In the first place, we must recognise the fact that we have contracted the habit of transposing causes and symptoms. Evil practices, such as drunkenness, for example, are blamed for the deterioration, instead of being regarded as the outcome of nerve-instability; while, on the other hand, nerve-instability itself is often regarded as criminality and the outcome of an evil disposition, punishments and deterrents are resorted to, time, money, and brains are wasted, criminal and lunatic classes are perpetuated, jails and lunatic asylums are multiplied, simply because we lack the knowledge to recognise that no amount of modification will ever put right the nerve-structure which is radically wrong from the birth. Excepting ignorance, the foundation of all woe, the first great cause of neurasthenia which we must honestly face is HEREDITY. We shall find, I think, that the second great cause is to be sought in IMPERFECT SOCIAL CONDITIONS, and the third in AN IMPERFECT SYSTEM OF EDUCATION. Other minor causes we may easily enumerate, but they will all be more or less secondary to these three, and dependent upon them. I propose, therefore, to consider each of these in turn. CHAPTER VII. _HEREDITY._ All those to whose lot it has fallen to minister to the wants of sufferers from nervous disease must have come across cases which they were expected to benefit, but for whom, manifestly, very little could be done. So great is human perversity, that though cases of epilepsy and nervous exhaustion are every day regarded as incurable merely because the most efficacious modes of treatment remain untried, these persons of defective nervous system and perverted growth are often supposed capable of development into ordinary people after a few weeks or months of special attention on the part of those to whose care they are confided. It seems useless to point out the wide difference between the two classes. The non-medical mind cannot or will not understand it. Our ignorance on such matters is boundless. It has always appeared to me that these unfortunate defective people are truly our sin-bearers, for they reap to the full the consequences of our mistakes; they inherit the results of a pernicious order of affairs. The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. Cursed from their infancy with a fatal blight; expected to arrive at a moral standard which is wholly beyond them; tormented in childhood by vain attempts to force them to the level of other children; the small stock of intelligence--which love, the great educator, might in some instances have developed to a limited extent--dwarfed and dissipated by impatient ignorance; objects too often of the heteropathy of which Miss Cobbe speaks so feelingly in her exquisite work entitled “Duties of Women;” these unhappy sufferers are surely spectacles fit to move the pity of gods and men.