation, or organisation, of matter from the blood, which thus becomes gradually thinner and impoverished, unless, in its turn, it receives a corresponding supply of its vital elements. ”

“ Finally, progress in medicine, the use of more wholesome food and healthy houses, the diminution of the two most active causes of deterioration, namely, misery and excessive wealth, must prolong the average duration of life, as well as raise the tone of health while it lasts. ”

“ Whether this suggestion has any validity or not, no one has ever more challengingly presented the problem of why the rate of growth declines from first to last, and whether it be due to an inevitable loss of the initial momentum or biological élan vital or to checks, arrests, and inhibitions of it, some of which may be removed. ”

“ There are both the joy of the abundant life, the craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and monotony which prepare the mind [34] for culmination in dramatic events. There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the individual and the social life. ”

“ If some function is habitually performed in excess of the requirement, or in defect of the requirement; and if, as a consequence, there is an often repeated perturbation of the functions at large, there results some chronic derangement in the balance of the functions. Necessarily reacting on the structures, and registering in them its accumulated effects, this derangement works a general deterioration; and when the vital energies begin to decline, the moving equilibrium, further from perfection than it would else have been, is sooner overthrown: death is more or less premature. ”

“ If you give one grain of weight too much, so as to increase fatigue without profit, or bulk without value—that added grain is hurtful; if you put one spot or one syllable out of its proper place, that spot or syllable will be destructive—how far destructive it is almost impossible to tell: a misplaced touch may sometimes annihilate the labour of hours. ”

“ If we consider it under its special, particular form, as peculiar to a given individual carrying on a given occupation and having given habits of life—an artisan, a labourer, a tradesman, a lawyer, a physician, etc.—the disturbed balance will appear to us as setting its mark on the individual’s professional activity and its products. The artisan will pass from a fury of work to excesses of idleness or drink ”

“ Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. ”

“ Can the world have grown worse and I better, or was I blind before and indifferent? If this change is the result of a general decline of physical and intellectual powers—I am ill, you know, and every day I am losing weight—my position is pitiable ”

“ Sometimes loss of appetite announces the cessation of nutrition; otherwise the sense of hunger, present in the system, is for a time preternaturally acute, and marks the fact that the demand is occasioned by loss of power to appropriate, instead of any diminution of supply. ”

“ Observe too that each grows with a rapidity proportioned, in general, to the madness and unhealthiness there is in it: slow regular growth, though this also ends in death, is what we name health and sanity. ”

“ Therefore all our distrust of the law of growth, whether shown in the anxious endeavour to bring pressure to bear from without, or in allowing despair to take the place of cheerful expectation, is reversing the action of the original cause and consequently reversing the nature of the results. ”

“ Thirdly, undue excitation of any physical function is followed by a corresponding depression, on the simple principle that action and reaction are equal; and the balance of health turns too easily to be wilfully disturbed. ”

“ In consequence of such disturbance to the equilibrium, active growth now takes place in the next group, leading to fresh irritation, and this group then reacts more strongly than all the others upon the tension which first stimulated its activity. ”

“ And finally, though it would be easy to multiply such quotations, the striking account, at the end of the second book, of the growth and the decay of our world is drawn directly from the obvious appearances of the growth and decay of the human body ”

“ Eventually, the daily loss, beginning to out-balance the daily gain, there results a diminishing amount of functional action; the organic rhythms extend less and less widely on each side of the medium state; and there finally results that complete equilibration which we call death. ”

“ The moment one ceases to do its work, or appropriates more than its share of the juices elaborated, or more than it needs to fit it for the performance of its appointed use, that moment comes disease—disease to itself and disease to all the rest. ”

“ Fatigue, weakness, hysterics, and extreme depression follow. They leave the heated ball-room, when the morning has far advanced, to breathe the bitterly cold and frequently damp air of a winter’s night, and what is the result? Hundreds die of consumption who might otherwise have lived. ”

“ And now, one final word in conclusion, for the purpose of drawing together, as it were, the multiplicity of threads which constitute the complex skein of causes and effects, with their remedial measures which cover the wide range of human life's vicissitudes—the interruptions of its would-be harmonies—which take the forms, all too common in these times of stress, of physical disturbance and of mental strain which come to us in the combined and threatening guise of suffering and disease. ”

“ The losing tendency can be stopped at any stage, but the only place where it can be immediately stopped is at its first appearance in consciousness. When you begin to feel that there is danger of loss, or when the general indications seem to predict loss, remove that feeling at once. Refuse to think of loss; refuse to admit the possibility of loss; refuse to recognize loss in any form whatever. ”

“ If we will introduce such a balance of pleasure and pain the individual must make the calculation for himself. The supposition is that total ruin is very painful, partial loss painful in a less proportion than that assigned by the ratio of the losses themselves; the inference is therefore drawn that on the average more pain is caused by occasional great losses than by frequent small ones, though the money value of the losses in the long run may be the same in each case. ”

“ By this multiplication of misery we see distress extended to the hundredth part of the whole society.
If we estimate at a shilling a day what is lost by the inaction, and consumed in the support of each man thus chained down to involuntary idleness, the publick loss will rise in one year to three hundred thousand pounds ”

“ Then came the Slump, worse, longer, and more general, than any previous one, and breaking upon peoples whose minds were no longer attuned to waiting for a natural recovery — after years of misery, poverty, and unemployment. ”

“ Chronic Decline, with its attendant anæmia, may be induced by bad habits, destitution, or constitutional depravity. Sickly forms, wrecks of health, address our senses on every side. All these subjects evidently once had a capital in life, sufficient, if properly and carefully husbanded, to comfortably afford them vital stamina and length of days. ”

“ Yet every movement which we accomplish implies a change in our debit and credit of vital economy, a change in our balance of bodily and mental expenditure and replenishment; and this, if brought to our awareness, is not only interesting, but interesting in the sense either of pleasure or displeasure, since it implies the more or less furtherance or hindrance of our life-processes. ”

“ It will be admitted, we presume, that those young men and women, leaving their homes, possessed, as a general thing, more physical energy and mental stamina than those remaining behind. Such a loss of physical vigor and character must have had a decided effect upon business interests as well as the present state of society. ”

“ The real answer to all the non-monetary explanations of the depression is that they are merely particular cases of the monetary explanation. If they do not explain the shrinkage of demand, they do not explain the depression. ”

“ The frequent repetition of the same movement or of the same mental activity certainly may condition an objective fatigue, which may interfere with the economic output, but this is not the real meaning of the problem of monotony. About fatigue we shall speak later. Here we are concerned exclusively with that particular psychological attitude which we know as subjective dislike of uniformity and lack of change in the work. ”