nd chastely celibate are
exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made.
But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and
plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and
can draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has
physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological
classifications and moral generalities. It is not true that his
absorbent vessels begin their task as children begin the guessing
game, by asking, "Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?" He responds to
stimulation and recuperates after the exhaustion of his response, and
his being is singularly careless whether the stimulation comes as a drug
or stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals.

Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of that admirable firm of
soap-boilers which assures its customers that the soap they make
"contains no chemicals." Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical
class of substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with
all other things. So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their
children with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken
helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who
denies healing only to those who have studied pathology, and declares
that anything whatever put into a bottle and labelled with directions
for its use by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned. But indeed all
drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there
is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness
in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless
artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are
matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is
stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely
to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become
painful to check or control. The moral rule of my standards is
irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue
of sins by asking: "are you a man of regular life?" And I would charge
my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving
irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on
pork and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and
sinners. Right conduct for the common unspecialized man lies delicately
adjusted between defect a