While the more important material agencies and conditions, closely related to the processes of life, are air, food, clothing, etc.; and while the reader’s attention has been, throughout, mainly directed to these; it would, from the author’s point of view, constitute a serious defect of the work, to omit the special consideration of the moral nature—its mighty influence over the physical state. In no better way can I impress this thought than by quoting the language of that veteran hygienist and reformer, Dr. James C. Jackson:

“But while a human being has a physical organization, and has, therefore, physical laws, he is dual, possessing also a spiritual nature; and to treat him for any disease he may have as though it originated in his body and did not relate itself at all to his soul or spirit, is to treat him, in ninety-nine cases in a hundred, unphilosophically and therefore unscientifically. Our observation and experience go to satisfy us that the majority of sick persons become disturbed and disordered in spirit before they show disorder or derangement of body.

“To illustrate: a man never comes to be a dyspeptic until he has a false spiritual conception of the true relations which he should hold to the use of food; he is conceptively sick before he is physically dyspeptic; he turns things right around in his mind; he lives to eat instead of eating to live; he is spiritually depraved before he becomes physically diseased. Take the methods of life common to our people. It is largely through these that they become sick. They eat badly, drink badly, dress unhealthfully, work without reference to their power to recover from the fatigue which work imposes, do not get sleep enough, are in a fret, or in a worry, or in a strife, or are under strain in their work. They work selfishly or for their own good only, and often as against the good of others; they seek to thrive at others’ unthrift; they buy and sell with the view in their minds of living gainfully at others’ loss; they have a false conception, a perverse view, of the relationships which they should hold to others, and under this spiritual perversity they put forth their energies. As they are inwardly wrong they become outwardly disordered, and when this disorder develops into actual sickness it has a spiritual or wrong moral basis. Having violated the higher law of their natures, in selfishness of thought and feeling, they are compelled to take the reflex effects in and upon their bodies. Living without sympathy, they become sympathetically diseased; the sympathetic forces in their nature, lacking proper expression or use, become debilitated and deranged, as shown in the abnormal condition of the sympathetic nervous structure.

“For instance: a man with his liver functionally deranged appears before a physician: The pulse shows the circulation to be disturbed; the excretory system has become largely inactive—the skin, bowels, kidneys, and lungs each working inefficiently or compelled to overdo. The doctor concludes that a good dose of calomel and jalap, which enter into the allopathic practice; or some sitz-baths, skin-rubbing, packs, or injections, which would be the hydropathic practice; or regulation of diet, connected with some mild alterative, which belong to the eclectic practice; or some little pills, which would be the homoeopathic practice, are what the man needs. He is a glutton, or a wine-bibber, or he drinks whiskey, or he lives bodily not only, but morally and spiritually on the line of self-indulgence. He lives as he pleases, and this not merely in his animal life. He lives spiritually as he pleases; his spirit is selfish and lawless. Order and righteousness are not in all his thoughts. His conscience is asleep; his intelligence is not at all on the alert; he has no inspirations, or aspirations; he simply has unhallowed desires, and his life consists largely in efforts to gratify these, and there he is—disturbed, disordered, deranged, diseased, sick.

“When one thus affected comes to us, what do we do with him? We bring him to judgment; we summon him up into the presence of the truth. We say: You are at fault for this sickness of yours; it is not necessary for you to be sick; you may be a healthy person, you should be. You may be free from aches and pains, you ought to be. There is no defectiveness in your organization; it is made to run successfully; that it does not, is your fault, not the fault of your circumstances. What you need is right perception and a good conscience to back it; a willingness, not only, but a thorough will to do right. In you is ample vital force to set your liver right, make your bowels work, make your skin carry on its insensible perspiration, your blood circulate healthfully, and have everything done according to law. All that is necessary is that you put your spirit, your responsible consciousness on the throne, and make your body its servant. When you resolve to do this and begin to do it, you will begin to get well. You do not need medicine; you need nothing done for you in order to get well, except to do judiciously, and, in your conditions, discretely, what if you had done all the while would have kept you well.

“The first thing to do is, not to consult doctors: not to hunt for some wonderful curative; but to get right ideas of life, and then begin, though in a feeble manner, to conform yourself to that way spiritually. Love the thing you are going to do; get your whole nature into a glow toward it. If it be to eat simple food, love to do it—not do it wishing you had not to do it. Look at the thing kindly, joyfully, comfortingly. Put away your evil habits, one after another, because they are evil, not simply because they hurt you. Get up a rebellion in your spirit against wrong ways of living. Resolve that you will not live wrongly; characterize that way as it should be characterized, as an improper, unmanly, mean, or unbefitting way for you. Say: I will not smoke; I will not drink; I will not make my body an instrument of gluttony; and so go through your whole round of habits, putting away all those that you can get along without. Reduce your artificial wants to a minimum. Throw yourself over on the line of order and law, and regularity and propriety. Then you will get well.”