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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Untroubled Mind
+
+Author: Herbert J. Hall
+
+Release Date: July 19, 2007 [EBook #22108]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNTROUBLED MIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Dave Morgan, Laura Wisewell
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+UNTROUBLED MIND
+
+
+BY
+
+HERBERT J. HALL, M.D.
+
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HERBERT J. HALL
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published May 1915_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+A very wise physician has said that "every illness has two parts--what
+it is, and what the patient thinks about it." What the patient thinks
+about it is often more important and more troublesome than the real
+disease. What the patient thinks of life, what life means to him is also
+of great importance and may be the bar that shuts out all real health
+and happiness. The following pages are devoted to certain ideals of life
+which I would like to give to my patients, the long-time patients who
+have especially fallen to my lot.
+
+They are not all here, the steps to health and happiness. The reader may
+even be annoyed and baffled by my indirectness and unwillingness to be
+specific. That I cannot help--it is a personal peculiarity; I cannot ask
+any one to live by rule, because I do not believe that rules are
+binding and final. There must be character behind the rule and then the
+rule is unnecessary.
+
+All that I have written has doubtless been presented before, in better
+ways, by wiser men, but I believe that each writer may expect to find
+his small public, his own particular public who can understand and
+profit by his teachings, having partly or wholly failed with the others.
+For that reason I am encouraged to write upon a subject usually shunned
+by medical men, being assured of at least a small company of friendly
+readers.
+
+I am grateful to a number of friends and patients who have read the
+manuscript of the following chapters. These reviewers have been frank
+and kind and very helpful. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Richard C.
+Cabot, who has given me much valuable assistance.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     I. THE UNTROUBLED MIND              1
+
+    II. RELIGIO MEDICI                  10
+
+   III. THOUGHT AND WORK                20
+
+    IV. IDLENESS                        30
+
+     V. RULES OF THE GAME               38
+
+    VI. THE NERVOUS TEMPERAMENT         50
+
+   VII. SELF-CONTROL                    59
+
+  VIII. THE LIGHTER TOUCH               65
+
+    IX. REGRETS AND FOREBODINGS         73
+
+     X. THE VIRTUES                     81
+
+    XI. THE CURE BY FAITH               88
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE UNTROUBLED MIND
+
+
+    Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
+    Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
+    Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
+    And with some sweet oblivious antidote
+    Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
+    Which weighs upon the heart?
+                MACBETH.
+
+When a man tells me he never worries, I am inclined to think that he is
+either deceiving himself or trying to deceive me. The great roots of
+worry are conscience, fear, and regret. Undoubtedly we ought to be
+conscientious and we ought to fear and regret evil. But if it is to be
+better than an impediment and a harm, our worry must be largely
+unconscious, and intuitive. The moment we become conscious of worry we
+are undone. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we cannot leave conscience to
+its own devices unless our lives are big enough and fine enough to
+warrant such a course. The remedy for the mental unrest, which is in
+itself an illness, lies not in an enlightened knowledge of the
+harmfulness and ineffectiveness of worry, not even in the acquirement of
+an unconscious conscience, but in the living of a life so full and good
+that worry cannot find place in it. That idea of worry and conscience,
+that definition of serenity, simplifies life immensely. To overcome
+worry by substituting development and growth need never be dull work. To
+know life in its farther reaches, life in its better applications, is
+the final remedy--the great undertaking--_it is life_. We must warn
+ourselves, not infrequently, that the larger life is to be pursued for
+its own glorious self and not for the sake of peace. Peace may come, a
+peace so sure that death itself cannot shake it, but we must not expect
+all our affairs to run smoothly. As a matter of fact they may run badly
+enough; we shall have our ups and downs, we shall sin and repent, and
+sin again, but if in the end we live according to our best intuitions,
+we shall be justified, and we need not worry about the outcome. To put
+it another way, if we would have the untroubled mind, we must transfer
+our conscientious efforts from the small details of life--from the worry
+and fret of common things--into another and a higher atmosphere. We must
+transfigure common life, dignify it and ennoble it; then, although the
+old causes of worry may continue, we shall have gained a stature that
+will make us unconscious masters of the little troubles and in a great
+degree equal to the larger requirements. Life will be easier, not
+because we make less effort, but because we are working from another and
+a better level.
+
+If such a change, and it would be a change for most of us, could come
+about instantly, in a flash of revelation, that would be ideal, but it
+would not be life. We must return again and again to the old uninspired
+state wherein we struggle conscientiously with perverse details. I would
+not minimize the importance and value of this struggle; only the sooner
+it changes its level the better for every one concerned. Large serenity
+must, finally, be earned through the toughening of moral fibre that
+comes in dealing squarely with perplexing details. Some of this struggle
+must always be going on, but serener life will come when we begin to
+concern ourselves with larger factors.
+
+How are we to live the larger life? Partly through uninspired struggle
+and through the brave meeting of adversity, but partly, also, in a way
+that may be described as "out of hand," by intuition, by exercise of the
+quality of mind that sees visions and grasps truths beyond the realms of
+common thought.
+
+I am more and more impressed with the necessity of inspiration in life
+if we are to be strong and serene, and so finally escape the pitfalls
+of worry and conscience. By inspirations I do not mean belief in any
+system or creed. It is not a stated belief that we need to begin with;
+that may come in time. We need first to find in life, or at least in
+nature, an essential beauty that makes its own true, inevitable response
+within us. We must learn to love life so deeply that we feel its
+tremendous significance, until we find in the sea and the sky the
+evidence of an overbrooding spirit too great to be understood, but not
+too great to satisfy the soul. This is a sort of mother religion--the
+matrix from which all sects and creeds are born. Its existence in us
+dignifies us and makes simple, purposeful, and receptive living almost
+inevitable. We may not know why we are living according to the dictates
+of our inspiration, but we shall live so and that is the important
+consideration.
+
+If I urge the acquirement of a religious conception that we may cure
+the intolerable distress of worry, I do what I have already warned
+against. It is so easy to make this mistake that I have virtually made
+it on the same page with my warning. We have no right to seek so great a
+thing as religious experience that we may be relieved of suffering.
+Better go on with pain and distress than cheapen religion by making it a
+remedy. We must seek it for its own sake, or rather, we must not seek it
+at all, lest, like a dream, it elude us, or change into something else,
+less holy. Nevertheless, it is true that if we will but look with open,
+unprejudiced eyes, again and again, upon the sunrise or the stars above
+us, we shall become conscious of a presence greater and more beautiful
+than our minds can think. In the experience of that vision strength and
+peace will come to us unbidden. We shall find our lives raised, as by an
+unseen force, above the warfare of conscience and worry. We shall begin
+to know the meaning of serenity and of that priceless, if not wholly to
+be acquired, possession, the untroubled mind.
+
+I am aware that I shall be misunderstood and perhaps ridiculed by my
+colleagues when I attempt to discuss religion in any way. Theology is a
+field in which I have had no training, but that is the very reason why I
+dare write of it. I do not even assume that there is a God in the
+traditional sense. The idea is too great to be made concrete and
+literal. No single fact of nature can be fully understood by our finite
+minds. But I do feel vaguely that the laws that compass us, and make our
+lives possible, point always on--"beyond the realms of time and
+space"--toward the existence of a mighty overruling spirit. If this is a
+cold and inadequate conception of God, it is at least one that can be
+held by any man without compromise.
+
+The modern mind is apt to fail of religious understanding and support,
+because of the arbitrary interpretations of religion which are
+presented for our acceptance. It is what men say about religion, rather
+than religion itself, that repels us. Let us think it out for ourselves.
+If we are open to a simple, even primitive, conception of God, we may
+still repudiate the creeds and doctrines, but we are likely to become
+more tolerant of those who find them true and good. We shall be likely
+in time to find the religion of Christ understandable and
+acceptable--warm and quick with life. The man who ungrudgingly opens his
+heart to the God of nature will be religious in the simplest possible
+sense. He may worry because of the things he cannot altogether
+understand, and because he falls so far short of the implied ideal. But
+he will have enlarged his life so much that the common worries will find
+little room--he will be too full of the joy of living to spend much
+conscious thought in worry. Such a man will realize that he cannot
+afford to spend his time and strength in regretting his past mistakes.
+There is too much in the future. What he does in the future, not what he
+has failed to do in the past, will determine the quality of his life. He
+knows this, and the knowledge sends him into that future with courage
+and with strength. Finally, in some indefinable way, character will
+become more important to him than physical health even. Illness is half
+compensated when a man realizes that it is not what he accomplishes in
+the world, but what he _is_ that really counts, which puts him in touch
+with the creative forces of God and raises him out of the aimless and
+ordinary into a life of inspiration and joy.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+RELIGIO MEDICI
+
+
+    At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to
+    Middlemarch with the reputation of having definite religious
+    views, of being given to prayer and of otherwise showing an
+    active piety, there would have been a general presumption
+    against his medical skill.
+                GEORGE ELIOT.
+
+When a medically educated man talks and writes of religion and of God,
+he is rightly enough questioned by his brothers--who are too busy with
+the hard work of practice to be concerned with anything but material
+problems. To me the word "God" is symbolic of the power which created
+and which maintains the universe. The sunrise and the stars of heaven
+give me some idea of his majesty, the warmth and tenderness of human
+love give me some idea of his divine love. That is all I know, but it is
+enough to make life glow; it is enough to inspire the most intense
+devotion to any good cause; it is enough to make me bear suffering with
+some degree of patience; and it is enough, finally, to give me some
+confidence and courage even in the face of the great mystery of death.
+Why this or another conception of God should produce such a profound
+result upon any one, I do not know, except that in some obscure way it
+connects the individual with the divine plan, and does not leave him
+outside in despair and loneliness. However that may be, it will be
+conceded that a religious conception of some kind does much toward
+justifying life, toward making it strong and livable, and so has
+directly to do with certain important problems of illness and health.
+The most practical medical man will admit that any illness is made
+lighter and more likely to recover in the presence of hope and serenity
+in the mind of the patient.
+
+Naturally the great bulk of medical practice calls for no handling other
+than that of the straight medical sort. A man comes in with a crushed
+finger, a girl with anĉmia--the way is clear. It is only in deeper, more
+intricate departments of medicine that we altogether fail. The
+bacteriologist and the pathologist have no use for mental treatment, in
+their departments. But when we come to the case of the nervously
+broken-down school teacher, or the worn-out telegrapher, that is another
+matter. Years may elapse before work can be resumed--years of dependence
+and anxiety. Here, a new view of life is often more useful than drugs, a
+view that accepts the situation reasonably after a while, that does not
+grope blindly and impatiently for a cure, but finds in life an
+inspiration that makes it good in spite of necessary suffering and
+limitations. Often enough we cannot promise a cure, but we must be
+prepared to give something better.
+
+A great deal of the fatigue and unhappiness of the world is due to the
+fact that we do not go deep enough in our justification for work or
+play, or for any experience, happy or sad. There is a good deal of a
+void after we have said, "Art for art's sake," or "Play for the joy of
+playing," or even after we have said, "I am working for the sake of my
+family, or for some one who needs my help." That is not enough; and
+whether we realize it or not, the lack of deeper justification is at the
+bottom of a restlessness and uncertainty which we might not be willing
+to acknowledge, but which nevertheless is very real.
+
+I am not satisfied when some moralist says, "Be good and you will be
+happy." The kind of happiness that comes from a perfunctory goodness is
+a thing which I cannot understand, and which I certainly do not want. If
+I work and play and serve and employ, making up the fabric of a busy
+life, if I attain a very real happiness, I am tormented by the desire to
+know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I
+usually get. The patient may not be cured when he is relieved of his
+anĉmia, or when his emaciation has given place to the plumpness and
+suppleness and physical strength that we call health. The man whom we
+look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not well
+in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is living,
+why he is filling his life with activity. In spite of the elasticity and
+spring of the world's interests, there must come often, and with a kind
+of fatal insistence, the deep demand for a cause, for a justification.
+If there is not an adequate significance behind it, life, with all its
+courage and accomplishment, seems but a sorry thing, so full of pathos,
+even in its brightest moments, so shadowed with a sense of loss and of
+finality that the bravest heart may well fail and the truest courage
+relax, supported only by the assurance that this way lies happiness or
+that right is right.
+
+What is this knowledge that the world is seeking, but can never find?
+What is this final justification? If we seek it in its completeness, we
+are doomed always to be ill and unsatisfied. If we are willing to look
+only a little way into the great question, if we are willing to accept a
+little for the whole, content because it is manifestly part of the final
+knowledge, and because we know that final knowledge rests with God
+alone, we shall understand enough to save us from much sorrow and
+painful incompleteness.
+
+There is, in the infinitely varied and beautiful world of nature, and in
+the hearts of men, so much of beauty and truth that it is a wonder we do
+not all realize that these things of common life may be in us and for us
+the daily and hourly expression of the infinite being we call God. We do
+not see God, but we do feel and know so much that we may fairly believe
+to be of God that we do not need to see Him face to face. It is
+something more than imagination to feel that it is the life of God in
+our lives, so often unrecognized or ignored, that prompts us to all the
+greatness and the inspiration and the accomplishment of the world. If we
+could know more clearly the joy of such a conception, we should dry up
+at its source much of the unhappiness which is, in a deep and subtle
+way, at the bottom of many a nervous illness and many a wretched
+existence.
+
+The happiness which is found in the recognition of kinship with God,
+through the common things of life, in the experiences which are so
+significant that they could not spring from a lesser source, the
+happiness which is not sought, but which is the inevitable result of
+such recognition--this experience goes a long way toward making life
+worth living.
+
+If we do have this conception of life, then some of the old, old
+questions that have vexed so many dwellers upon the earth will no longer
+be a source of unhappiness or of illness of mind or body. The question
+of immortality, for instance, which has made us afraid to die, will no
+longer be a question--we shall not need to answer it, in the presence of
+God, in our lives and in the world about us. We shall be content finally
+to accept whatever is in store for us--so it be the will of God. We may
+even look for something better than mere immortality, something more
+divine than our gross conception of eternal life.
+
+This is a religion that I believe medical men may teach without
+hesitation whenever the need shall arise. I know well enough that many a
+blunt if kindly man cannot bring himself to say these words, even if he
+believes them, but I do think that in some measure they point the way to
+what may wisely be taught.
+
+There is a practice of medicine--the common practice--that is concerned
+with the body only, and with its chemical and mechanical reactions. We
+can have nothing but respect and admiration for the men who go on year
+after year in the eager pursuit of this calling. We know that such a
+work is necessary, that it is just as important as the educational
+practice of which I write. We know that without the physical side
+medicine would fail of its usefulness and that disease and death would
+reap far richer harvests: I only wish the two naturally related aspects
+of our dealing with patients might not be so completely separated that
+they lose sight of each other. As a matter of fact, both elements are
+necessary to our human welfare. If medicine devotes itself altogether to
+the cure and prevention of physical disease, it will miss half of its
+possibilities. It is equally true that if we forget the physical
+necessities in our zeal for spiritual hygiene, we shall get and deserve
+complete and humiliating failure. Many men will say, "Why mix the two?
+Why not let the preachers and the philosophers preach and the doctors
+follow their own ways?" For the most part this may have to be the
+arrangement, but the doctor who can see and treat the spiritual needs of
+his patient will always be more likely to cure in the best sense than
+the doctor who sees only half of the picture. On the other hand, the
+philosopher is likely to be a comparatively poor doctor, because he
+knows nothing of medicine, and so can see only the other half of the
+picture. There is much to be said for the religion of medicine if it can
+be kept free from cant, if it can be simple and rational enough to be
+available for the whole world.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THOUGHT AND WORK
+
+
+    I wish I had a trade!--It would animate my arms and tranquilize
+    my brain.
+                SENANCOUR.
+
+    "Doe ye nexte thynge."--_Old English Proverb_.
+
+Since our minds are so constantly filled with anxiety, there would seem
+to be at least one sure way to be rid of it--to stop thinking.
+
+A great many people believe that the mind will become less effective,
+that life will become dull and purposeless, unless they are constantly
+thinking and planning and arranging their affairs. I believe that the
+mind may easily and wisely be free from conscious thought a good deal of
+the time, and that the greatest progress and development in mind often
+comes when the thinker is virtually at rest, when his mind is to all
+intents and purposes blank. The busy, unconscious mind does its best
+work in the serenity of an atmosphere which does not interfere and
+confuse.
+
+It is true that the greatest conceptions do not come to the untrained
+and undisciplined mind. But do we want great conceptions all the time?
+There is a technical training for the mind which is, of course,
+necessary for special accomplishments, but this is quite another matter.
+Even this kind of thought must not obtrude too much, lest we become
+conscious of our mental processes and so end in confusion.
+
+One of the greatest benefits of work with the hands, or of objective and
+constructive work with the mind, is that it saves us from unending hours
+of thinking. Work should, of course, find its fullest justification as
+an expression of faith. If we have ever so dim a vision of a greater
+significance in life, of its close relationship to infinite things, we
+become thereby conscious of the need of service, of the need of work. It
+is the easy, natural expression of our faith, the inevitable result of
+a spiritual contact with the great working forces of the world. It is
+work above all else that saves us from the disasters of conflicting
+thought.
+
+A few years ago a young man came to me, suffering from too much
+thinking. He had just been graduated from college and his head was full
+of confused ideas and emotions. He was also very tired, having
+overworked in his preparation for examinations, and because he had not
+taken the best care of his body. The symptoms he complained of were
+sleeplessness and worry, together with the inevitable indigestion and
+headache. Of course, as a physician, I went over the bodily functions
+carefully, and studied, as far as I might, into the organic conditions.
+I could find no evidence of physical disease. I did not say, "There is
+nothing the matter with you"; for the man was sick. I told him that he
+was tired, that he had thought too much, that he was too much concerned
+about himself, and that as a result of all this his bodily functions
+were temporarily upset. He thought he ought to worry about himself,
+because otherwise he would not be trying to get well. I explained to him
+that this mistaken obligation was the common reason for worry, and that
+in this case, at least, it was quite unnecessary and even harmful for
+him to go on thinking about himself. That helped a little, but not
+nearly enough, because when a man has overworked, when he has begun to
+worry, and when his various bodily functions show results of worry, no
+reasoning, no explanations, can wholly relieve him. I said to this young
+man, "In spite of your discomforts, in spite of your depression and
+concern in regard to yourself, you will get well if you will stop
+thinking about the matter altogether. You must be first convinced that
+it is best for you to stop thinking, that no harm or violence can
+result, and then you must be helped in this direction by going to work
+with your hands--that will be life and progress, it will lead you to
+health."
+
+Fortunately I had had some experience with nervous illness, and I knew
+that unless I managed for this man the character and extent of his work,
+he would not only fail in it, but of its object, and so become more
+confused and discouraged. I knew the troubled mind, in this instance,
+might find its solace and its relief in work, but that I must choose the
+work carefully to suit the individual, and I must see that the nervously
+fatigued body was not pushed too hard.
+
+In the town where I live is a blacksmith shop, presided over by a genial
+old man who has been a blacksmith since he was a boy, and in whose hands
+iron is like clay. I took my patient down to the smithy and said, "Here
+is a young man whom I want to put to work. He will pay for the chance. I
+want you first to teach him to make hand-wrought nails." This was a
+good deal of a joke to the smith and to the patient, but they saw that I
+was in earnest and agreed to go ahead. We got together the proper tools
+and proceeded to make nails, a job which is really not very difficult.
+After an hour's work, I called off my patient, much to his disgust, for
+he was just beginning to be interested. But I knew that if he were to
+keep on until fatigue should come, the whole matter would end in
+trouble. So the next day, with some new overalls and a leather apron
+added to the equipment, we proceeded to another hour's work. We went on
+this way for three or four days, before the time was increased.
+
+The interest of the patient was always fresh, he was eager for more, and
+he did not taste the dregs of fatigue. Yet he did get the wholesome
+exercise, and he did get the strong turning of the mind from its worry
+and concern. Of course, the rest of the day was taken care of in one
+way or another, but the work was the central feature. In a week, we were
+at it two hours a day, in three weeks, four hours, and in a month, five
+hours. He had made a handsome display of hand-wrought nails, a superior
+line of pokers and shovels for fireplaces, together with a number of
+very respectable andirons. On each of these larger pieces of handiwork
+my patient had stamped his initials with a little steel die that was
+made for him. Each piece was his own, each piece was the product of his
+own versatility and his own strength. His pride and pleasure in this
+work were very great, and well they might be, for it is a fine thing to
+have learned to handle so intractable a material as iron. But in
+handling the iron patiently and consistently until he could do it
+without too much conscious thinking, and so without effort, he had also
+learned to handle himself naturally, more simply and easily.
+
+As a matter of fact, the illness which had brought this boy to me was
+pretty nearly cured by his blacksmithing, because it was an illness of
+the mind and of the nerves, and not of the body, although the body had
+suffered in its turn. That young man, instead of becoming a nervous
+invalid as he might have done, is now working steadily in partnership
+with his father, in business in the city. I had found him a very
+interesting patient, full of originality and not at all the tedious and
+boresome person he might have been had I listened day after day, week
+after week to the recital of his ills. I was willing to listen,--I did
+listen,--but I also gave him a new trend of life, which pretty soon made
+his complaints sound hollow and then disappear.
+
+Of course, the problem is not always so simple as this, and we must
+often deal with complexities of body and mind requiring prolonged
+investigation and treatment. I cite this case because it shows clearly
+that relief from some forms of nervous illness can come when we stop
+thinking, when we stop analyzing, and then back up our position with
+prescribed work.
+
+There may be some nervous invalids who read these lines who will say,
+"But I have tried so many times to work and have failed." Unfortunately,
+such failure must often occur unless we can proceed with care and with
+understanding. But the principle remains true, although it must be
+modified in an infinite variety to meet the changing conditions of
+individuals.
+
+I see a great many people who are conscientiously trying to get well
+from nervous exhaustion. They almost inevitably try too hard. They think
+and worry too much about it, and so exhaust themselves the more. This is
+the greater pity because it is the honest and the conscientious people
+who make the greatest effort. It is very hard for them to realize that
+they must stop thinking, stop trying, and if possible get to work
+before they can accomplish their end. We shall have to repeat to them
+over and over again that they must stop thinking the matter out, because
+the thing they are attempting to overcome is too subtle to be met in
+that way. So, if they are fortunate, they may rid themselves of the
+vagueness and uncertainty of life, until all the multitude of details
+which go to make up life lose their desultoriness and their lack of
+meaning, and they may find themselves no longer the subjects of physical
+or nervous exhaustion.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IDLENESS
+
+
+    O ye! who have your eyeballs vex'd and tir'd,
+      Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.
+                KEATS.
+
+    Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,
+    is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness
+    implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal
+    identity.
+                STEVENSON.
+
+It is an unfortunate fact that very few people are able to be idle
+successfully. I think it is not so much because we misuse idleness as
+because we misinterpret it that the long days become increasingly
+demoralizing. I would ask no one to accept a forced idleness without
+objection or regret. Such an acceptance would imply a lack of spirit, to
+say the least. But idleness and rest are not incompatible; neither are
+idleness and service, nor idleness and contentment. If we can look upon
+rest as a preparation for service, if we can make it serve us in the
+opportunity it gives for quiet growth and legitimate enjoyment, then it
+is fully justified and it may offer advantages and opportunity of the
+best.
+
+The chief trouble with idleness is that it so often means introspection,
+worry, and impatience, especially to those conscientious souls who would
+fain be about their business.
+
+I have for a long time been accustomed to combat the worry and fret of
+necessary idleness--not by forbidding it, not by advising struggle and
+fight against it, but by insisting that the best way to get rid of it is
+to leave it alone, to accept it. When we do this there may come a kind
+of fallow time in which the mind enriches and refreshes itself beyond
+our conception.
+
+I would rather my patient who must rest for a long time would give up
+all thought of method, would give up all idea of making his mind follow
+any particular line of thought or absence of thought. I know that the
+mind which has been under conscious control a good deal of the time is
+apt to rebel at this freedom and to indulge in all kinds of alarming
+extravagances. I am sure, however, that the best way to meet these
+demands for conscious control is to be careless of them, to be willing
+to experience these extravagances and inconsistencies without fear, in
+the belief that finally will come a quiet and peace which will be all
+that we can ask. The peace of mind that is unguided, in the conscious
+and literal sense, is a thing which too few of us know.
+
+Mr. Arnold Bennett, in his little book, "How to Live on Twenty-four
+Hours a Day," teaches that we should leave no time unused in our lives;
+that we should accomplish a great deal more and be infinitely more
+effective and progressive if we devoted our minds to the definite
+working-out of necessary problems whenever those times occur in which we
+are apt to be desultory. I wish here to make a plea for desultoriness
+and for an idleness which goes even beyond the idleness of the man who
+reads the newspaper and forgets what he has read. It seems to me better,
+whether we are sick or well, to allow long periods in our lives when we
+think only casually. To the good old adage, "Work while you work and
+play while you play," we might well add, "Rest while you rest," lest in
+the end you should be unable successfully either to work or play.
+
+A man is not necessarily condemned to tortures of mind because he must
+rest for a week or a month or a year. I know that there must be anxious
+times, especially when idleness means dependence, and when it brings
+hardship to those who need our help. But the invalid must not try
+constantly to puzzle the matter out. If we do not make ourselves sick
+with worry, we shall be able sometime to approach active life with
+sufficient frankness and force. It is the constant effort of the poor,
+tired mind to solve its problems that not only fails of its object, but
+plunges the invalid deeper into discouragement and misunderstanding. How
+cruel this is, and how unfortunate that it should come more commonly to
+those who try the hardest to overcome their handicaps, to throw off the
+yoke of idleness and to be well.
+
+When you have tried your best to get back to your work and have failed,
+when you have done this not once but many times, it is inevitable that
+misunderstanding should creep in, inevitable that you should question
+very deeply and doubt not infrequently. Yet the chances are that one of
+the reasons for your failure is that you have tried too hard, that you
+have not known how to rest. When you have learned how to rest, when you
+have learned to put off thinking and planning until the mind becomes
+fresh and clear, when you are in a fair way to know the joy of idleness
+and the peace of rest, you are a great deal more likely to get back to
+efficiency and to find your way along the great paths of activity into
+the world of life.
+
+It is not so much the idleness, then, as the attempt to overcome its
+irksomeness, that makes this condition painful. The invalid in bed is in
+a trap, to be tormented by his thoughts unless he knows the meaning of
+successful idleness. This knowledge may come to him by such strategy as
+I have suggested--by giving up the struggle against worry and fret; but
+peace will come surely, steadily, "with healing in its wings," when the
+mind is changed altogether, when life becomes free because of a growth
+and development that finds significance even in idleness, that sees the
+world with wise and patient eyes.
+
+In a way it does not matter, your physical condition or mine, if our
+"eyes have seen the glory" that deifies life and makes even its waste
+places beautiful. What is that view from your window as you lie in your
+bed? A bit of the sea, if you are fortunate, a corner of garden, surely,
+the top of an elm tree against the blue. What is it but the revelations
+of a God in the world? There is enough that is sad and unhappy, but over
+all are these simple, ineffable things. If the garden is an expression
+of God in the world, then the world and life are no longer meaningless.
+Even idleness becomes in some degree bearable because it is a part of a
+significant world.
+
+Unfortunately, the idleness of disability often means pain, the wear and
+tear of physical or nervous suffering. That is another matter. We cannot
+meet it fully with any philosophy. My patients very often beg to know
+the best way to bear pain, how they may overcome the attacks of "nerves"
+that are harder to bear than pain. To such a question I can only say
+that the time to bear pain is before and after. Live in such a way in
+the times of comparative comfort that the attacks are less likely to
+appear and easier to bear when they do come. After the pain or the
+"nervous" attack is over, that is the time to prevent the worst features
+of another. Forget the distress; live simply and happily in spite of the
+memory, and you will have done all that the patient himself can do to
+ward off or to make tolerable the next occasion of suffering. Pain
+itself--pure physical pain--is a matter for the physician's judgment. It
+is his business to seek out the causes and apply the remedy.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+RULES OF THE GAME
+
+
+    It is not growing like a tree
+    In bulk, doth make man better be.
+                BEN JONSON.
+
+    It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane
+    mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile
+    and decent qualities which we call character.
+                THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
+
+    The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to
+    yield to it.
+                PETRARCH.
+
+When I go about among my patients, most of them, as it happens,
+"nervously" sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I
+know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have
+no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness,
+some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the
+game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but
+it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress
+those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our
+transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or
+sinners. There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise
+and balance when these have been lost. These laws are less well observed
+and understood than those which determine our downfall.
+
+The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we
+need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable
+people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that
+nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical
+disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for
+us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens in the human
+economy when a "nervous breakdown" comes, nobody seems to know, but mind
+and body coöperate to make the patient miserable and helpless. It may
+be nature's way of holding us up and preventing further injury. The
+hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.
+
+The rules we have wittingly or unwittingly broken are often unknown to
+us, but they exist in the All-Wise Providence, and we may guess by our
+own suffering how far we have overstepped them. If a man runs into a
+door in the dark, we know all about that,--the case is simple,--but if
+he runs overtime at his office and hastens to be rich with the result of
+a nervous dyspepsia--that is a mystery. Here is a girl who "came out"
+last year. She was apparently strong and her mother was ambitious for
+her social progress. That meant four nights a week for several months at
+dances and dinners, getting home at 3 A.M. or later. It was gay and
+delightful while it lasted, but it could not last, and the girl went to
+pieces suddenly; her back gave out because it was not strong enough to
+stand the dancing and the long-continued physical strain. The nerves
+gave out because she did not give her faculties time to rest, and
+perhaps because of a love affair that supervened. The result was a year
+of invalidism, and then, because the rules of recovery were not
+understood, several years more of convalescence. Such common rules
+should be well enough understood, but they are broken everywhere by the
+wisest people.
+
+The common case of the broken-down school teacher is more unfortunate.
+This tragedy and others like it are more often, I believe, due to unwise
+choice of profession in the first place. The women's colleges are
+turning out hundreds of young women every year who naturally consider
+teaching as the field most appropriate and available. Probably only a
+very small proportion of these girls are strong enough physically or
+nervously to meet the growing demands of the schools. They may do well
+for a time, some of them unusually well, for it is the sensitive,
+high-strung organism that is appreciative and effective. After a while
+the worry and fret of the requirements and the constant nag of the
+schoolroom have their effect upon those who are foredoomed to failure in
+that particular field. The plight of such young women is particularly
+hard, for they are usually dependent upon their work.
+
+It is, after all, not so much the things we do as the way we do them,
+and what we think about them, that accomplishes nervous harm. Strangely
+enough, the sense of effort and the feeling of our own inadequacy damage
+the nervous system quite as much as the actual physical effort. The
+attempt to catch up with life and with affairs that go on too fast for
+us is a frequent and harmful deflection from the rules of the game. Few
+of us avoid it. Life comes at us and goes by very fast. Tasks multiply
+and we are inadequate, responsibilities increase before we are ready.
+They bring fatigue and confusion. We cannot shirk and be true. Having
+done all you reasonably can, stop, whatever may be the consequences.
+That is a rule I would enforce if I could. To do more is to drag and
+fail, so defeating the end of your efforts. If it turns out that you are
+not fit for the job you have undertaken, give it up and find another, or
+modify that one until it comes within your capacity. It takes courage to
+do this--more courage sometimes than is needed to make us stick to the
+thing we are doing. Rarely, however, will it be necessary for us to give
+up if we will undertake and consider for the day only such part of our
+task as we are able to perform. The trouble is that we look at our work
+or our responsibility all in one piece, and it crushes us. If we cannot
+arrange our lives so that we may meet their obligations a little at a
+time, then we must admit failure and try again, on what may seem a
+lower plane. That is what I consider the brave thing to do. I would
+honor the factory superintendent, who, finding himself unequal to his
+position, should choose to work at the bench where he could succeed
+perfectly.
+
+The habit of uncertainty in thought and action, bred, as it sometimes
+is, from a lack of faith in man and in God, is, nevertheless, a thing to
+be dealt with sometimes by itself. Not infrequently it is a petty habit
+that can be corrected by the exercise of a little will power. I believe
+it is better to decide wrong a great many times--doing it quickly--than
+to come to a right decision after weakly vacillating. As a matter of
+fact, we may trust our decisions to be fair and true if our life's
+ideals are beautiful and true.
+
+We may improve our indecisions a great deal by mastering their unhappy
+details, but we shall not finally overcome them until life rings true
+and until all our acts and thoughts become the solid and inevitable
+expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to
+right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed
+every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential
+the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling
+of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous
+exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of
+cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously takes the snap and
+sparkle out of life and leaves us for the time being colorless and weak.
+
+Next to uncertainty, an uninspired certainty is wrecking to the best of
+human prospects. The man whose one idea is of making himself and his
+family materially comfortable, or even rich, may not be coming to
+nervous prostration, but he is courting a moral prostration that will
+deny him all the real riches of life and that will in the end reward
+him with a troubled mind, a great, unsatisfied longing, unless, to be
+sure, he is too smug and satisfied to long for anything.
+
+The larger life leads us inevitably away from ourselves, away from the
+super-requirements of our families. It demands of them and of ourselves
+an unselfishness that is born of a love that finds its expression in the
+service of God. And what is the service of God if it is not such an
+entering into the divine purposes and spirit that we become with God
+re-creators in the world--working factors in the higher evolution of
+humanity? While we live we shall get and save, we shall use and spend,
+we shall serve the needs of those dependent upon us, but we shall not
+line the family nest so softly that our children become powerless. We
+shall not confine our charities to the specified channels, where our
+names will be praised and our credit increased. We shall give and serve
+in secret places with our hearts in our deeds. Then we may possess the
+untroubled mind, a treasure too rich to be computed. We shall not have
+it for the seeking; it may exist in the midst of what men may call
+privations and sorrows; but it will exist in a very large sense and it
+will be ours. The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows
+himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and
+uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when
+he is ill. I cannot argue in favor of business laxity,--I know the
+imperative need of exactness and finality,--but I do believe that if we
+are to possess the untroubled mind we must make our lives larger than
+the field of dollars and cents. The charity that develops in us will
+make us truly generous and free from the reaction of hardness.
+
+It is a great temptation to go on multiplying the rules of the game.
+There are so many sensible and necessary pieces of advice which we all
+need to have emphasized. That is the course we must try to avoid. The
+child needs to be told, arbitrarily for a while, what is right, and what
+is wrong, that he must do this, and he must not do that. The time comes,
+however, when the growing instinct toward right living is the thing to
+foster--not the details of life which will inevitably take care of
+themselves if the underlying principle is made right. It must be the
+ideal of moral teaching to make clear and pure the source of action.
+Then the stream will be clear and pure. Such a stream will purify itself
+and neutralize the dangerous inflow along its banks. It is true that
+great harm may come from the polluted inflows, but they will be less and
+less harmful as the increasing current from the good source flows down.
+
+We shall have to look well to our habits lest serious ills befall, but
+that must never be the main concern or we shall find ourselves living
+very narrow and labored lives; we shall find that we are failing to
+observe one of the most important rules of the game.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE NERVOUS TEMPERAMENT
+
+
+    Beyond the ugly actual, lo, on every side,
+    Imagination's limitless domain.
+                BROWNING.
+
+    He that too much refines his delicacy will always endanger his
+    quiet.
+                SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+
+    The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered
+    them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life.
+                STEVENSON.
+
+It has been my fortune as a physician to deal much with the so-called
+nervous temperament. I have come both to fear and to love it. It is the
+essence of all that is bright, imaginative, and fine, but it is as
+unstable as water. Those who possess it must suffer--it is their lot to
+feel deeply, and very often to be misunderstood by their more practical
+friends. All their lives these people will shed tears of joy, and more
+tears of sorrow. I would like to write of their joy, of the perfect
+satisfaction, the true happiness that comes in creating new and
+beautiful things, of the deep pleasure they have in the appreciation of
+good work in others. But with the instinct of a dog trained for a
+certain kind of hunting I find myself turning to the misfortunes and the
+ills.
+
+The very keenness of perception makes painful anything short of
+perfection. What will such people do in our clanging streets? What of
+those fine ears tuned to the most exquisite appreciation of sweet sound?
+What of that refinement of hearing that detects the least departure from
+the rhythm and pitch in complex orchestral music? And must they bear the
+crash of steel on stone, the infernal clatter of traffic? Well, yes,--as
+a matter of fact--they must, at least for a good many years to come,
+until advancing civilization eliminates the city noise. But it is not
+always great noises that disturb and distract. There is a story told of
+a woman who became so sensitive to noise that she had her house made
+sound-proof: there were thick carpets and softly closing doors;
+everything was padded. The house was set back from a quiet street, but
+that street was strewn with tanbark to check the sound of carriages.
+Surely here was bliss for the sensitive soul. I need not tell the rest
+of the story, how absolutely necessary noises became intolerable, and
+the poor woman ended by keeping a man on the place to catch and silence
+the tree toads and crickets.
+
+There is nothing to excuse the careless and unnecessary noises of the
+world--we shall dispose of them finally as we are disposing of
+flamboyant signboards and typhoid flies. But meanwhile, and always, for
+that matter, the sensitive soul must learn to adjust itself to
+circumstances and conditions. This adjustment may in itself become a
+fine art. It is really the art by which the painter excludes the
+commonplace and irrelevant from his landscape. Sometimes we have to do
+this consciously; for the most part, it should be a natural, unconscious
+selection.
+
+I am sure it is unwise to attempt at any time the dulling of the
+appreciative sense for the sake of peace and comfort. Love and
+understanding of the beautiful and true is too rare and fine a thing to
+be lost or diminished under any circumstances. The cure, as I see it, is
+to be found in the cultivation of the faculty that finds some good in
+everything and everybody. This is the saving grace--it takes great bulks
+of the commonplace and distils from the mass a few drops of precious
+essence; it finds in the unscholarly and the imperfect, rare traces of
+good; it sees in man, any man, the image of God, to be justified and
+made evident only in the sublimity of death, perhaps, but usually to be
+developed in life.
+
+The nervous person is often morose and unsocial--perhaps because he is
+not understood, perhaps because he falls so short of his own ideals.
+Often he does not find kindred spirits anywhere. I do not think we
+should drive such a man into conditions that hurt, but I do believe that
+if he is truly artistic, and not a snob, he may lead himself into a
+larger social life without too much sacrifice.
+
+The sensitive, high-strung spirit that does not give of its own best
+qualities to the world of its acquaintance, that does not express itself
+in some concrete way, is always in danger of harm. Such a spirit turned
+in upon itself is a consuming fire. The spirit will burn a long time and
+suffer much if it does not use its heat to warm and comfort the world of
+need.
+
+Real illness makes the nervous temperament a much more formidable
+difficulty--all the sensitive faculties are more sensitive--irritability
+becomes an obsession and idleness a terror.
+
+The nervous temperament under irritation is very prone to become
+selfish--and very likely to hide behind this selfishness, calling it
+temperament. The man who flies into a passion when he is disturbed, or
+who spends his days in torment from the noises of the street; the woman
+of high attainment who has retired into herself, who is moody and
+unresponsive,--these unfortunates have virtually built a wall about
+their lives, a wall which shuts out the world of life and happiness.
+From the walls of this prison the sounds of discord and annoyance are
+thrown back upon the prisoner intensified and multiplied. The wall is
+real enough in its effect, but will cease to exist when the prisoner
+begins to go outside, when he begins to realize his selfishness and his
+mistake. Then the noises and the irritations will be lost in the wider
+world that is open to him. After all, it is only through unselfish
+service in the world of men that this broadening can come.
+
+There is no lack of opportunity for service. Perhaps the simplest and
+most available form of service is charity,--the big, professional kind,
+of course,--and beyond that the greater field of intimate and personal
+charity. I know a girl of talent and ability--herself a nervous
+invalid--sick and helpless for the lack of a little money which would
+give her a chance to get well. I do not mean money for luxuries, for
+foolish indulgences, but money to buy opportunity--money that would lift
+her out of the heavy morass of poverty and give her a chance. She falls
+outside the beaten path of charity. She is not reached by the usual
+philanthropies. I also know plenty of people who could help that girl
+without great sacrifice. They will not do it because they give money to
+the regular charities--they will not do it because sometimes generosity
+has been abused. So they miss the chance of broadening and developing
+their own lives.
+
+I know well enough that objective interest can rarely be forced--it
+must usually come the other way about--through the broadening of life
+which makes it inevitable. Sometimes I wish I could force that kind of
+development, that kind of charity. Sometimes I long to take the rich
+neurasthenic and make him help his brother, make him develop a new art
+that shall save people from sorrow and loss. We are all together in this
+world, and all kin; to recognize it and to serve the needs of the
+unfortunate as we would serve our own children is the remedy for many
+ills. It is the new art, the final and greatest of all artistic
+achievements; it warms our hearts and opens our lives to all that is
+wholesome and good. This is one of the crises in which my theory of
+"inspiration first" may fail. Here the charity may have to come first,
+may have to be insisted upon before there can be any inspiration or any
+further joy in life. It is not always charity in the usual sense that is
+required; sometimes the charity that gives something besides money is
+best. But charity in any good sense means self-forgetfulness, and that
+is a long way on the road to nervous health. Give of yourself, give of
+your substance, and you will cease to be troubled with the penalties of
+selfishness. Then take the next step--that gives not because life has
+come back, but because the world has become larger and warmer and
+happier. When the giver gives of his sympathy and of his means because
+he wants to,--not because he has to do so,--he will begin to know what I
+mean when I say it is better to have the inspiration first.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+SELF-CONTROL
+
+
+    He only earns his freedom and existence
+    Who daily conquers them anew.
+                GOETHE.
+
+A good many writers on self-control and kindred subjects insist that we
+shall conscientiously and consciously govern our mental lives. They say,
+"You must get up in the morning with determination to be cheerful." They
+insist that in spite of annoyance or trouble you shall keep a smiling
+face, and affirm to yourself over and over again the denial of
+annoyance.
+
+I do not like this kind of self-control. I wish I could admire it and
+approve it, but I find I cannot because it seems to me self-conscious
+and superficial. It is better than nothing and unquestionably adds
+greatly to the sum of human happiness. But I do not think we ought to be
+cheerful if we are consumed with trouble and sorrow. The fact is we
+ought not to be for long beyond a natural cheerfulness that comes from
+the deepest possible sources. While we are sad, let us be so, simply and
+naturally; but we must pray that the light may come to us in our sorrow,
+that we may be able soon and naturally to put aside the signs of
+mourning.
+
+The person who thinks little of his own attitude of mind is more likely
+to be well controlled and to radiate happiness than one who must
+continually prompt himself to worthy thoughts. The man whose heart is
+great with understanding of the sorrow and pathos of life is far more
+apt to be brave and fine in his own trouble than one who must look to a
+motto or a formula for consolation and advice. Deep in the lives of
+those who permanently triumph over sorrow there is an abiding peace and
+joy. Such peace cannot come even from ample experience in the material
+world. Despair comes from that experience sometimes, unless the heart
+is open to the vital spirit that lies beyond all material things, that
+creates and renews life and that makes it indescribably beautiful and
+significant. Experience of material things is only the beginning. In it
+and through it we may have experience of the wider life that surrounds
+the material.
+
+Our hearts must be opened to the courage that comes unbidden when we
+feel ourselves to be working, growing parts of the universe of God. Then
+we shall have no more sorrow and no more joy in the pitiful sense of the
+earth, but rather an exaltation which shall make us masters of these and
+of ourselves. We shall have a sympathy and charity that shall need no
+promptings, but that flow from us spontaneously into the world of
+suffering and need.
+
+Beethoven was of a sour temper, according to all accounts, but he wrote
+his symphonies in the midst of tribulations under which few men would
+have worked at all. When we have felt something of the spirit that makes
+work inevitable, it will be as though we had heard the eternal harmonies.
+We shall write our symphonies, build our bridges, or do our lesser tasks
+with dauntless purpose, even though the possessions that men count dear
+are taken from us. Suppose we can do very little because of some
+infirmity: if that little has in it the larger inspiration, it will be
+enough to make life full and fine. The joy of a wider life is not
+obtainable in its completeness; it is only through a lifetime of service
+and experience that we can approach it. That is the proof of its divine
+origin--its unattainableness. "God keep you from the she wolf and from
+your heart's deepest desire," is an old saying of the Rumanians. If we
+fully obtain our desires, we prove their unworthiness. Does any one
+suppose that Beethoven attained his whole heart's desire in his music?
+He might have done so had he been a lesser man. He was not a cheerful
+companion. That is unfortunate, and shows that he failed in complete
+inspiration and in the ordinary kind of self-control. He was at least
+sincere, and that helped not a little to make him what he was. I would
+almost rather a man would be morose and sincere than cheerful from a
+sense of duty.
+
+Our knowledge of the greater things of life must always be substantiated
+and worked out into realities of service, or else we shall be weak and
+ineffective. The charity that balks at giving, reacts upon a man and
+deadens him. I am always insisting that we must not live and serve
+through a sense of duty, but that we must find the inspiration first. It
+is better to give ourselves to service not for the sake of finding God,
+but because we have found Him and because our souls have grown in the
+finding until we cannot help giving. If we have grown to such a stature
+we shall be able to meet sorrow and loss bravely and simply. We shall
+feel for ourselves and for others in their troubles as Forbes Robertson
+did when he wrote to his friend who had met with a great loss: "I pray
+that you may never, never, never get over this sorrow, but through it,
+into it, into the very heart of God." All this is very unworldly, no
+doubt, and yet I will venture the assertion that such a standard and
+such a method will come nearer to the mark of successful and
+well-controlled living than the most carefully planned campaign of duty.
+If we plan to make life fine, if we say, in effect, "I will be good and
+cheerful, no matter what happens," we are beginning at the wrong end. We
+may be able to work back from our mottoes to real living, but the
+chances are we shall stop somewhere by the way, too confused and
+uncertain to go on. Self-control, at its best, is not a conscious thing.
+It is not well that we should try to be good, but that we should so
+dignify our lives with the spirit of good that evil becomes well-nigh
+impossible to us.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE LIGHTER TOUCH
+
+
+    Heart not so heavy as mine,
+    Wending late home,
+    As it passed my window
+    Whistled itself a tune.
+                EMILY DICKINSON.
+
+I have never seen good come from frightening worriers. It is no doubt
+wise to speak the truth, but it seems to me a mistake to say in public
+print or in private advice that worry leads to tragedies of the worst
+sort. No matter how hopeful we may be in our later teaching about the
+possibilities of overcoming worry, the really serious worrier will
+pounce upon the original tragic statement and apply it with terrible
+insistence to his own case.
+
+I would not minimize the seriousness of worry, but I am convinced that
+we can rarely overcome it by direct voluntary effort. It does not go
+until we forget it, and we do not forget it if we are always trying
+consciously to overcome it. We worriers must go about our
+business--other business than that of worry.
+
+Life is serious--alas, too serious--and full enough of pathos. We cannot
+joke about its troubles; they are real. But, at least, we need not
+magnify them. Why should we act as though everything depended upon our
+efforts, even the changing seasons and the blowing winds? No doubt we
+are responsible for our own acts and thoughts and for the welfare of
+those who depend upon us. The trouble is we take unnecessary
+responsibilities so seriously that we overreach ourselves and defeat our
+own good ends.
+
+I would make my little world more blessedly careless--with an _abandon_
+that loves life too much to spoil it with worry. I would cherish so
+great a desire for my child's good that I could not scold and bear down
+upon him for every little fault, making him a worrier too, but,
+instead, I would guide him along the right path with pleasant words and
+brave encouragement. The condemnation of faults is rarely constructive.
+
+We had better say to the worriers, "Here is life; no matter what
+unfortunate things you may have said or done, you must put all evil
+behind you and live--simply, bravely, well." The greater the evil,
+the greater the need of forgetting. Not flippantly, but reverently,
+leave your misdeeds in a limbo where they may not rise to haunt you.
+This great thing you may do, not with the idea of evading or escaping
+consequences, but so that past evil may be turned into present and
+future good. The criminal himself is coming to be treated this way. He
+is no longer eternally reminded of his crime. He is taken out into the
+sunshine and air and is given a shovel to dig with. A wonderful thing is
+that shovel. With it he may bury the past and raise up a happier,
+better future. We must care so much to expiate our sins that we are
+willing to neglect them and live righteously. That is true repentance,
+constructive repentance.
+
+We cannot suddenly change our mental outlook and become happy when grief
+has borne us down. "For the broken heart silence and shade,"--that is
+fair and right. I would say to those who are unhappy, "Do not try to be
+happy, you cannot force it; but let peace come to you out of the great
+world of beauty that calmly surrounds our human suffering, and that
+speaks to us quietly of God." Genuine laughter is not forced, but we may
+let it come back into our lives if we know that it is right for it to
+come.
+
+We have all about us instances of the effectiveness of the lighter touch
+as applied to serious matters. The life of the busy surgeon is a good
+example. He may be, and usually is, brimming with sympathy, but if he
+were to feel too deeply for all his patients, he would soon fail and
+die. He goes about his work. He puts through a half-dozen operations in
+a way that would send cold shivers down the back of the uninitiated. And
+yet he is accurate and sure as a machine. If he were to take each case
+upon his mind in a heavy, consequential way, if he were to give deep
+concern to each ligature he ties, and if he were to be constantly afraid
+of causing pain, he would be a poor surgeon. His work, instead of being
+clean and sharp, would suffer from over-conscientiousness. He might
+never finish an operation for fear his patient would bleed to death.
+Such a man may be the reverse of flippant, and yet he may actually enjoy
+his somber work. Cruel, bloodthirsty? Not at all. These men--the great
+surgeons--are as tender as children. But they love their work, they
+really care very deeply for their patients. The successful ones have the
+lighter touch and they have no time for worry.
+
+Sometimes we wish to arouse the public conscience. Do the long columns
+of figures, the impressive statistics, wake men to activity? It is
+rather the keen, bright thrust of the satirist that saves the day. Once
+in a New England town meeting there was a movement for a much-needed new
+schoolhouse. By the installation of skylights in the attic the old
+building had been made to accommodate the overflow of pupils. The
+serious speakers in favor of the new building had left the audience
+cold, when a young man arose and said he had been up into the attic and
+had seen the wonderful skylights that were supposed to meet the needs of
+the children. "I have seen them," he said; "we used to call them
+scuttles when I was a boy." A hundred thousand dollars was voted for the
+new schoolhouse.
+
+There is a natural gayety in most of us which helps more than we realize
+to keep us sound. The pity is that when responsibilities come and
+hardships come, we repress our lighter selves sternly, as though such
+repression were a duty. Better let us guard the springs of happiness
+very, very jealously. The whistling boy in the dark street does more
+than cheer himself on the way. He actually protects himself from evil,
+and brings courage not only to himself, but to those who hear him. I do
+not hold for false cheerfulness that is sometimes affected, but a brave
+show of courage in a forlorn hope will sometimes win the day. It is
+infinitely more likely to win than a too serious realization of the
+danger of defeat. The show of courage is often not a pretense at all,
+but victory itself.
+
+The need of the world is very great and its human destiny is in our
+hands. Half of those who could help to right the wrongs are asleep or
+too selfishly immersed in their own affairs. We need more helpers like
+my friend of the skylights. Most of us are far too serious. The
+slumberers will slumber on, and the worriers will worry, the serious
+people will go ponderously about until some one shows them how
+ridiculous they are and how pitiful.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+REGRETS AND FOREBODINGS
+
+
+    Regret avails little--still less remorse--the one keeps alive
+    the old offense, the other creates new offenses.
+                GOETHE.
+
+The unrepentant sinner walks abroad. Unfortunately for us moralists he
+seems to be having a very good time. We must not condone him, though he
+may be a very lovable person; neither must we altogether condemn him,
+for he may be repentant in the very best way of all ways, the way that
+forgets much and leaves behind more, because life is so fine that it
+must not be spoiled, and because progress is in every way better than
+retrospection. The fact is, that repentance is too often the fear of
+punishment, and such fear is, to say the least, unmanly. I would rather
+be a lovable sinner than one of the people who repent because they
+cannot bear to think of the consequences. Knowledge and fear of
+consequences undoubtedly keep a great many young people from the
+so-called sins of ignorance. But there must be something behind
+knowledge and fear of consequences to stop the youth of spirit from
+doing what he is inclined to do. Over and over again we must go back to
+the appreciation of life's dignity and beauty--to the consciousness of
+the spirit of God behind and in the world if we are to find a balance
+and a character that will "deliver us from evil."
+
+When we have found this consciousness--when we live it and breathe it,
+we shall be far less apt to sin, and when we have sinned, as we all must
+in the course of our blundering lives, we shall not waste our time in
+regret or in the fear of consequences. If the God we dream of is as
+great as the sea, or as beautiful as a tree, we need not fear Him. He
+will be tender, and just at the same time. He will be as forgiving as
+He is strong. The best we can do, then, is to leave our sins in the hand
+of God and go our way, sadder and wiser, maybe, but not regretting too
+much, not fearing any more.
+
+There is a new idea in medicine--the development of which has been one
+of the most striking achievements of modern times--the idea of
+psychanalysis as taught and advocated by Freud in Germany. The plan
+is to study the subconscious mind of the nervous patient by means of
+hypnotism, to assist the patient to recall all the mental experiences of
+his past,--even his very early childhood,--and in this way to make clear
+the origin of the misconceptions and the unfortunate impressions which
+have presumably exerted their influence through the years. The new
+system includes, also, the interpretation of dreams, their effect upon
+the conscious life and their influence upon the mentality. Very
+wonderful results are reported from the pursuit of this method. Many a
+badly warped and twisted life has been straightened out and renewed when
+the searchlight has revealed the hidden influences that have been at
+work and which have made trouble. The repression of conscious or
+unconscious feelings can no doubt change the whole mental life. We
+should have the greatest respect for the men who are doing this work. It
+requires, I am told, an almost unbelievable amount of patience and time
+to accomplish the analysis. No doubt the adult judgment of childish
+follies is a direct means of disposing of their harmful influence in
+life, the surest way of losing the conscious or unconscious regrets that
+sadden many lives. There are probably many cases of disturbed and
+troubled mind that can be cured in this way only. The method does not
+appeal to me because I am so strongly inclined to take people as they
+are, to urge a forgetfulness that does not really forget, but which goes
+on bravely to the development of life. This development cannot proceed
+without the understanding that life may be made so beautiful that sins
+and failures are lost in progress. Some of us may need the subtle
+analysis of our lives to make clear the points where we went astray in
+our thoughts and ideas, but many of us, fortunately, are able to take
+ourselves for better or for worse, sins and all. Most of us ought to do
+that, for the most part, if we are to progress and live. Sometimes the
+revelations of evils we know not of result in complications rather than
+simplification, as in the case of a boy who wrote to me and said that
+since he had learned of his early sins he had made sure that he could
+never be well. Instead of going into further analysis with him, I
+assured him that, while it was undoubtedly his duty to regret all the
+evil of his life, it was a still greater duty to go on and live the rest
+of it well, and that he could do so if he would open his eyes to the
+possibilities of unselfish service.
+
+I am very much inclined to preach against self-analysis and the almost
+inevitable regret and despair that accompany it.
+
+One of my patients decided some time ago that her life was wasted, that
+she had accomplished nothing. It was true that she had not the endurance
+to meet the usual demands of social or even family life, and that for
+long periods she had to give up altogether. But it happened that she had
+the gift of musical understanding, that she had studied hard in younger
+days. With a little urging the gift was made to grow again and to serve
+not only the patient's own needs, but to bring very great pleasure to
+every one who listened to her playing. That rare, true ability was worth
+everything, and she came to realize it in time. The gift of musical
+expression is a very great thing, and I succeeded in making this woman
+understand that she should be happy in that ability even if nothing
+else should be possible.
+
+Often enough nothing that can compare with music exists, and life seems
+wholly barren. Rather cold comfort it seems at first to assure a person
+who is helpless that character is the greatest thing in the world, but
+that is the final truth. The most limited and helpless life may glow
+with it and be richer than imagination can believe. It is never time to
+regret--and never time to despair. The less analysis the better. When it
+comes to character, live, grow, and get a deeper and deeper
+understanding of life--of life that is near to God and so capable of
+wrong only as we turn away from Him. "Do not say things; what you are
+stands over you and thunders so, I cannot hear what you say to the
+contrary." We shall do well not to forget that, whatever failures or
+mistakes we have made, there is infinite possibility ahead of us, that
+character is the greatest thing in the world, and that most good
+character has been built upon mistakes and failures. I believe there is
+no sin which may not make up the fabric of its own forgiveness in the
+living of a free, self-sacrificing life. I know of no bodily ill nor
+handicap which we may not eventually rise above and beyond by means of
+brave spiritual progress. The body may fail us, but the spirit reaches
+on and into the great world of God.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE VIRTUES
+
+
+    The virtues hide their vanquished fires
+    Within that whiter flame--
+    Till conscience grows irrelevant
+    And duty but a name.
+                FREDERICK LAWRENCE KNOWLES.
+
+In most books I have read on "nerves" and similar subjects, advice is
+given, encouragement is given, but the necessity for patience is not
+made clear. Patience is typical of all the other virtues. Many a man has
+followed the best of advice for a time, and has become discouraged
+because the promised results did not materialize. It is disappointing,
+surely, to have lived upon a diet for months only to find that you still
+have dyspepsia, or to have followed certain rules of morality with great
+precision and enthusiasm without obtaining the untroubled mind. We are
+accustomed to see results in the material world and naturally expect
+them everywhere. The trouble is we do not always recognize improvements
+when we see them, and we insist upon certain preconceived changes as a
+result of our endeavors. The physician is apt rashly to promise definite
+physical accomplishments in a given time. He is courting disappointment
+and distrust when he does so. We all want to get relief from our
+symptoms, and we are inclined to insist upon a particular kind of relief
+so strongly that we fail to appreciate the possibilities of another and
+a better relief which may be at hand. The going astray in this
+particular is sometimes very unfortunate. I have known a man to rush
+frantically from one doctor to another, trying to obtain relief for a
+particular pain or discomfort, unwilling to rest long enough to find out
+that the trouble would have disappeared naturally if he had taken the
+advice of the first physician, to live without impatience and within his
+limitations.
+
+The human body is a very complex organism, and sometimes pain and
+distress are better not relieved, since they may be the expression of
+some deeper maladjustment which must first be straightened out. This is
+also true of the mind--in which the unhappy proddings of conscience had
+better not be cured by anodynes or by evasion unless we are prepared to
+go deeply enough to make them disappear spontaneously. We must sometimes
+insist upon patience, though it should exist as a matter of
+course--patience with ourselves and with others. The physician who
+demands and secures the greatest degree of patience from his clients is
+the most successful practitioner, for no life can go on successfully
+without patience. If patience can be spontaneous,--the natural result of
+a broadening outlook,--then it will be permanent and serviceable; the
+other kind, that exists by extreme effort, may do for a while, but it is
+a poor makeshift.
+
+I always feel like apologizing when I ask a man or a woman to be
+tolerant or charitable or generous or, for that matter, to practice any
+of the ordinary virtues. Sound living should spring unbidden from the
+very joy of life; it should need no justification and certainly no
+urging. But unfortunately, as the world now stands, there are men and
+groups of men who do not see the light. There is a wide contagion of
+selfishness and short-sightedness among the well-to-do, and a necessary
+federation of protection and selfishness among the poor. The practical
+needs of life, artificial as they are among the rich, and terribly
+insistent as they are among the poor, blind us to larger considerations.
+
+If all matters of welfare, public or private, could be treated
+unselfishly, how quickly we should be rid of some of the great evils
+that afflict the race. I am inclined to think that much of the goodness
+of people does come in that way, unconsciously, naturally, as the light
+flows from the sun. Yet I suppose that in our present order, and until,
+through the years, the better time arrives, we must very often ask
+ourselves and others to be good and to be charitable, just because it is
+right, or worse still because it is good policy.
+
+A man grows better, more human, more intelligent, as he practices the
+virtues. He is safer, no doubt, and the world is better. It is even true
+that, by the constant practice of virtues, he may come finally to
+espouse goodness and become thoroughly good. That is the hopeful thing
+about it and the reason why we may consistently ask or demand the
+routine practice of the virtues. But let us hold up all the time in our
+teaching and in our lives the other course, the development of the
+inspiration that includes all virtues and that makes all our way easy
+and plain in a world where confusion reigns, because men are going at
+the problem of right living the wrong way around.
+
+The practice of good living will never be easy in its details, but if it
+is sure in its inspiration there will be no question of the final
+triumph. We shall have to fight blindly sometimes and with all the
+strength and persistence of animals at bay. We shall fail sometimes,
+too, and that is not always the worst thing that can happen. It is the
+glory of life that we shall slowly triumph over ourselves and the world.
+It is the glory of life that out of sore trouble, in the midst of
+poverty and human injustice, may rise, spontaneous and serene, the
+spirit of self-sacrifice, the unconquerable spirit of service that does
+not question, that expresses the divine tenderness in terms of human
+love. Through the times of darkness and doubt which must inevitably
+come, there will be for those who cherish such a vision, and who come
+back to it again and again, no utter darkness, no trouble that wholly
+crushes, no loss that wholly destroys.
+
+If we could not understand it before, it will slowly dawn upon us that
+the life of Christ exemplified all these things. Charity, kindliness,
+service, patience,--all these things which have seemed so hard will
+become in our lives, as in his, the substance and expression of our
+faith. The great human virtues will become easy and natural, the
+untroubled mind, or as much of it as is good to possess, will be ours,
+not because we have escaped trouble, but because we have disarmed it,
+have welcomed it even, so long as it has served to strengthen and
+ennoble our lives.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE CURE BY FAITH
+
+
+    The healing of his seamless dress
+    Is by our beds of pain--
+    We touch Him in life's throng and press,
+    And we are whole again.
+                WHITTIER.
+
+I cannot finish my little book of ideals without writing some things
+that are in my mind about cure by faith or by prayer. It is a subject
+that I approach with hesitation because of the danger of
+misunderstanding. No subject is more difficult and none is more
+important for the invalid to understand. We hear a great deal about the
+wonderful cures of Christian Science or of similar agencies, and we all
+know of people who have been restored to usefulness by such means. Has
+the healing of Christ again become possible on earth? No one would be
+more eager to accept it and acknowledge it than the physician if it
+were really so. But careful investigation always reveals the fact that
+the wonderful cures are not of the body but of the mind. It is easy
+enough to say that a cancer or tuberculosis has been cured by faith, and
+apparently easy for many people to believe it, but alas, the proof is
+wanting. The Christian Scientist, honest and sincere as he may be, is
+not qualified to say what is true disease and what is not. What looks
+like diseased tissue recovers, but medical men know that it could not
+have been diseased in the most serious sense, and that the prayer for
+recovery could have had nothing to do with the cure, save in a very
+indirect way.
+
+The man who discards medicine for philosophy or religion is courting
+unnecessary suffering and even death. The worst part of it is that he
+may induce some one else to make the same mistake with similar results.
+In writing this opinion I am in no way denying the great significance
+and value of faith nor of the prayerful and trustful mind. If it cannot
+cure actual physical disease, faith can accomplish veritable miracles of
+healing in the mind of the patient. No thoughtful or honest medical man
+will deny it. Nor will most medical men deny that the course of almost
+any physical illness may be modified by faith and prayer. I am almost
+saying that there is no known medicine of such potency. Every bodily
+function is the better for the conquering spirit that transcends the
+earth and finds its necessary expression in prayer.
+
+There really need be no issue or disagreement between medicine and faith
+cure. At its best, one is not more wonderful than the other, and both
+aim to accomplish the same end--the relief of human suffering. When the
+two are merged, as some day they will be, we shall be surprised to
+discover how alike they are. Christian Science is rightly scorned by
+medical men because it is unscientific, because it makes absurd and
+untenable claims outside its own field, and because it has not as yet
+investigated that field in the scientific spirit. When proper study and
+investigation have been made it will be found that faith cure, not in
+its present state, but in some future development, will have an immense
+field of usefulness. It will be worthy of as much respect in that field
+as medicine proper in its own sphere. As a matter of fact both medicine
+and faith cure are miraculous in a very real sense, as both depend for
+efficiency now and always upon the same great laws which may be fairly
+called divine. What is the discovery that the serum of a horse will
+under certain circumstances cure diphtheria? Does it not mean that man
+is tapping sources of power far beyond his understanding? Is man
+responsible save as the agent? Did he produce the complex animal
+chemistry that makes this cure possible? Did man make the horse, or the
+laws that control the physiology and pathology of that animal? Here,
+then, is faith cure in its largest and best sense. The biologist may not
+be willing to admit it, but his faith in these great laws of God have
+made possible the cure of a dread disease. Here, as in all matters of
+pure religion, it is what men say and write, not the fact itself, that
+makes all the misunderstanding; we make our judgments and conceive our
+prejudices from mere surface considerations. Call life what you
+will,--leave out the symbolic word "God" altogether,--the facts remain.
+The true scientific spirit must reverence and adore the power that lies
+behind creation. It is as inconsistent for the bacteriologist to be an
+unbeliever as it is for the Christian Scientist to deny the value of
+bacteriology. Medicine is infinitely farther advanced than Christian
+Science, and yet Christian Science has grasped some truth that the
+natural scientist has stupidly missed. When an obsession is thrown off
+and courage substituted for fear, we witness as important a "cure" as
+can be shown to the credit of surgery. If the Christian Scientists and
+the other faith-curers were only less superficial and less narrow in
+their explanation of the facts, if they would condescend to study the
+diseases they treat, they would be entitled to, and would receive, more
+respect and consideration.
+
+The cure and prevention of disease through the agency of man are
+evidently part of the divine plan. Our eagerness to advance along the
+lines of investigation and practice is but that divine plan in action.
+The truly scientific spirit will neglect no possible curative agent.
+When scientific men ridicule prayer, they are thinking not of the real
+thing which is above all possible criticism, but of the feeble and often
+pathetic groping for the real thing. We ask in our prayers for
+impossible blessings that would invert the laws of God and change the
+face of nature--very well, we must be prepared for disappointment. The
+attitude of prayer may, indeed, transform our own lives and make
+possible for us experiences that would otherwise have been impossible.
+But our pathetic demands--we shall never know how forlorn and weak they
+are. Prayer is the opening of the heart to the being we call God--it is
+most natural and reasonable. If we pray in our weakness and blindness
+for what we may not have, there is, nevertheless, a wonderful
+re-creative effect within us. The comfort and peace of such communion is
+beyond all else healing and restoring in its influence upon the troubled
+and anxious mind of man. The poet or the scientist who bows in adoration
+before the glory of God revealed in nature, prays in effect to that God
+and his soul is refreshed and renewed. The poor wretch who stands
+blindfolded before the firing squad, waiting the word that ends the life
+of a military spy, is near enough to God--and the whispered prayer upon
+his lips is cure for the wounds that take his life.
+
+The best kind of prayer seeks not and asks not for physical relief or
+benefit, but opens the heart to its maker, and so receives the cure of
+peace that is a greater miracle than any yet wrought by man. Under the
+influence of that cure the sick are well and the dead are alive again.
+With the courage and spirit of such a cure in our lives, we shall
+inevitably do our utmost to relieve, by any good means, the physical
+suffering of the world. We shall follow the laws of nature. We shall
+study them with the utmost care. We shall take nothing for granted,
+since by less careful steps we shall miss the divine law and so go
+astray. The science of healing will become no chance and irrational
+thing. We shall use all the natural means to relieve and prevent
+suffering--there will be no scoring of one set of doctors by another
+because all will have one purpose. But more to the point than that, men
+will discover that health in its largest sense consists in living devout
+and prayerful lives whereunto shall be revealed in good time all that
+our finite minds can know and use. There will be no suffering of the
+body in the old and pitiful sense, for we shall be so much alive that
+disease and death can no longer claim us.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <link rel="schema.DC" href="http://dublincore.org/documents/1998/09/dces/" />
+    <meta name="author" content="Herbert J. Hall" />
+    <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Herbert J. Hall" />
+    <meta name="DC.Title" content="The Untroubled Mind" />
+    <meta name="DC.Date" content="2007" />
+    <meta name="DC.Language" content="en" />
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Untroubled Mind
+
+Author: Herbert J. Hall
+
+Release Date: July 19, 2007 [EBook #22108]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNTROUBLED MIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Dave Morgan, Laura Wisewell
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><span class="num" title="Page i">&zwnj;</span><a name="pi" id="pi"></a>THE<br /> UNTROUBLED MIND</h1>
+
+<p class="title"><small>BY</small>
+<br />
+HERBERT J. HALL, M.D.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width:100px">
+<img src="images/logo.png" alt="" width="100" height="137" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="title"><small>BOSTON AND NEW YORK</small>
+<br />
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+<br />
+The Riverside Press Cambridge</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center"><span class="num" title="Page ii">&zwnj;</span><a name="pii" id="pii"></a>COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HERBERT J. HALL
+<br />
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Published May 1915</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page iii">&zwnj;</span><a name="piii" id="piii"></a><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A very</span> wise physician has said that &ldquo;every illness has two parts&mdash;what
+it is, and what the patient thinks about it.&rdquo; What the patient thinks
+about it is often more important and more troublesome than the real
+disease. What the patient thinks of life, what life means to him is also
+of great importance and may be the bar that shuts out all real health
+and happiness. The following pages are devoted to certain ideals of life
+which I would like to give to my patients, the long-time patients who
+have especially fallen to my lot.</p>
+
+<p>They are not all here, the steps to health and happiness. The reader may
+even be annoyed and baffled by my indirectness and unwillingness to be
+specific. That I cannot help&mdash;it is a personal peculiarity; I cannot ask
+any one to live by rule, because I do not believe<span class="num" title="Page iv">&zwnj;</span><a name="piv" id="piv"></a> that rules are
+binding and final. There must be character behind the rule and then the
+rule is unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>All that I have written has doubtless been presented before, in better
+ways, by wiser men, but I believe that each writer may expect to find
+his small public, his own particular public who can understand and
+profit by his teachings, having partly or wholly failed with the others.
+For that reason I am encouraged to write upon a subject usually shunned
+by medical men, being assured of at least a small company of friendly
+readers.</p>
+
+<p>I am grateful to a number of friends and patients who have read the
+manuscript of the following chapters. These reviewers have been frank
+and kind and very helpful. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Richard C.
+Cabot, who has given me much valuable assistance.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page v">&zwnj;</span><a name="pv" id="pv"></a><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS. <a href="#p1" style="font-size:x-small; font-weight:normal; position:absolute; right:22%;">Skip &rarr;</a></h2>
+
+
+<ol>
+<li><a href="#I">The Untroubled Mind</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p1">1</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#II" lang="la" xml:lang="la">Religio Medici</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p10">10</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#III">Thought and Work</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p20">20</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#IV">Idleness</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p30">30</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#V">Rules of the Game</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p38">38</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#VI">The Nervous Temperament</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p50">50</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#VII">Self-Control</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p59">59</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#VIII">The Lighter Touch</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p65">65</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#IX">Regrets and Forebodings</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p73">73</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#X">The Virtues</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p81">81</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#XI">The Cure by Faith</a> <a class="ralign" href="#p88">88</a></li>
+</ol>
+
+
+<p><span class="num" title="Page vi">&zwnj;</span><a name="pvi" id="pvi"></a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 1">&zwnj;</span><a name="p1" id="p1"></a><a name="I" id="I"></a><abbr title="1.">I</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>THE UNTROUBLED MIND</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Raze out the written troubles of the brain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And with some sweet oblivious antidote<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cleanse the stuff&#8217;d bosom of that perilous stuff<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which weighs upon the heart?<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Macbeth.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> a man tells me he never worries, I am inclined to think that he is
+either deceiving himself or trying to deceive me. The great roots of
+worry are conscience, fear, and regret. Undoubtedly we ought to be
+conscientious and we ought to fear and regret evil. But if it is to be
+better than an impediment and a harm, our worry must be largely
+unconscious, and intuitive. The moment we become conscious of worry we
+are undone. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we cannot leave conscience to
+its own devices unless our lives are big enough and fine enough to
+warrant such a<span class="num" title="Page 2">&zwnj;</span><a name="p2" id="p2"></a> course. The remedy for the mental unrest, which is in
+itself an illness, lies not in an enlightened knowledge of the
+harmfulness and ineffectiveness of worry, not even in the acquirement of
+an unconscious conscience, but in the living of a life so full and good
+that worry cannot find place in it. That idea of worry and conscience,
+that definition of serenity, simplifies life immensely. To overcome
+worry by substituting development and growth need never be dull work. To
+know life in its farther reaches, life in its better applications, is
+the final remedy&mdash;the great undertaking&mdash;<em>it is life</em>. We must warn
+ourselves, not infrequently, that the larger life is to be pursued for
+its own glorious self and not for the sake of peace. Peace may come, a
+peace so sure that death itself cannot shake it, but we must not expect
+all our affairs to run smoothly. As a matter of fact they may run badly
+enough; we shall have our ups and downs, we shall sin<span class="num" title="Page 3">&zwnj;</span><a name="p3" id="p3"></a> and repent, and
+sin again, but if in the end we live according to our best intuitions,
+we shall be justified, and we need not worry about the outcome. To put
+it another way, if we would have the untroubled mind, we must transfer
+our conscientious efforts from the small details of life&mdash;from the worry
+and fret of common things&mdash;into another and a higher atmosphere. We must
+transfigure common life, dignify it and ennoble it; then, although the
+old causes of worry may continue, we shall have gained a stature that
+will make us unconscious masters of the little troubles and in a great
+degree equal to the larger requirements. Life will be easier, not
+because we make less effort, but because we are working from another and
+a better level.</p>
+
+<p>If such a change, and it would be a change for most of us, could come
+about instantly, in a flash of revelation, that would be ideal, but it
+would not be life. We must return again and again to the<span class="num" title="Page 4">&zwnj;</span><a name="p4" id="p4"></a> old uninspired
+state wherein we struggle conscientiously with perverse details. I would
+not minimize the importance and value of this struggle; only the sooner
+it changes its level the better for every one concerned. Large serenity
+must, finally, be earned through the toughening of moral fibre that
+comes in dealing squarely with perplexing details. Some of this struggle
+must always be going on, but serener life will come when we begin to
+concern ourselves with larger factors.</p>
+
+<p>How are we to live the larger life? Partly through uninspired struggle
+and through the brave meeting of adversity, but partly, also, in a way
+that may be described as &ldquo;out of hand,&rdquo; by intuition, by exercise of the
+quality of mind that sees visions and grasps truths beyond the realms of
+common thought.</p>
+
+<p>I am more and more impressed with the necessity of inspiration in life
+if we are to be strong and serene, and so fin<span class="num" title="Page 5">&zwnj;</span><a name="p5" id="p5"></a>ally escape the pitfalls
+of worry and conscience. By inspirations I do not mean belief in any
+system or creed. It is not a stated belief that we need to begin with;
+that may come in time. We need first to find in life, or at least in
+nature, an essential beauty that makes its own true, inevitable response
+within us. We must learn to love life so deeply that we feel its
+tremendous significance, until we find in the sea and the sky the
+evidence of an overbrooding spirit too great to be understood, but not
+too great to satisfy the soul. This is a sort of mother religion&mdash;the
+matrix from which all sects and creeds are born. Its existence in us
+dignifies us and makes simple, purposeful, and receptive living almost
+inevitable. We may not know why we are living according to the dictates
+of our inspiration, but we shall live so and that is the important
+consideration.</p>
+
+<p>If I urge the acquirement of a religious conception that we may cure
+the<span class="num" title="Page 6">&zwnj;</span><a name="p6" id="p6"></a> intolerable distress of worry, I do what I have already warned
+against. It is so easy to make this mistake that I have virtually made
+it on the same page with my warning. We have no right to seek so great a
+thing as religious experience that we may be relieved of suffering.
+Better go on with pain and distress than cheapen religion by making it a
+remedy. We must seek it for its own sake, or rather, we must not seek it
+at all, lest, like a dream, it elude us, or change into something else,
+less holy. Nevertheless, it is true that if we will but look with open,
+unprejudiced eyes, again and again, upon the sunrise or the stars above
+us, we shall become conscious of a presence greater and more beautiful
+than our minds can think. In the experience of that vision strength and
+peace will come to us unbidden. We shall find our lives raised, as by an
+unseen force, above the warfare of conscience and worry. We shall begin
+to know the meaning of serenity and of that price<span class="num" title="Page 7">&zwnj;</span><a name="p7" id="p7"></a>less, if not wholly to
+be acquired, possession, the untroubled mind.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware that I shall be misunderstood and perhaps ridiculed by my
+colleagues when I attempt to discuss religion in any way. Theology is a
+field in which I have had no training, but that is the very reason why I
+dare write of it. I do not even assume that there is a God in the
+traditional sense. The idea is too great to be made concrete and
+literal. No single fact of nature can be fully understood by our finite
+minds. But I do feel vaguely that the laws that compass us, and make our
+lives possible, point always on&mdash;&ldquo;beyond the realms of time and
+space&rdquo;&mdash;toward the existence of a mighty overruling spirit. If this is a
+cold and inadequate conception of God, it is at least one that can be
+held by any man without compromise.</p>
+
+<p>The modern mind is apt to fail of religious understanding and support,
+because of the arbitrary interpretations<span class="num" title="Page 8">&zwnj;</span><a name="p8" id="p8"></a> of religion which are
+presented for our acceptance. It is what men say about religion, rather
+than religion itself, that repels us. Let us think it out for ourselves.
+If we are open to a simple, even primitive, conception of God, we may
+still repudiate the creeds and doctrines, but we are likely to become
+more tolerant of those who find them true and good. We shall be likely
+in time to find the religion of Christ understandable and
+acceptable&mdash;warm and quick with life. The man who ungrudgingly opens his
+heart to the God of nature will be religious in the simplest possible
+sense. He may worry because of the things he cannot altogether
+understand, and because he falls so far short of the implied ideal. But
+he will have enlarged his life so much that the common worries will find
+little room&mdash;he will be too full of the joy of living to spend much
+conscious thought in worry. Such a man will realize that he cannot
+afford to spend his time and strength in regret<span class="num" title="Page 9">&zwnj;</span><a name="p9" id="p9"></a>ting his past mistakes.
+There is too much in the future. What he does in the future, not what he
+has failed to do in the past, will determine the quality of his life. He
+knows this, and the knowledge sends him into that future with courage
+and with strength. Finally, in some indefinable way, character will
+become more important to him than physical health even. Illness is half
+compensated when a man realizes that it is not what he accomplishes in
+the world, but what he <em>is</em> that really counts, which puts him in touch
+with the creative forces of God and raises him out of the aimless and
+ordinary into a life of inspiration and joy. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 10">&zwnj;</span><a name="p10" id="p10"></a><a name="II" id="II"></a><abbr title="2.">II</abbr>
+<br />
+<small lang="la" xml:lang="la">RELIGIO MEDICI</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote><p>At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to
+Middlemarch with the reputation of having definite religious
+views, of being given to prayer and of otherwise showing an
+active piety, there would have been a general presumption
+against his medical skill. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">George Eliot.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> a medically educated man talks and writes of religion and of God,
+he is rightly enough questioned by his brothers&mdash;who are too busy with
+the hard work of practice to be concerned with anything but material
+problems. To me the word &ldquo;God&rdquo; is symbolic of the power which created
+and which maintains the universe. The sunrise and the stars of heaven
+give me some idea of his majesty, the warmth and tenderness of human
+love give me some idea of his divine love. That is all I know, but it is
+enough to make life glow; it is enough to inspire the most intense
+devotion to<span class="num" title="Page 11">&zwnj;</span><a name="p11" id="p11"></a> any good cause; it is enough to make me bear suffering with
+some degree of patience; and it is enough, finally, to give me some
+confidence and courage even in the face of the great mystery of death.
+Why this or another conception of God should produce such a profound
+result upon any one, I do not know, except that in some obscure way it
+connects the individual with the divine plan, and does not leave him
+outside in despair and loneliness. However that may be, it will be
+conceded that a religious conception of some kind does much toward
+justifying life, toward making it strong and livable, and so has
+directly to do with certain important problems of illness and health.
+The most practical medical man will admit that any illness is made
+lighter and more likely to recover in the presence of hope and serenity
+in the mind of the patient.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the great bulk of medical practice calls for no handling other
+than<span class="num" title="Page 12">&zwnj;</span><a name="p12" id="p12"></a> that of the straight medical sort. A man comes in with a crushed
+finger, a girl with an&aelig;mia&mdash;the way is clear. It is only in deeper, more
+intricate departments of medicine that we altogether fail. The
+bacteriologist and the pathologist have no use for mental treatment, in
+their departments. But when we come to the case of the nervously
+broken-down school teacher, or the worn-out telegrapher, that is another
+matter. Years may elapse before work can be resumed&mdash;years of dependence
+and anxiety. Here, a new view of life is often more useful than drugs, a
+view that accepts the situation reasonably after a while, that does not
+grope blindly and impatiently for a cure, but finds in life an
+inspiration that makes it good in spite of necessary suffering and
+limitations. Often enough we cannot promise a cure, but we must be
+prepared to give something better.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of the fatigue and unhappiness of the world is due to the
+fact<span class="num" title="Page 13">&zwnj;</span><a name="p13" id="p13"></a> that we do not go deep enough in our justification for work or
+play, or for any experience, happy or sad. There is a good deal of a
+void after we have said, &ldquo;Art for art&#8217;s sake,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Play for the joy of
+playing,&rdquo; or even after we have said, &ldquo;I am working for the sake of my
+family, or for some one who needs my help.&rdquo; That is not enough; and
+whether we realize it or not, the lack of deeper justification is at the
+bottom of a restlessness and uncertainty which we might not be willing
+to acknowledge, but which nevertheless is very real.</p>
+
+<p>I am not satisfied when some moralist says, &ldquo;Be good and you will be
+happy.&rdquo; The kind of happiness that comes from a perfunctory goodness is
+a thing which I cannot understand, and which I certainly do not want. If
+I work and play and serve and employ, making up the fabric of a busy
+life, if I attain a very real happiness, I am tormented by the desire to
+know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I<span class="num" title="Page 14">&zwnj;</span><a name="p14" id="p14"></a>
+usually get. The patient may not be cured when he is relieved of his
+an&aelig;mia, or when his emaciation has given place to the plumpness and
+suppleness and physical strength that we call health. The man whom we
+look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not well
+in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is living,
+why he is filling his life with activity. In spite of the elasticity and
+spring of the world&#8217;s interests, there must come often, and with a kind
+of fatal insistence, the deep demand for a cause, for a justification.
+If there is not an adequate significance behind it, life, with all its
+courage and accomplishment, seems but a sorry thing, so full of pathos,
+even in its brightest moments, so shadowed with a sense of loss and of
+finality that the bravest heart may well fail and the truest courage
+relax, supported only by the assurance that this way lies happiness or
+that right is right.</p>
+
+<p>What is this knowledge that the<span class="num" title="Page 15">&zwnj;</span><a name="p15" id="p15"></a> world is seeking, but can never find?
+What is this final justification? If we seek it in its completeness, we
+are doomed always to be ill and unsatisfied. If we are willing to look
+only a little way into the great question, if we are willing to accept a
+little for the whole, content because it is manifestly part of the final
+knowledge, and because we know that final knowledge rests with God
+alone, we shall understand enough to save us from much sorrow and
+painful incompleteness.</p>
+
+<p>There is, in the infinitely varied and beautiful world of nature, and in
+the hearts of men, so much of beauty and truth that it is a wonder we do
+not all realize that these things of common life may be in us and for us
+the daily and hourly expression of the infinite being we call God. We do
+not see God, but we do feel and know so much that we may fairly believe
+to be of God that we do not need to see Him face to face. It is
+something more than imagination<span class="num" title="Page 16">&zwnj;</span><a name="p16" id="p16"></a> to feel that it is the life of God in
+our lives, so often unrecognized or ignored, that prompts us to all the
+greatness and the inspiration and the accomplishment of the world. If we
+could know more clearly the joy of such a conception, we should dry up
+at its source much of the unhappiness which is, in a deep and subtle
+way, at the bottom of many a nervous illness and many a wretched
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>The happiness which is found in the recognition of kinship with God,
+through the common things of life, in the experiences which are so
+significant that they could not spring from a lesser source, the
+happiness which is not sought, but which is the inevitable result of
+such recognition&mdash;this experience goes a long way toward making life
+worth living.</p>
+
+<p>If we do have this conception of life, then some of the old, old
+questions that have vexed so many dwellers upon the earth will no longer
+be a source of un<span class="num" title="Page 17">&zwnj;</span><a name="p17" id="p17"></a>happiness or of illness of mind or body. The question
+of immortality, for instance, which has made us afraid to die, will no
+longer be a question&mdash;we shall not need to answer it, in the presence of
+God, in our lives and in the world about us. We shall be content finally
+to accept whatever is in store for us&mdash;so it be the will of God. We may
+even look for something better than mere immortality, something more
+divine than our gross conception of eternal life.</p>
+
+<p>This is a religion that I believe medical men may teach without
+hesitation whenever the need shall arise. I know well enough that many a
+blunt if kindly man cannot bring himself to say these words, even if he
+believes them, but I do think that in some measure they point the way to
+what may wisely be taught.</p>
+
+<p>There is a practice of medicine&mdash;the common practice&mdash;that is concerned
+with the body only, and with its chemical and mechanical reactions. We
+can<span class="num" title="Page 18">&zwnj;</span><a name="p18" id="p18"></a> have nothing but respect and admiration for the men who go on year
+after year in the eager pursuit of this calling. We know that such a
+work is necessary, that it is just as important as the educational
+practice of which I write. We know that without the physical side
+medicine would fail of its usefulness and that disease and death would
+reap far richer harvests: I only wish the two naturally related aspects
+of our dealing with patients might not be so completely separated that
+they lose sight of each other. As a matter of fact, both elements are
+necessary to our human welfare. If medicine devotes itself altogether to
+the cure and prevention of physical disease, it will miss half of its
+possibilities. It is equally true that if we forget the physical
+necessities in our zeal for spiritual hygiene, we shall get and deserve
+complete and humiliating failure. Many men will say, &ldquo;Why mix the two?
+Why not let the preachers and the philosophers preach and the doctors<span class="num" title="Page 19">&zwnj;</span><a name="p19" id="p19"></a>
+follow their own ways?&rdquo; For the most part this may have to be the
+arrangement, but the doctor who can see and treat the spiritual needs of
+his patient will always be more likely to cure in the best sense than
+the doctor who sees only half of the picture. On the other hand, the
+philosopher is likely to be a comparatively poor doctor, because he
+knows nothing of medicine, and so can see only the other half of the
+picture. There is much to be said for the religion of medicine if it can
+be kept free from cant, if it can be simple and rational enough to be
+available for the whole world. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 20">&zwnj;</span><a name="p20" id="p20"></a><a name="III" id="III"></a><abbr title="3.">III</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>THOUGHT AND WORK</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote><p>I wish I had a trade!&mdash;It would animate my arms and tranquilize
+my brain. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Senancour.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Doe ye nexte thynge.&rdquo;&mdash;<cite>Old English Proverb</cite>. </p></blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Since</span> our minds are so constantly filled with anxiety, there would seem
+to be at least one sure way to be rid of it&mdash;to stop thinking.</p>
+
+<p>A great many people believe that the mind will become less effective,
+that life will become dull and purposeless, unless they are constantly
+thinking and planning and arranging their affairs. I believe that the
+mind may easily and wisely be free from conscious thought a good deal of
+the time, and that the greatest progress and development in mind often
+comes when the thinker is virtually at rest, when his mind is to all
+intents and purposes blank. The busy,<span class="num" title="Page 21">&zwnj;</span><a name="p21" id="p21"></a> unconscious mind does its best
+work in the serenity of an atmosphere which does not interfere and
+confuse.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the greatest conceptions do not come to the untrained
+and undisciplined mind. But do we want great conceptions all the time?
+There is a technical training for the mind which is, of course,
+necessary for special accomplishments, but this is quite another matter.
+Even this kind of thought must not obtrude too much, lest we become
+conscious of our mental processes and so end in confusion.</p>
+
+<p>One of the greatest benefits of work with the hands, or of objective and
+constructive work with the mind, is that it saves us from unending hours
+of thinking. Work should, of course, find its fullest justification as
+an expression of faith. If we have ever so dim a vision of a greater
+significance in life, of its close relationship to infinite things, we
+become thereby conscious of the need of service, of the need of work. It
+is the<span class="num" title="Page 22">&zwnj;</span><a name="p22" id="p22"></a> easy, natural expression of our faith, the inevitable result of
+a spiritual contact with the great working forces of the world. It is
+work above all else that saves us from the disasters of conflicting
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago a young man came to me, suffering from too much
+thinking. He had just been graduated from college and his head was full
+of confused ideas and emotions. He was also very tired, having
+overworked in his preparation for examinations, and because he had not
+taken the best care of his body. The symptoms he complained of were
+sleeplessness and worry, together with the inevitable indigestion and
+headache. Of course, as a physician, I went over the bodily functions
+carefully, and studied, as far as I might, into the organic conditions.
+I could find no evidence of physical disease. I did not say, &ldquo;There is
+nothing the matter with you&rdquo;; for the man was sick. I told him that he
+was tired, that he had<span class="num" title="Page 23">&zwnj;</span><a name="p23" id="p23"></a> thought too much, that he was too much concerned
+about himself, and that as a result of all this his bodily functions
+were temporarily upset. He thought he ought to worry about himself,
+because otherwise he would not be trying to get well. I explained to him
+that this mistaken obligation was the common reason for worry, and that
+in this case, at least, it was quite unnecessary and even harmful for
+him to go on thinking about himself. That helped a little, but not
+nearly enough, because when a man has overworked, when he has begun to
+worry, and when his various bodily functions show results of worry, no
+reasoning, no explanations, can wholly relieve him. I said to this young
+man, &ldquo;In spite of your discomforts, in spite of your depression and
+concern in regard to yourself, you will get well if you will stop
+thinking about the matter altogether. You must be first convinced that
+it is best for you to stop thinking, that no harm or violence<span class="num" title="Page 24">&zwnj;</span><a name="p24" id="p24"></a> can
+result, and then you must be helped in this direction by going to work
+with your hands&mdash;that will be life and progress, it will lead you to
+health.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately I had had some experience with nervous illness, and I knew
+that unless I managed for this man the character and extent of his work,
+he would not only fail in it, but of its object, and so become more
+confused and discouraged. I knew the troubled mind, in this instance,
+might find its solace and its relief in work, but that I must choose the
+work carefully to suit the individual, and I must see that the nervously
+fatigued body was not pushed too hard.</p>
+
+<p>In the town where I live is a blacksmith shop, presided over by a genial
+old man who has been a blacksmith since he was a boy, and in whose hands
+iron is like clay. I took my patient down to the smithy and said, &ldquo;Here
+is a young man whom I want to put to work. He will pay for the chance. I
+want you first to teach him to make<span class="num" title="Page 25">&zwnj;</span><a name="p25" id="p25"></a> hand-wrought nails.&rdquo; This was a
+good deal of a joke to the smith and to the patient, but they saw that I
+was in earnest and agreed to go ahead. We got together the proper tools
+and proceeded to make nails, a job which is really not very difficult.
+After an hour&#8217;s work, I called off my patient, much to his disgust, for
+he was just beginning to be interested. But I knew that if he were to
+keep on until fatigue should come, the whole matter would end in
+trouble. So the next day, with some new overalls and a leather apron
+added to the equipment, we proceeded to another hour&#8217;s work. We went on
+this way for three or four days, before the time was increased.</p>
+
+<p>The interest of the patient was always fresh, he was eager for more, and
+he did not taste the dregs of fatigue. Yet he did get the wholesome
+exercise, and he did get the strong turning of the mind from its worry
+and concern. Of course, the rest of the day was taken care of in<span class="num" title="Page 26">&zwnj;</span><a name="p26" id="p26"></a> one
+way or another, but the work was the central feature. In a week, we were
+at it two hours a day, in three weeks, four hours, and in a month, five
+hours. He had made a handsome display of hand-wrought nails, a superior
+line of pokers and shovels for fireplaces, together with a number of
+very respectable andirons. On each of these larger pieces of handiwork
+my patient had stamped his initials with a little steel die that was
+made for him. Each piece was his own, each piece was the product of his
+own versatility and his own strength. His pride and pleasure in this
+work were very great, and well they might be, for it is a fine thing to
+have learned to handle so intractable a material as iron. But in
+handling the iron patiently and consistently until he could do it
+without too much conscious thinking, and so without effort, he had also
+learned to handle himself naturally, more simply and easily.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the illness which<span class="num" title="Page 27">&zwnj;</span><a name="p27" id="p27"></a> had brought this boy to me was
+pretty nearly cured by his blacksmithing, because it was an illness of
+the mind and of the nerves, and not of the body, although the body had
+suffered in its turn. That young man, instead of becoming a nervous
+invalid as he might have done, is now working steadily in partnership
+with his father, in business in the city. I had found him a very
+interesting patient, full of originality and not at all the tedious and
+boresome person he might have been had I listened day after day, week
+after week to the recital of his ills. I was willing to listen,&mdash;I did
+listen,&mdash;but I also gave him a new trend of life, which pretty soon made
+his complaints sound hollow and then disappear.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the problem is not always so simple as this, and we must
+often deal with complexities of body and mind requiring prolonged
+investigation and treatment. I cite this case because it shows clearly
+that relief from some<span class="num" title="Page 28">&zwnj;</span><a name="p28" id="p28"></a> forms of nervous illness can come when we stop
+thinking, when we stop analyzing, and then back up our position with
+prescribed work.</p>
+
+<p>There may be some nervous invalids who <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber&#8217;s note: Original says &lsquo;reads&rsquo;.">read</ins> these lines who will say,
+&ldquo;But I have tried so many times to work and have failed.&rdquo; Unfortunately,
+such failure must often occur unless we can proceed with care and with
+understanding. But the principle remains true, although it must be
+modified in an infinite variety to meet the changing conditions of
+individuals.</p>
+
+<p>I see a great many people who are conscientiously trying to get well
+from nervous exhaustion. They almost inevitably try too hard. They think
+and worry too much about it, and so exhaust themselves the more. This is
+the greater pity because it is the honest and the conscientious people
+who make the greatest effort. It is very hard for them to realize that
+they must stop thinking, stop trying, and if possible get to work<span class="num" title="Page 29">&zwnj;</span><a name="p29" id="p29"></a>
+before they can accomplish their end. We shall have to repeat to them
+over and over again that they must stop thinking the matter out, because
+the thing they are attempting to overcome is too subtle to be met in
+that way. So, if they are fortunate, they may rid themselves of the
+vagueness and uncertainty of life, until all the multitude of details
+which go to make up life lose their desultoriness and their lack of
+meaning, and they may find themselves no longer the subjects of physical
+or nervous exhaustion. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 30">&zwnj;</span><a name="p30" id="p30"></a><a name="IV" id="IV"></a><abbr title="4.">IV</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>IDLENESS</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O ye! who have your eyeballs vex&#8217;d and tir&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Keats.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,
+is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness
+implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal
+identity. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Stevenson.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is an unfortunate fact that very few people are able to be idle
+successfully. I think it is not so much because we misuse idleness as
+because we misinterpret it that the long days become increasingly
+demoralizing. I would ask no one to accept a forced idleness without
+objection or regret. Such an acceptance would imply a lack of spirit, to
+say the least. But idleness and rest are not incompatible; neither are
+idleness and service, nor idleness and contentment. If we can look upon
+rest as a preparation for service, if we can make it serve<span class="num" title="Page 31">&zwnj;</span><a name="p31" id="p31"></a> us in the
+opportunity it gives for quiet growth and legitimate enjoyment, then it
+is fully justified and it may offer advantages and opportunity of the
+best.</p>
+
+<p>The chief trouble with idleness is that it so often means introspection,
+worry, and impatience, especially to those conscientious souls who would
+fain be about their business.</p>
+
+<p>I have for a long time been accustomed to combat the worry and fret of
+necessary idleness&mdash;not by forbidding it, not by advising struggle and
+fight against it, but by insisting that the best way to get rid of it is
+to leave it alone, to accept it. When we do this there may come a kind
+of fallow time in which the mind enriches and refreshes itself beyond
+our conception.</p>
+
+<p>I would rather my patient who must rest for a long time would give up
+all thought of method, would give up all idea of making his mind follow
+any particular line of thought or absence of thought. I know that the
+mind which<span class="num" title="Page 32">&zwnj;</span><a name="p32" id="p32"></a> has been under conscious control a good deal of the time is
+apt to rebel at this freedom and to indulge in all kinds of alarming
+extravagances. I am sure, however, that the best way to meet these
+demands for conscious control is to be careless of them, to be willing
+to experience these extravagances and inconsistencies without fear, in
+the belief that finally will come a quiet and peace which will be all
+that we can ask. The peace of mind that is unguided, in the conscious
+and literal sense, is a thing which too few of us know.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Arnold Bennett, in his little book, &ldquo;How to Live on Twenty-four
+Hours a Day,&rdquo; teaches that we should leave no time unused in our lives;
+that we should accomplish a great deal more and be infinitely more
+effective and progressive if we devoted our minds to the definite
+working-out of necessary problems whenever those times occur in which we
+are apt to be desultory. I wish here to make a plea for desultori<span class="num" title="Page 33">&zwnj;</span><a name="p33" id="p33"></a>ness
+and for an idleness which goes even beyond the idleness of the man who
+reads the newspaper and forgets what he has read. It seems to me better,
+whether we are sick or well, to allow long periods in our lives when we
+think only casually. To the good old adage, &ldquo;Work while you work and
+play while you play,&rdquo; we might well add, &ldquo;Rest while you rest,&rdquo; lest in
+the end you should be unable successfully either to work or play.</p>
+
+<p>A man is not necessarily condemned to tortures of mind because he must
+rest for a week or a month or a year. I know that there must be anxious
+times, especially when idleness means dependence, and when it brings
+hardship to those who need our help. But the invalid must not try
+constantly to puzzle the matter out. If we do not make ourselves sick
+with worry, we shall be able sometime to approach active life with
+sufficient frankness and force. It is the constant effort of the<span class="num" title="Page 34">&zwnj;</span><a name="p34" id="p34"></a> poor,
+tired mind to solve its problems that not only fails of its object, but
+plunges the invalid deeper into discouragement and misunderstanding. How
+cruel this is, and how unfortunate that it should come more commonly to
+those who try the hardest to overcome their handicaps, to throw off the
+yoke of idleness and to be well.</p>
+
+<p>When you have tried your best to get back to your work and have failed,
+when you have done this not once but many times, it is inevitable that
+misunderstanding should creep in, inevitable that you should question
+very deeply and doubt not infrequently. Yet the chances are that one of
+the reasons for your failure is that you have tried too hard, that you
+have not known how to rest. When you have learned how to rest, when you
+have learned to put off thinking and planning until the mind becomes
+fresh and clear, when you are in a fair way to know the joy of idleness
+and the peace of rest, you are a<span class="num" title="Page 35">&zwnj;</span><a name="p35" id="p35"></a> great deal more likely to get back to
+efficiency and to find your way along the great paths of activity into
+the world of life.</p>
+
+<p>It is not so much the idleness, then, as the attempt to overcome its
+irksomeness, that makes this condition painful. The invalid in bed is in
+a trap, to be tormented by his thoughts unless he knows the meaning of
+successful idleness. This knowledge may come to him by such strategy as
+I have suggested&mdash;by giving up the struggle against worry and fret; but
+peace will come surely, steadily, &ldquo;with healing in its wings,&rdquo; when the
+mind is changed altogether, when life becomes free because of a growth
+and development that finds significance even in idleness, that sees the
+world with wise and patient eyes.</p>
+
+<p>In a way it does not matter, your physical condition or mine, if our
+&ldquo;eyes have seen the glory&rdquo; that deifies life and makes even its waste
+places beautiful. What is that view from your win<span class="num" title="Page 36">&zwnj;</span><a name="p36" id="p36"></a>dow as you lie in your
+bed? A bit of the sea, if you are fortunate, a corner of garden, surely,
+the top of an elm tree against the blue. What is it but the revelations
+of a God in the world? There is enough that is sad and unhappy, but over
+all are these simple, ineffable things. If the garden is an expression
+of God in the world, then the world and life are no longer meaningless.
+Even idleness becomes in some degree bearable because it is a part of a
+significant world.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, the idleness of disability often means pain, the wear and
+tear of physical or nervous suffering. That is another matter. We cannot
+meet it fully with any philosophy. My patients very often beg to know
+the best way to bear pain, how they may overcome the attacks of &ldquo;nerves&rdquo;
+that are harder to bear than pain. To such a question I can only say
+that the time to bear pain is before and after. Live in such a way in
+the times of comparative<span class="num" title="Page 37">&zwnj;</span><a name="p37" id="p37"></a> comfort that the attacks are less likely to
+appear and easier to bear when they do come. After the pain or the
+&ldquo;nervous&rdquo; attack is over, that is the time to prevent the worst features
+of another. Forget the distress; live simply and happily in spite of the
+memory, and you will have done all that the patient himself can do to
+ward off or to make tolerable the next occasion of suffering. Pain
+itself&mdash;pure physical pain&mdash;is a matter for the physician&#8217;s judgment. It
+is his business to seek out the causes and apply the remedy. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 38">&zwnj;</span><a name="p38" id="p38"></a><a name="V" id="V"></a><abbr title="5.">V</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>RULES OF THE GAME</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It is not growing like a tree<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In bulk, doth make man better be.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Ben Jonson.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane
+mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile
+and decent qualities which we call character. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Theodore Roosevelt.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to
+yield to it. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Petrarch.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> I go about among my patients, most of them, as it happens,
+&ldquo;nervously&rdquo; sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I
+know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have
+no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness,
+some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the
+game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them<span class="num" title="Page 39">&zwnj;</span><a name="p39" id="p39"></a> all, but
+it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress
+those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our
+transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or
+sinners. There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise
+and balance when these have been lost. These laws are less well observed
+and understood than those which determine our downfall.</p>
+
+<p>The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we
+need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable
+people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that
+nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical
+disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for
+us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens in the human
+economy when a &ldquo;nervous breakdown&rdquo; comes, nobody seems to know, but mind
+and body co&ouml;perate to make the<span class="num" title="Page 40">&zwnj;</span><a name="p40" id="p40"></a> patient miserable and helpless. It may
+be nature&#8217;s way of holding us up and preventing further injury. The
+hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.</p>
+
+<p>The rules we have wittingly or unwittingly broken are often unknown to
+us, but they exist in the All-Wise Providence, and we may guess by our
+own suffering how far we have overstepped them. If a man runs into a
+door in the dark, we know all about that,&mdash;the case is simple,&mdash;but if
+he runs overtime at his office and hastens to be rich with the result of
+a nervous dyspepsia&mdash;that is a mystery. Here is a girl who &ldquo;came out&rdquo;
+last year. She was apparently strong and her mother was ambitious for
+her social progress. That meant four nights a week for several months at
+dances and dinners, getting home at 3&nbsp;<span class="allsc">A.M.</span> or later. It was gay and
+delightful while it lasted, but it could not last, and the girl went to
+pieces suddenly; her back gave out be<span class="num" title="Page 41">&zwnj;</span><a name="p41" id="p41"></a>cause it was not strong enough to
+stand the dancing and the long-continued physical strain. The nerves
+gave out because she did not give her faculties time to rest, and
+perhaps because of a love affair that supervened. The result was a year
+of invalidism, and then, because the rules of recovery were not
+understood, several years more of convalescence. Such common rules
+should be well enough understood, but they are broken everywhere by the
+wisest people.</p>
+
+<p>The common case of the broken-down school teacher is more unfortunate.
+This tragedy and others like it are more often, I believe, due to unwise
+choice of profession in the first place. The women&#8217;s colleges are
+turning out hundreds of young women every year who naturally consider
+teaching as the field most appropriate and available. Probably only a
+very small proportion of these girls are strong enough physically or
+nervously to meet the<span class="num" title="Page 42">&zwnj;</span><a name="p42" id="p42"></a> growing demands of the schools. They may do well
+for a time, some of them unusually well, for it is the sensitive,
+high-strung organism that is appreciative and effective. After a while
+the worry and fret of the requirements and the constant nag of the
+schoolroom have their effect upon those who are foredoomed to failure in
+that particular field. The plight of such young women is particularly
+hard, for they are usually dependent upon their work.</p>
+
+<p>It is, after all, not so much the things we do as the way we do them,
+and what we think about them, that accomplishes nervous harm. Strangely
+enough, the sense of effort and the feeling of our own inadequacy damage
+the nervous system quite as much as the actual physical effort. The
+attempt to catch up with life and with affairs that go on too fast for
+us is a frequent and harmful deflection from the rules of the game. Few
+of us avoid it. Life comes at us and goes by very fast. Tasks multiply<span class="num" title="Page 43">&zwnj;</span><a name="p43" id="p43"></a>
+and we are inadequate, responsibilities increase before we are ready.
+They bring fatigue and confusion. We cannot shirk and be true. Having
+done all you reasonably can, stop, whatever may be the consequences.
+That is a rule I would enforce if I could. To do more is to drag and
+fail, so defeating the end of your efforts. If it turns out that you are
+not fit for the job you have undertaken, give it up and find another, or
+modify that one until it comes within your capacity. It takes courage to
+do this&mdash;more courage sometimes than is needed to make us stick to the
+thing we are doing. Rarely, however, will it be necessary for us to give
+up if we will undertake and consider for the day only such part of our
+task as we are able to perform. The trouble is that we look at our work
+or our responsibility all in one piece, and it crushes us. If we cannot
+arrange our lives so that we may meet their obligations a little at a
+time, then we must admit failure<span class="num" title="Page 44">&zwnj;</span><a name="p44" id="p44"></a> and try again, on what may seem a
+lower plane. That is what I consider the brave thing to do. I would
+honor the factory superintendent, who, finding himself unequal to his
+position, should choose to work at the bench where he could succeed
+perfectly.</p>
+
+<p>The habit of uncertainty in thought and action, bred, as it sometimes
+is, from a lack of faith in man and in God, is, nevertheless, a thing to
+be dealt with sometimes by itself. Not infrequently it is a petty habit
+that can be corrected by the exercise of a little will power. I believe
+it is better to decide wrong a great many times&mdash;doing it quickly&mdash;than
+to come to a right decision after weakly vacillating. As a matter of
+fact, we may trust our decisions to be fair and true if our life&#8217;s
+ideals are beautiful and true.</p>
+
+<p>We may improve our indecisions a great deal by mastering their unhappy
+details, but we shall not finally overcome them until life rings true
+and until<span class="num" title="Page 45">&zwnj;</span><a name="p45" id="p45"></a> all our acts and thoughts become the solid and inevitable
+expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to
+right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed
+every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential
+the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling
+of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous
+exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of
+cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously takes the snap and
+sparkle out of life and leaves us for the time being colorless and weak.</p>
+
+<p>Next to uncertainty, an uninspired certainty is wrecking to the best of
+human prospects. The man whose one idea is of making himself and his
+family materially comfortable, or even rich, may not be coming to
+nervous prostration, but he is courting a moral prostration that will
+deny him all the real riches of life and that will in the end<span class="num" title="Page 46">&zwnj;</span><a name="p46" id="p46"></a> reward
+him with a troubled mind, a great, unsatisfied longing, unless, to be
+sure, he is too smug and satisfied to long for anything.</p>
+
+<p>The larger life leads us inevitably away from ourselves, away from the
+super-requirements of our families. It demands of them and of ourselves
+an unselfishness that is born of a love that finds its expression in the
+service of God. And what is the service of God if it is not such an
+entering into the divine purposes and spirit that we become with God
+re-creators in the world&mdash;working factors in the higher evolution of
+humanity? While we live we shall get and save, we shall use and spend,
+we shall serve the needs of those dependent upon us, but we shall not
+line the family nest so softly that our children become powerless. We
+shall not confine our charities to the specified channels, where our
+names will be praised and our credit increased. We shall give and serve
+in secret places with<span class="num" title="Page 47">&zwnj;</span><a name="p47" id="p47"></a> our hearts in our deeds. Then we may possess the
+untroubled mind, a treasure too rich to be computed. We shall not have
+it for the seeking; it may exist in the midst of what men may call
+privations and sorrows; but it will exist in a very large sense and it
+will be ours. The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows
+himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and
+uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when
+he is ill. I cannot argue in favor of business laxity,&mdash;I know the
+imperative need of exactness and finality,&mdash;but I do believe that if we
+are to possess the untroubled mind we must make our lives larger than
+the field of dollars and cents. The charity that develops in us will
+make us truly generous and free from the reaction of hardness.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great temptation to go on multiplying the rules of the game.
+There are so many sensible and necessary<span class="num" title="Page 48">&zwnj;</span><a name="p48" id="p48"></a> pieces of advice which we all
+need to have emphasized. That is the course we must try to avoid. The
+child needs to be told, arbitrarily for a while, what is right, and what
+is wrong, that he must do this, and he must not do that. The time comes,
+however, when the growing instinct toward right living is the thing to
+foster&mdash;not the details of life which will inevitably take care of
+themselves if the underlying principle is made right. It must be the
+ideal of moral teaching to make clear and pure the source of action.
+Then the stream will be clear and pure. Such a stream will purify itself
+and neutralize the dangerous inflow along its banks. It is true that
+great harm may come from the polluted inflows, but they will be less and
+less harmful as the increasing current from the good source flows down.</p>
+
+<p>We shall have to look well to our habits lest serious ills befall, but
+that must never be the main concern or we<span class="num" title="Page 49">&zwnj;</span><a name="p49" id="p49"></a> shall find ourselves living
+very narrow and labored lives; we shall find that we are failing to
+observe one of the most important rules of the game. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 50">&zwnj;</span><a name="p50" id="p50"></a><a name="VI" id="VI"></a><abbr title="6.">VI</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>THE NERVOUS TEMPERAMENT</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Beyond the ugly actual, lo, on every side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Imagination&#8217;s limitless domain.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Browning.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>He that too much refines his delicacy will always endanger his
+quiet. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Samuel Johnson.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered
+them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Stevenson.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> has been my fortune as a physician to deal much with the so-called
+nervous temperament. I have come both to fear and to love it. It is the
+essence of all that is bright, imaginative, and fine, but it is as
+unstable as water. Those who possess it must suffer&mdash;it is their lot to
+feel deeply, and very often to be misunderstood by their more practical
+friends. All their lives these people will shed tears of joy, and more
+tears of sorrow. I would like to write of their joy,<span class="num" title="Page 51">&zwnj;</span><a name="p51" id="p51"></a> of the perfect
+satisfaction, the true happiness that comes in creating new and
+beautiful things, of the deep pleasure they have in the appreciation of
+good work in others. But with the instinct of a dog trained for a
+certain kind of hunting I find myself turning to the misfortunes and the
+ills.</p>
+
+<p>The very keenness of perception makes painful anything short of
+perfection. What will such people do in our clanging streets? What of
+those fine ears tuned to the most exquisite appreciation of sweet sound?
+What of that refinement of hearing that detects the least departure from
+the rhythm and pitch in complex orchestral music? And must they bear the
+crash of steel on stone, the infernal clatter of traffic? Well, yes,&mdash;as
+a matter of fact&mdash;they must, at least for a good many years to come,
+until advancing civilization eliminates the city noise. But it is not
+always great noises that disturb and distract. There is a story told of
+a<span class="num" title="Page 52">&zwnj;</span><a name="p52" id="p52"></a> woman who became so sensitive to noise that she had her house made
+sound-proof: there were thick carpets and softly closing doors;
+everything was padded. The house was set back from a quiet street, but
+that street was strewn with tanbark to check the sound of carriages.
+Surely here was bliss for the sensitive soul. I need not tell the rest
+of the story, how absolutely necessary noises became intolerable, and
+the poor woman ended by keeping a man on the place to catch and silence
+the tree toads and crickets.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing to excuse the careless and unnecessary noises of the
+world&mdash;we shall dispose of them finally as we are disposing of
+flamboyant signboards and typhoid flies. But meanwhile, and always, for
+that matter, the sensitive soul must learn to adjust itself to
+circumstances and conditions. This adjustment may in itself become a
+fine art. It is really the art by which the painter excludes the
+commonplace and<span class="num" title="Page 53">&zwnj;</span><a name="p53" id="p53"></a> irrelevant from his landscape. Sometimes we have to do
+this consciously; for the most part, it should be a natural, unconscious
+selection.</p>
+
+<p>I am sure it is unwise to attempt at any time the dulling of the
+appreciative sense for the sake of peace and comfort. Love and
+understanding of the beautiful and true is too rare and fine a thing to
+be lost or diminished under any circumstances. The cure, as I see it, is
+to be found in the cultivation of the faculty that finds some good in
+everything and everybody. This is the saving grace&mdash;it takes great bulks
+of the commonplace and distils from the mass a few drops of precious
+essence; it finds in the unscholarly and the imperfect, rare traces of
+good; it sees in man, any man, the image of God, to be justified and
+made evident only in the sublimity of death, perhaps, but usually to be
+developed in life.</p>
+
+<p>The nervous person is often morose and unsocial&mdash;perhaps because he is
+not<span class="num" title="Page 54">&zwnj;</span><a name="p54" id="p54"></a> understood, perhaps because he falls so short of his own ideals.
+Often he does not find kindred spirits anywhere. I do not think we
+should drive such a man into conditions that hurt, but I do believe that
+if he is truly artistic, and not a snob, he may lead himself into a
+larger social life without too much sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>The sensitive, high-strung spirit that does not give of its own best
+qualities to the world of its acquaintance, that does not express itself
+in some concrete way, is always in danger of harm. Such a spirit turned
+in upon itself is a consuming fire. The spirit will burn a long time and
+suffer much if it does not use its heat to warm and comfort the world of
+need.</p>
+
+<p>Real illness makes the nervous temperament a much more formidable
+difficulty &mdash;all the sensitive faculties are more
+sensitive&mdash;irritability becomes an obsession and idleness a terror.</p>
+
+<p>The nervous temperament under irritation is very prone to become
+selfish<span class="num" title="Page 55">&zwnj;</span><a name="p55" id="p55"></a>&mdash;and very likely to hide behind this selfishness, calling it
+temperament. The man who flies into a passion when he is disturbed, or
+who spends his days in torment from the noises of the street; the woman
+of high attainment who has retired into herself, who is moody and
+unresponsive,&mdash;these unfortunates have virtually built a wall about
+their lives, a wall which shuts out the world of life and happiness.
+From the walls of this prison the sounds of discord and annoyance are
+thrown back upon the prisoner intensified and multiplied. The wall is
+real enough in its effect, but will cease to exist when the prisoner
+begins to go outside, when he begins to realize his selfishness and his
+mistake. Then the noises and the irritations will be lost in the wider
+world that is open to him. After all, it is only through unselfish
+service in the world of men that this broadening can come.</p>
+
+<p>There is no lack of opportunity for service. Perhaps the simplest and
+most<span class="num" title="Page 56">&zwnj;</span><a name="p56" id="p56"></a> available form of service is charity,&mdash;the big, professional kind,
+of course, &mdash;and beyond that the greater field of intimate and personal
+charity. I know a girl of talent and ability&mdash;herself a nervous
+invalid&mdash;sick and helpless for the lack of a little money which would
+give her a chance to get well. I do not mean money for luxuries, for
+foolish indulgences, but money to buy opportunity&mdash;money that would lift
+her out of the heavy morass of poverty and give her a chance. She falls
+outside the beaten path of charity. She is not reached by the usual
+philanthropies. I also know plenty of people who could help that girl
+without great sacrifice. They will not do it because they give money to
+the regular charities&mdash;they will not do it because sometimes generosity
+has been abused. So they miss the chance of broadening and developing
+their own lives.</p>
+
+<p>I know well enough that objective interest can rarely be forced&mdash;it
+must<span class="num" title="Page 57">&zwnj;</span><a name="p57" id="p57"></a> usually come the other way about&mdash;through the broadening of life
+which makes it inevitable. Sometimes I wish I could force that kind of
+development, that kind of charity. Sometimes I long to take the rich
+neurasthenic and make him help his brother, make him develop a new art
+that shall save people from sorrow and loss. We are all together in this
+world, and all kin; to recognize it and to serve the needs of the
+unfortunate as we would serve our own children is the remedy for many
+ills. It is the new art, the final and greatest of all artistic
+achievements; it warms our hearts and opens our lives to all that is
+wholesome and good. This is one of the crises in which my theory of
+&ldquo;inspiration first&rdquo; may fail. Here the charity may have to come first,
+may have to be insisted upon before there can be any inspiration or any
+further joy in life. It is not always charity in the usual sense that is
+required; sometimes the charity that gives something besides<span class="num" title="Page 58">&zwnj;</span><a name="p58" id="p58"></a> money is
+best. But charity in any good sense means self-forgetfulness, and that
+is a long way on the road to nervous health. Give of yourself, give of
+your substance, and you will cease to be troubled with the penalties of
+selfishness. Then take the next step&mdash;that gives not because life has
+come back, but because the world has become larger and warmer and
+happier. When the giver gives of his sympathy and of his means because
+he wants to,&mdash;not because he has to do so,&mdash;he will begin to know what I
+mean when I say it is better to have the inspiration first. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 59">&zwnj;</span><a name="p59" id="p59"></a><a name="VII" id="VII"></a><abbr title="7.">VII</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>SELF-CONTROL</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He only earns his freedom and existence<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who daily conquers them anew.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Goethe.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A good</span> many writers on self-control and kindred subjects insist that we
+shall conscientiously and consciously govern our mental lives. They say,
+&ldquo;You must get up in the morning with determination to be cheerful.&rdquo; They
+insist that in spite of annoyance or trouble you shall keep a smiling
+face, and affirm to yourself over and over again the denial of
+annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>I do not like this kind of self-control. I wish I could admire it and
+approve it, but I find I cannot because it seems to me self-conscious
+and superficial. It is better than nothing and unquestionably adds
+greatly to the sum of human happiness. But I do not think we ought to be
+cheerful if we are consumed with<span class="num" title="Page 60">&zwnj;</span><a name="p60" id="p60"></a> trouble and sorrow. The fact is we
+ought not to be for long beyond a natural cheerfulness that comes from
+the deepest possible sources. While we are sad, let us be so, simply and
+naturally; but we must pray that the light may come to us in our sorrow,
+that we may be able soon and naturally to put aside the signs of
+mourning.</p>
+
+<p>The person who thinks little of his own attitude of mind is more likely
+to be well controlled and to radiate happiness than one who must
+continually prompt himself to worthy thoughts. The man whose heart is
+great with understanding of the sorrow and pathos of life is far more
+apt to be brave and fine in his own trouble than one who must look to a
+motto or a formula for consolation and advice. Deep in the lives of
+those who permanently triumph over sorrow there is an abiding peace and
+joy. Such peace cannot come even from ample experience in the material
+world. Despair comes from that experi<span class="num" title="Page 61">&zwnj;</span><a name="p61" id="p61"></a>ence sometimes, unless the heart
+is open to the vital spirit that lies beyond all material things, that
+creates and renews life and that makes it indescribably beautiful and
+significant. Experience of material things is only the beginning. In it
+and through it we may have experience of the wider life that surrounds
+the material.</p>
+
+<p>Our hearts must be opened to the courage that comes unbidden when we
+feel ourselves to be working, growing parts of the universe of God. Then
+we shall have no more sorrow and no more joy in the pitiful sense of the
+earth, but rather an exaltation which shall make us masters of these and
+of ourselves. We shall have a sympathy and charity that shall need no
+promptings, but that flow from us spontaneously into the world of
+suffering and need.</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven was of a sour temper, according to all accounts, but he wrote
+his symphonies in the midst of tribulations under which few men would have<span class="num" title="Page 62">&zwnj;</span><a name="p62" id="p62"></a>
+worked at all. When we have felt something of the spirit that makes work
+inevitable, it will be as though we had heard the eternal harmonies. We
+shall write our symphonies, build our bridges, or do our lesser tasks
+with dauntless purpose, even though the possessions that men count dear
+are taken from us. Suppose we can do very little because of some
+infirmity: if that little has in it the larger inspiration, it will be
+enough to make life full and fine. The joy of a wider life is not
+obtainable in its completeness; it is only through a lifetime of service
+and experience that we can approach it. That is the proof of its divine
+origin&mdash;its unattainableness. &ldquo;God keep you from the she wolf and from
+your heart&#8217;s deepest desire,&rdquo; is an old saying of the Rumanians. If we
+fully obtain our desires, we prove their unworthiness. Does any one
+suppose that Beethoven attained his whole heart&#8217;s desire in his music?
+He might have done so had he been a lesser man.<span class="num" title="Page 63">&zwnj;</span><a name="p63" id="p63"></a> He was not a cheerful
+companion. That is unfortunate, and shows that he failed in complete
+inspiration and in the ordinary kind of self-control. He was at least
+sincere, and that helped not a little to make him what he was. I would
+almost rather a man would be morose and sincere than cheerful from a
+sense of duty.</p>
+
+<p>Our knowledge of the greater things of life must always be substantiated
+and worked out into realities of service, or else we shall be weak and
+ineffective. The charity that balks at giving, reacts upon a man and
+deadens him. I am always insisting that we must not live and serve
+through a sense of duty, but that we must find the inspiration first. It
+is better to give ourselves to service not for the sake of finding God,
+but because we have found Him and because our souls have grown in the
+finding until we cannot help giving. If we have grown to such a stature
+we shall be able to meet sorrow and loss bravely and simply. We shall
+feel for ourselves and<span class="num" title="Page 64">&zwnj;</span><a name="p64" id="p64"></a> for others in their troubles as Forbes Robertson
+did when he wrote to his friend who had met with a great loss: &ldquo;I pray
+that you may never, never, never get over this sorrow, but through it,
+into it, into the very heart of God.&rdquo; All this is very unworldly, no
+doubt, and yet I will venture the assertion that such a standard and
+such a method will come nearer to the mark of successful and
+well-controlled living than the most carefully planned campaign of duty.
+If we plan to make life fine, if we say, in effect, &ldquo;I will be good and
+cheerful, no matter what happens,&rdquo; we are beginning at the wrong end. We
+may be able to work back from our mottoes to real living, but the
+chances are we shall stop somewhere by the way, too confused and
+uncertain to go on. Self-control, at its best, is not a conscious thing.
+It is not well that we should try to be good, but that we should so
+dignify our lives with the spirit of good that evil becomes well-nigh
+impossible to us.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 65">&zwnj;</span><a name="p65" id="p65"></a><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a><abbr title="8.">VIII</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>THE LIGHTER TOUCH</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Heart not so heavy as mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wending late home,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As it passed my window<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whistled itself a tune.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Emily Dickinson.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> never seen good come from frightening worriers. It is no doubt
+wise to speak the truth, but it seems to me a mistake to say in public
+print or in private advice that worry leads to tragedies of the worst
+sort. No matter how hopeful we may be in our later teaching about the
+possibilities of overcoming worry, the really serious worrier will
+pounce upon the original tragic statement and apply it with terrible
+insistence to his own case.</p>
+
+<p>I would not minimize the seriousness of worry, but I am convinced that
+we can rarely overcome it by direct voluntary effort. It does not go
+until we for<span class="num" title="Page 66">&zwnj;</span><a name="p66" id="p66"></a>get it, and we do not forget it if we are always trying
+consciously to overcome it. We worriers must go about our
+business&mdash;other business than that of worry.</p>
+
+<p>Life is serious&mdash;alas, too serious&mdash;and full enough of pathos. We cannot
+joke about its troubles; they are real. But, at least, we need not
+magnify them. Why should we act as though everything depended upon our
+efforts, even the changing seasons and the blowing <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber&#8217;s note: Original ends with a period not a question mark.">winds?</ins> No doubt we
+are responsible for our own acts and thoughts and for the welfare of
+those who depend upon us. The trouble is we take unnecessary
+responsibilities so seriously that we overreach ourselves and defeat our
+own good ends.</p>
+
+<p>I would make my little world more blessedly careless&mdash;with an <em>abandon</em>
+that loves life too much to spoil it with worry. I would cherish so
+great a desire for my child&#8217;s good that I could not scold and bear down
+upon him for every<span class="num" title="Page 67">&zwnj;</span><a name="p67" id="p67"></a> little fault, making him a worrier too, but,
+instead, I would guide him along the right path with pleasant words and
+brave encouragement. The condemnation of faults is rarely constructive.</p>
+
+<p>We had better say to the worriers, &ldquo;Here is life; no matter what
+unfortunate things you may have said or done, you must put all evil
+behind you and live&mdash;simply, bravely, well.<ins class="corr" title="Transcriber&#8217;s note: Original lacked a closing quote, but a gap in the type suggests it belonged here.">&rdquo;</ins> The greater the evil,
+the greater the need of forgetting. Not flippantly, but reverently,
+leave your misdeeds in a limbo where they may not rise to haunt you.
+This great thing you may do, not with the idea of evading or escaping
+consequences, but so that past evil may be turned into present and
+future good. The criminal himself is coming to be treated this way. He
+is no longer eternally reminded of his crime. He is taken out into the
+sunshine and air and is given a shovel to dig with. A wonderful thing is
+that shovel. With it he may bury the past and raise up a happier,<span class="num" title="Page 68">&zwnj;</span><a name="p68" id="p68"></a>
+better future. We must care so much to expiate our sins that we are
+willing to neglect them and live righteously. That is true repentance,
+constructive repentance.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot suddenly change our mental outlook and become happy when grief
+has borne us down. &ldquo;For the broken heart silence and shade,&rdquo;&mdash;that is
+fair and right. I would say to those who are unhappy, &ldquo;Do not try to be
+happy, you cannot force it; but let peace come to you out of the great
+world of beauty that calmly surrounds our human suffering, and that
+speaks to us quietly of God.&rdquo; Genuine laughter is not forced, but we may
+let it come back into our lives if we know that it is right for it to
+come.</p>
+
+<p>We have all about us instances of the effectiveness of the lighter touch
+as applied to serious matters. The life of the busy surgeon is a good
+example. He may be, and usually is, brimming with sympathy, but if he
+were to feel<span class="num" title="Page 69">&zwnj;</span><a name="p69" id="p69"></a> too deeply for all his patients, he would soon fail and
+die. He goes about his work. He puts through a half-dozen operations in
+a way that would send cold shivers down the back of the uninitiated. And
+yet he is accurate and sure as a machine. If he were to take each case
+upon his mind in a heavy, consequential way, if he were to give deep
+concern to each ligature he ties, and if he were to be constantly afraid
+of causing pain, he would be a poor surgeon. His work, instead of being
+clean and sharp, would suffer from over-conscientiousness. He might
+never finish an operation for fear his patient would bleed to death.
+Such a man may be the reverse of flippant, and yet he may actually enjoy
+his somber work. Cruel, bloodthirsty? Not at all. These men&mdash;the great
+surgeons&mdash;are as tender as children. But they love their work, they
+really care very deeply for their patients. The successful ones have the
+lighter touch and they have no time for worry.</p>
+
+<p><span class="num" title="Page 70">&zwnj;</span><a name="p70" id="p70"></a>Sometimes we wish to arouse the public conscience. Do the long columns
+of figures, the impressive statistics, wake men to activity? It is
+rather the keen, bright thrust of the satirist that saves the day. Once
+in a New England town meeting there was a movement for a much-needed new
+schoolhouse. By the installation of skylights in the attic the old
+building had been made to accommodate the overflow of pupils. The
+serious speakers in favor of the new building had left the audience
+cold, when a young man arose and said he had been up into the attic and
+had seen the wonderful skylights that were supposed to meet the needs of
+the children. &ldquo;I have seen them,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we used to call them
+scuttles when I was a boy.&rdquo; A hundred thousand dollars was voted for the
+new schoolhouse.</p>
+
+<p>There is a natural gayety in most of us which helps more than we realize
+to keep us sound. The pity is that when responsibilities come and
+hardships<span class="num" title="Page 71">&zwnj;</span><a name="p71" id="p71"></a> come, we repress our lighter selves sternly, as though such
+repression were a duty. Better let us guard the springs of happiness
+very, very jealously. The whistling boy in the dark street does more
+than cheer himself on the way. He actually protects himself from evil,
+and brings courage not only to himself, but to those who hear him. I do
+not hold for false cheerfulness that is sometimes affected, but a brave
+show of courage in a forlorn hope will sometimes win the day. It is
+infinitely more likely to win than a too serious realization of the
+danger of defeat. The show of courage is often not a pretense at all,
+but victory itself.</p>
+
+<p>The need of the world is very great and its human destiny is in our
+hands. Half of those who could help to right the wrongs are asleep or
+too selfishly immersed in their own affairs. We need more helpers like
+my friend of the skylights. Most of us are far too serious. The
+slumberers will slumber on, and<span class="num" title="Page 72">&zwnj;</span><a name="p72" id="p72"></a> the worriers will worry, the serious
+people will go ponderously about until some one shows them how
+ridiculous they are and how pitiful. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 73">&zwnj;</span><a name="p73" id="p73"></a><a name="IX" id="IX"></a><abbr title="9.">IX</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>REGRETS AND FOREBODINGS</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote><p>Regret avails little&mdash;still less remorse&mdash;the one keeps alive
+the old offense, the other creates new offenses. </p>
+
+<p class="sig">Goethe.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> unrepentant sinner walks abroad. Unfortunately for us moralists he
+seems to be having a very good time. We must not condone him, though he
+may be a very lovable person; neither must we altogether condemn him,
+for he may be repentant in the very best way of all ways, the way that
+forgets much and leaves behind more, because life is so fine that it
+must not be spoiled, and because progress is in every way better than
+retrospection. The fact is, that repentance is too often the fear of
+punishment, and such fear is, to say the least, unmanly. I would rather
+be a lovable sinner than one of the people who repent because they
+cannot bear<span class="num" title="Page 74">&zwnj;</span><a name="p74" id="p74"></a> to think of the consequences. Knowledge and fear of
+consequences undoubtedly keep a great many young people from the
+so-called sins of ignorance. But there must be something behind
+knowledge and fear of consequences to stop the youth of spirit from
+doing what he is inclined to do. Over and over again we must go back to
+the appreciation of life&#8217;s dignity and beauty&mdash;to the consciousness of
+the spirit of God behind and in the world if we are to find a balance
+and a character that will &ldquo;deliver us from evil.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When we have found this consciousness&mdash;when we live it and breathe it,
+we shall be far less apt to sin, and when we have sinned, as we all must
+in the course of our blundering lives, we shall not waste our time in
+regret or in the fear of consequences. If the God we dream of is as
+great as the sea, or as beautiful as a tree, we need not fear Him. He
+will be tender, and just at the same time. He will be as forgiving as<span class="num" title="Page 75">&zwnj;</span><a name="p75" id="p75"></a>
+He is strong. The best we can do, then, is to leave our sins in the hand
+of God and go our way, sadder and wiser, maybe, but not regretting too
+much, not fearing any more.</p>
+
+<p>There is a new idea in medicine&mdash;the development of which has been one
+of the most striking achievements of modern times&mdash;the idea of
+psychanalysis as taught and advocated by Freud in Germany. The plan
+is to study the subconscious mind of the nervous patient by means of
+hypnotism, to assist the patient to recall all the mental experiences of
+his past,&mdash;even his very early childhood,&mdash;and in this way to make clear
+the origin of the misconceptions and the unfortunate impressions which
+have presumably exerted their influence through the years. The new
+system includes, also, the interpretation of dreams, their effect upon
+the conscious life and their influence upon the mentality. Very
+wonderful results are reported from the<span class="num" title="Page 76">&zwnj;</span><a name="p76" id="p76"></a> pursuit of this method. Many a
+badly warped and twisted life has been straightened out and renewed when
+the searchlight has revealed the hidden influences that have been at
+work and which have made trouble. The repression of conscious or
+unconscious feelings can no doubt change the whole mental life. We
+should have the greatest respect for the men who are doing this work. It
+requires, I am told, an almost unbelievable amount of patience and time
+to accomplish the analysis. No doubt the adult judgment of childish
+follies is a direct means of disposing of their harmful influence in
+life, the surest way of losing the conscious or unconscious regrets that
+sadden many lives. There are probably many cases of disturbed and
+troubled mind that can be cured in this way only. The method does not
+appeal to me because I am so strongly inclined to take people as they
+are, to urge a forgetfulness that does not really forget, but which goes
+on<span class="num" title="Page 77">&zwnj;</span><a name="p77" id="p77"></a> bravely to the development of life. This development cannot proceed
+without the understanding that life may be made so beautiful that sins
+and failures are lost in progress. Some of us may need the subtle
+analysis of our lives to make clear the points where we went astray in
+our thoughts and ideas, but many of us, fortunately, are able to take
+ourselves for better or for worse, sins and all. Most of us ought to do
+that, for the most part, if we are to progress and live. Sometimes the
+revelations of evils we know not of result in complications rather than
+simplification, as in the case of a boy who wrote to me and said that
+since he had learned of his early sins he had made sure that he could
+never be well. Instead of going into further analysis with him, I
+assured him that, while it was undoubtedly his duty to regret all the
+evil of his life, it was a still greater duty to go on and live the rest
+of it well, and that he could do so if he would open<span class="num" title="Page 78">&zwnj;</span><a name="p78" id="p78"></a> his eyes to the
+possibilities of unselfish service.</p>
+
+<p>I am very much inclined to preach against self-analysis and the almost
+inevitable regret and despair that accompany it.</p>
+
+<p>One of my patients decided some time ago that her life was wasted, that
+she had accomplished nothing. It was true that she had not the endurance
+to meet the usual demands of social or even family life, and that for
+long periods she had to give up altogether. But it happened that she had
+the gift of musical understanding, that she had studied hard in younger
+days. With a little urging the gift was made to grow again and to serve
+not only the patient&#8217;s own needs, but to bring very great pleasure to
+every one who listened to her playing. That rare, true ability was worth
+everything, and she came to realize it in time. The gift of musical
+expression is a very great thing, and I succeeded in making this woman
+understand that<span class="num" title="Page 79">&zwnj;</span><a name="p79" id="p79"></a> she should be happy in that ability even if nothing
+else should be possible.</p>
+
+<p>Often enough nothing that can compare with music exists, and life seems
+wholly barren. Rather cold comfort it seems at first to assure a person
+who is helpless that character is the greatest thing in the world, but
+that is the final truth. The most limited and helpless life may glow
+with it and be richer than imagination can believe. It is never time to
+regret&mdash;and never time to despair. The less analysis the better. When it
+comes to character, live, grow, and get a deeper and deeper
+understanding of life&mdash;of life that is near to God and so capable of
+wrong only as we turn away from Him. &ldquo;Do not say things; what you are
+stands over you and thunders so, I cannot hear what you say to the
+contrary.&rdquo; We shall do well not to forget that, whatever failures or
+mistakes we have made, there is infinite possibility ahead of us, that
+character is the greatest thing in the world, and<span class="num" title="Page 80">&zwnj;</span><a name="p80" id="p80"></a> that most good
+character has been built upon mistakes and failures. I believe there is
+no sin which may not make up the fabric of its own forgiveness in the
+living of a free, self-sacrificing life. I know of no bodily ill nor
+handicap which we may not eventually rise above and beyond by means of
+brave spiritual progress. The body may fail us, but the spirit reaches
+on and into the great world of God. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 81">&zwnj;</span><a name="p81" id="p81"></a><a name="X" id="X"></a><abbr title="10.">X</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>THE VIRTUES</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The virtues hide their vanquished fires<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Within that whiter flame&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till conscience grows irrelevant<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And duty but a name.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Frederick Lawrence Knowles.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> most books I have read on &ldquo;nerves&rdquo; and similar subjects, advice is
+given, encouragement is given, but the necessity for patience is not
+made clear. Patience is typical of all the other virtues. Many a man has
+followed the best of advice for a time, and has become discouraged
+because the promised results did not materialize. It is disappointing,
+surely, to have lived upon a diet for months only to find that you still
+have dyspepsia, or to have followed certain rules of morality with great
+precision and enthusiasm without obtaining the untroubled mind. We are
+accustomed to see results in the material world and<span class="num" title="Page 82">&zwnj;</span><a name="p82" id="p82"></a> naturally expect
+them everywhere. The trouble is we do not always recognize improvements
+when we see them, and we insist upon certain preconceived changes as a
+result of our endeavors. The physician is apt rashly to promise definite
+physical accomplishments in a given time. He is courting disappointment
+and distrust when he does so. We all want to get relief from our
+symptoms, and we are inclined to insist upon a particular kind of relief
+so strongly that we fail to appreciate the possibilities of another and
+a better relief which may be at hand. The going astray in this
+particular is sometimes very unfortunate. I have known a man to rush
+frantically from one doctor to another, trying to obtain relief for a
+particular pain or discomfort, unwilling to rest long enough to find out
+that the trouble would have disappeared naturally if he had taken the
+advice of the first physician, to live without impatience and within his
+limitations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="num" title="Page 83">&zwnj;</span><a name="p83" id="p83"></a>The human body is a very complex organism, and sometimes pain and
+distress are better not relieved, since they may be the expression of
+some deeper maladjustment which must first be straightened out. This is
+also true of the mind&mdash;in which the unhappy proddings of conscience had
+better not be cured by anodynes or by evasion unless we are prepared to
+go deeply enough to make them disappear spontaneously. We must sometimes
+insist upon patience, though it should exist as a matter of
+course&mdash;patience with ourselves and with others. The physician who
+demands and secures the greatest degree of patience from his clients is
+the most successful practitioner, for no life can go on successfully
+without patience. If patience can be spontaneous,&mdash;the natural result of
+a broadening outlook,&mdash;then it will be permanent and serviceable; the
+other kind, that exists by extreme effort, may do for a while, but it is
+a poor makeshift.</p>
+
+<p><span class="num" title="Page 84">&zwnj;</span><a name="p84" id="p84"></a>I always feel like apologizing when I ask a man or a woman to be
+tolerant or charitable or generous or, for that matter, to practice any
+of the ordinary virtues. Sound living should spring unbidden from the
+very joy of life; it should need no justification and certainly no
+urging. But unfortunately, as the world now stands, there are men and
+groups of men who do not see the light. There is a wide contagion of
+selfishness and short-sightedness among the well-to-do, and a necessary
+federation of protection and selfishness among the poor. The practical
+needs of life, artificial as they are among the rich, and terribly
+insistent as they are among the poor, blind us to larger considerations.</p>
+
+<p>If all matters of welfare, public or private, could be treated
+unselfishly, how quickly we should be rid of some of the great evils
+that afflict the race. I am inclined to think that much of the goodness
+of people does come in that way, unconsciously, naturally, as the<span class="num" title="Page 85">&zwnj;</span><a name="p85" id="p85"></a> light
+flows from the sun. Yet I suppose that in our present order, and until,
+through the years, the better time arrives, we must very often ask
+ourselves and others to be good and to be charitable, just because it is
+right, or worse still because it is good policy.</p>
+
+<p>A man grows better, more human, more intelligent, as he practices the
+virtues. He is safer, no doubt, and the world is better. It is even true
+that, by the constant practice of virtues, he may come finally to
+espouse goodness and become thoroughly good. That is the hopeful thing
+about it and the reason why we may consistently ask or demand the
+routine practice of the virtues. But let us hold up all the time in our
+teaching and in our lives the other course, the development of the
+inspiration that includes all virtues and that makes all our way easy
+and plain in a world where confusion reigns, because men are going at
+the problem of right living the wrong way around.</p>
+
+<p><span class="num" title="Page 86">&zwnj;</span><a name="p86" id="p86"></a>The practice of good living will never be easy in its details, but if it
+is sure in its inspiration there will be no question of the final
+triumph. We shall have to fight blindly sometimes and with all the
+strength and persistence of animals at bay. We shall fail sometimes,
+too, and that is not always the worst thing that can happen. It is the
+glory of life that we shall slowly triumph over ourselves and the world.
+It is the glory of life that out of sore trouble, in the midst of
+poverty and human injustice, may rise, spontaneous and serene, the
+spirit of self-sacrifice, the unconquerable spirit of service that does
+not question, that expresses the divine tenderness in terms of human
+love. Through the times of darkness and doubt which must inevitably
+come, there will be for those who cherish such a vision, and who come
+back to it again and again, no utter darkness, no trouble that wholly
+crushes, no loss that wholly destroys.</p>
+
+<p>If we could not understand it before,<span class="num" title="Page 87">&zwnj;</span><a name="p87" id="p87"></a> it will slowly dawn upon us that
+the life of Christ exemplified all these things. Charity, kindliness,
+service, patience,&mdash;all these things which have seemed so hard will
+become in our lives, as in his, the substance and expression of our
+faith. The great human virtues will become easy and natural, the
+untroubled mind, or as much of it as is good to possess, will be ours,
+not because we have escaped trouble, but because we have disarmed it,
+have welcomed it even, so long as it has served to strengthen and
+ennoble our lives. <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><span class="num" title="Page 88">&zwnj;</span><a name="p88" id="p88"></a><a name="XI" id="XI"></a><abbr title="11.">XI</abbr>
+<br />
+<small>THE CURE BY FAITH</small></h2>
+
+
+<blockquote class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The healing of his seamless dress<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is by our beds of pain&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We touch Him in life&#8217;s throng and press,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we are whole again.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="sig">Whittier.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I cannot</span> finish my little book of ideals without writing some things
+that are in my mind about cure by faith or by prayer. It is a subject
+that I approach with hesitation because of the danger of
+misunderstanding. No subject is more difficult and none is more
+important for the invalid to understand. We hear a great deal about the
+wonderful cures of Christian Science or of similar agencies, and we all
+know of people who have been restored to usefulness by such means. Has
+the healing of Christ again become possible on earth? No one would be
+more eager to accept it and acknowledge it than the physician<span class="num" title="Page 89">&zwnj;</span><a name="p89" id="p89"></a> if it
+were really so. But careful investigation always reveals the fact that
+the wonderful cures are not of the body but of the mind. It is easy
+enough to say that a cancer or tuberculosis has been cured by faith, and
+apparently easy for many people to believe it, but alas, the proof is
+wanting. The Christian Scientist, honest and sincere as he may be, is
+not qualified to say what is true disease and what is not. What looks
+like diseased tissue recovers, but medical men know that it could not
+have been diseased in the most serious sense, and that the prayer for
+recovery could have had nothing to do with the cure, save in a very
+indirect way.</p>
+
+<p>The man who discards medicine for philosophy or religion is courting
+unnecessary suffering and even death. The worst part of it is that he
+may induce some one else to make the same mistake with similar results.
+In writing this opinion I am in no way denying the great significance
+and value of faith nor<span class="num" title="Page 90">&zwnj;</span><a name="p90" id="p90"></a> of the prayerful and trustful mind. If it cannot
+cure actual physical disease, faith can accomplish veritable miracles of
+healing in the mind of the patient. No thoughtful or honest medical man
+will deny it. Nor will most medical men deny that the course of almost
+any physical illness may be modified by faith and prayer. I am almost
+saying that there is no known medicine of such potency. Every bodily
+function is the better for the conquering spirit that transcends the
+earth and finds its necessary expression in prayer.</p>
+
+<p>There really need be no issue or disagreement between medicine and faith
+cure. At its best, one is not more wonderful than the other, and both
+aim to accomplish the same end&mdash;the relief of human suffering. When the
+two are merged, as some day they will be, we shall be surprised to
+discover how alike they are. Christian Science is rightly scorned by
+medical men because it is unscientific, because it makes absurd<span class="num" title="Page 91">&zwnj;</span><a name="p91" id="p91"></a> and
+untenable claims outside its own field, and because it has not as yet
+investigated that field in the scientific spirit. When proper study and
+investigation have been made it will be found that faith cure, not in
+its present state, but in some future development, will have an immense
+field of usefulness. It will be worthy of as much respect in that field
+as medicine proper in its own sphere. As a matter of fact both medicine
+and faith cure are miraculous in a very real sense, as both depend for
+efficiency now and always upon the same great laws which may be fairly
+called divine. What is the discovery that the serum of a horse will
+under certain circumstances cure diphtheria? Does it not mean that man
+is tapping sources of power far beyond his understanding? Is man
+responsible save as the agent? Did he produce the complex animal
+chemistry that makes this cure possible? Did man make the horse, or the
+laws that control the physiology<span class="num" title="Page 92">&zwnj;</span><a name="p92" id="p92"></a> and pathology of that animal? Here,
+then, is faith cure in its largest and best sense. The biologist may not
+be willing to admit it, but his faith in these great laws of God have
+made possible the cure of a dread disease. Here, as in all matters of
+pure religion, it is what men say and write, not the fact itself, that
+makes all the misunderstanding; we make our judgments and conceive our
+prejudices from mere surface considerations. Call life what you
+will,&mdash;leave out the symbolic word &ldquo;God&rdquo; altogether,&mdash;the facts remain.
+The true scientific spirit must reverence and adore the power that lies
+behind creation. It is as inconsistent for the bacteriologist to be an
+unbeliever as it is for the Christian Scientist to deny the value of
+bacteriology. Medicine is infinitely farther advanced than Christian
+Science, and yet Christian Science has grasped some truth that the
+natural scientist has stupidly missed. When an obsession is thrown off
+and courage<span class="num" title="Page 93">&zwnj;</span><a name="p93" id="p93"></a> substituted for fear, we witness as important a &ldquo;cure&rdquo; as
+can be shown to the credit of surgery. If the Christian Scientists and
+the other faith-curers were only less superficial and less narrow in
+their explanation of the facts, if they would condescend to study the
+diseases they treat, they would be entitled to, and would receive, more
+respect and consideration.</p>
+
+<p>The cure and prevention of disease through the agency of man are
+evidently part of the divine plan. Our eagerness to advance along the
+lines of investigation and practice is but that divine plan in action.
+The truly scientific spirit will neglect no possible curative agent.
+When scientific men ridicule prayer, they are thinking not of the real
+thing which is above all possible criticism, but of the feeble and often
+pathetic groping for the real thing. We ask in our prayers for
+impossible blessings that would invert the laws of God and change the
+face of nature&mdash;very<span class="num" title="Page 94">&zwnj;</span><a name="p94" id="p94"></a> well, we must be prepared for disappointment. The
+attitude of prayer may, indeed, transform our own lives and make
+possible for us experiences that would otherwise have been impossible.
+But our pathetic demands&mdash;we shall never know how forlorn and weak they
+are. Prayer is the opening of the heart to the being we call God&mdash;it is
+most natural and reasonable. If we pray in our weakness and blindness
+for what we may not have, there is, nevertheless, a wonderful
+re-creative effect within us. The comfort and peace of such communion is
+beyond all else healing and restoring in its influence upon the troubled
+and anxious mind of man. The poet or the scientist who bows in adoration
+before the glory of God revealed in nature, prays in effect to that God
+and his soul is refreshed and renewed. The poor wretch who stands
+blindfolded before the firing squad, waiting the word that ends the life
+of a military spy, is near enough to<span class="num" title="Page 95">&zwnj;</span><a name="p95" id="p95"></a> God&mdash;and the whispered prayer upon
+his lips is cure for the wounds that take his life.</p>
+
+<p>The best kind of prayer seeks not and asks not for physical relief or
+benefit, but opens the heart to its maker, and so receives the cure of
+peace that is a greater miracle than any yet wrought by man. Under the
+influence of that cure the sick are well and the dead are alive again.
+With the courage and spirit of such a cure in our lives, we shall
+inevitably do our utmost to relieve, by any good means, the physical
+suffering of the world. We shall follow the laws of nature. We shall
+study them with the utmost care. We shall take nothing for granted,
+since by less careful steps we shall miss the divine law and so go
+astray. The science of healing will become no chance and irrational
+thing. We shall use all the natural means to relieve and prevent
+suffering&mdash;there will be no scoring of one set of doctors by another
+because all will have one<span class="num" title="Page 96">&zwnj;</span><a name="p96" id="p96"></a> purpose. But more to the point than that, men
+will discover that health in its largest sense consists in living devout
+and prayerful lives whereunto shall be revealed in good time all that
+our finite minds can know and use. There will be no suffering of the
+body in the old and pitiful sense, for we shall be so much alive that
+disease and death can no longer claim us.</p>
+
+
+<p class="title" style="margin:3em;">THE END <a class="toclink" rel="contents" title="Contents." href="#CONTENTS">&larr;ToC</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Untroubled Mind
+
+Author: Herbert J. Hall
+
+Release Date: July 19, 2007 [EBook #22108]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNTROUBLED MIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Dave Morgan, Laura Wisewell
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+UNTROUBLED MIND
+
+
+BY
+
+HERBERT J. HALL, M.D.
+
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HERBERT J. HALL
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published May 1915_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+A very wise physician has said that "every illness has two parts--what
+it is, and what the patient thinks about it." What the patient thinks
+about it is often more important and more troublesome than the real
+disease. What the patient thinks of life, what life means to him is also
+of great importance and may be the bar that shuts out all real health
+and happiness. The following pages are devoted to certain ideals of life
+which I would like to give to my patients, the long-time patients who
+have especially fallen to my lot.
+
+They are not all here, the steps to health and happiness. The reader may
+even be annoyed and baffled by my indirectness and unwillingness to be
+specific. That I cannot help--it is a personal peculiarity; I cannot ask
+any one to live by rule, because I do not believe that rules are
+binding and final. There must be character behind the rule and then the
+rule is unnecessary.
+
+All that I have written has doubtless been presented before, in better
+ways, by wiser men, but I believe that each writer may expect to find
+his small public, his own particular public who can understand and
+profit by his teachings, having partly or wholly failed with the others.
+For that reason I am encouraged to write upon a subject usually shunned
+by medical men, being assured of at least a small company of friendly
+readers.
+
+I am grateful to a number of friends and patients who have read the
+manuscript of the following chapters. These reviewers have been frank
+and kind and very helpful. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Richard C.
+Cabot, who has given me much valuable assistance.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     I. THE UNTROUBLED MIND              1
+
+    II. RELIGIO MEDICI                  10
+
+   III. THOUGHT AND WORK                20
+
+    IV. IDLENESS                        30
+
+     V. RULES OF THE GAME               38
+
+    VI. THE NERVOUS TEMPERAMENT         50
+
+   VII. SELF-CONTROL                    59
+
+  VIII. THE LIGHTER TOUCH               65
+
+    IX. REGRETS AND FOREBODINGS         73
+
+     X. THE VIRTUES                     81
+
+    XI. THE CURE BY FAITH               88
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE UNTROUBLED MIND
+
+
+    Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
+    Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
+    Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
+    And with some sweet oblivious antidote
+    Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
+    Which weighs upon the heart?
+                MACBETH.
+
+When a man tells me he never worries, I am inclined to think that he is
+either deceiving himself or trying to deceive me. The great roots of
+worry are conscience, fear, and regret. Undoubtedly we ought to be
+conscientious and we ought to fear and regret evil. But if it is to be
+better than an impediment and a harm, our worry must be largely
+unconscious, and intuitive. The moment we become conscious of worry we
+are undone. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we cannot leave conscience to
+its own devices unless our lives are big enough and fine enough to
+warrant such a course. The remedy for the mental unrest, which is in
+itself an illness, lies not in an enlightened knowledge of the
+harmfulness and ineffectiveness of worry, not even in the acquirement of
+an unconscious conscience, but in the living of a life so full and good
+that worry cannot find place in it. That idea of worry and conscience,
+that definition of serenity, simplifies life immensely. To overcome
+worry by substituting development and growth need never be dull work. To
+know life in its farther reaches, life in its better applications, is
+the final remedy--the great undertaking--_it is life_. We must warn
+ourselves, not infrequently, that the larger life is to be pursued for
+its own glorious self and not for the sake of peace. Peace may come, a
+peace so sure that death itself cannot shake it, but we must not expect
+all our affairs to run smoothly. As a matter of fact they may run badly
+enough; we shall have our ups and downs, we shall sin and repent, and
+sin again, but if in the end we live according to our best intuitions,
+we shall be justified, and we need not worry about the outcome. To put
+it another way, if we would have the untroubled mind, we must transfer
+our conscientious efforts from the small details of life--from the worry
+and fret of common things--into another and a higher atmosphere. We must
+transfigure common life, dignify it and ennoble it; then, although the
+old causes of worry may continue, we shall have gained a stature that
+will make us unconscious masters of the little troubles and in a great
+degree equal to the larger requirements. Life will be easier, not
+because we make less effort, but because we are working from another and
+a better level.
+
+If such a change, and it would be a change for most of us, could come
+about instantly, in a flash of revelation, that would be ideal, but it
+would not be life. We must return again and again to the old uninspired
+state wherein we struggle conscientiously with perverse details. I would
+not minimize the importance and value of this struggle; only the sooner
+it changes its level the better for every one concerned. Large serenity
+must, finally, be earned through the toughening of moral fibre that
+comes in dealing squarely with perplexing details. Some of this struggle
+must always be going on, but serener life will come when we begin to
+concern ourselves with larger factors.
+
+How are we to live the larger life? Partly through uninspired struggle
+and through the brave meeting of adversity, but partly, also, in a way
+that may be described as "out of hand," by intuition, by exercise of the
+quality of mind that sees visions and grasps truths beyond the realms of
+common thought.
+
+I am more and more impressed with the necessity of inspiration in life
+if we are to be strong and serene, and so finally escape the pitfalls
+of worry and conscience. By inspirations I do not mean belief in any
+system or creed. It is not a stated belief that we need to begin with;
+that may come in time. We need first to find in life, or at least in
+nature, an essential beauty that makes its own true, inevitable response
+within us. We must learn to love life so deeply that we feel its
+tremendous significance, until we find in the sea and the sky the
+evidence of an overbrooding spirit too great to be understood, but not
+too great to satisfy the soul. This is a sort of mother religion--the
+matrix from which all sects and creeds are born. Its existence in us
+dignifies us and makes simple, purposeful, and receptive living almost
+inevitable. We may not know why we are living according to the dictates
+of our inspiration, but we shall live so and that is the important
+consideration.
+
+If I urge the acquirement of a religious conception that we may cure
+the intolerable distress of worry, I do what I have already warned
+against. It is so easy to make this mistake that I have virtually made
+it on the same page with my warning. We have no right to seek so great a
+thing as religious experience that we may be relieved of suffering.
+Better go on with pain and distress than cheapen religion by making it a
+remedy. We must seek it for its own sake, or rather, we must not seek it
+at all, lest, like a dream, it elude us, or change into something else,
+less holy. Nevertheless, it is true that if we will but look with open,
+unprejudiced eyes, again and again, upon the sunrise or the stars above
+us, we shall become conscious of a presence greater and more beautiful
+than our minds can think. In the experience of that vision strength and
+peace will come to us unbidden. We shall find our lives raised, as by an
+unseen force, above the warfare of conscience and worry. We shall begin
+to know the meaning of serenity and of that priceless, if not wholly to
+be acquired, possession, the untroubled mind.
+
+I am aware that I shall be misunderstood and perhaps ridiculed by my
+colleagues when I attempt to discuss religion in any way. Theology is a
+field in which I have had no training, but that is the very reason why I
+dare write of it. I do not even assume that there is a God in the
+traditional sense. The idea is too great to be made concrete and
+literal. No single fact of nature can be fully understood by our finite
+minds. But I do feel vaguely that the laws that compass us, and make our
+lives possible, point always on--"beyond the realms of time and
+space"--toward the existence of a mighty overruling spirit. If this is a
+cold and inadequate conception of God, it is at least one that can be
+held by any man without compromise.
+
+The modern mind is apt to fail of religious understanding and support,
+because of the arbitrary interpretations of religion which are
+presented for our acceptance. It is what men say about religion, rather
+than religion itself, that repels us. Let us think it out for ourselves.
+If we are open to a simple, even primitive, conception of God, we may
+still repudiate the creeds and doctrines, but we are likely to become
+more tolerant of those who find them true and good. We shall be likely
+in time to find the religion of Christ understandable and
+acceptable--warm and quick with life. The man who ungrudgingly opens his
+heart to the God of nature will be religious in the simplest possible
+sense. He may worry because of the things he cannot altogether
+understand, and because he falls so far short of the implied ideal. But
+he will have enlarged his life so much that the common worries will find
+little room--he will be too full of the joy of living to spend much
+conscious thought in worry. Such a man will realize that he cannot
+afford to spend his time and strength in regretting his past mistakes.
+There is too much in the future. What he does in the future, not what he
+has failed to do in the past, will determine the quality of his life. He
+knows this, and the knowledge sends him into that future with courage
+and with strength. Finally, in some indefinable way, character will
+become more important to him than physical health even. Illness is half
+compensated when a man realizes that it is not what he accomplishes in
+the world, but what he _is_ that really counts, which puts him in touch
+with the creative forces of God and raises him out of the aimless and
+ordinary into a life of inspiration and joy.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+RELIGIO MEDICI
+
+
+    At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to
+    Middlemarch with the reputation of having definite religious
+    views, of being given to prayer and of otherwise showing an
+    active piety, there would have been a general presumption
+    against his medical skill.
+                GEORGE ELIOT.
+
+When a medically educated man talks and writes of religion and of God,
+he is rightly enough questioned by his brothers--who are too busy with
+the hard work of practice to be concerned with anything but material
+problems. To me the word "God" is symbolic of the power which created
+and which maintains the universe. The sunrise and the stars of heaven
+give me some idea of his majesty, the warmth and tenderness of human
+love give me some idea of his divine love. That is all I know, but it is
+enough to make life glow; it is enough to inspire the most intense
+devotion to any good cause; it is enough to make me bear suffering with
+some degree of patience; and it is enough, finally, to give me some
+confidence and courage even in the face of the great mystery of death.
+Why this or another conception of God should produce such a profound
+result upon any one, I do not know, except that in some obscure way it
+connects the individual with the divine plan, and does not leave him
+outside in despair and loneliness. However that may be, it will be
+conceded that a religious conception of some kind does much toward
+justifying life, toward making it strong and livable, and so has
+directly to do with certain important problems of illness and health.
+The most practical medical man will admit that any illness is made
+lighter and more likely to recover in the presence of hope and serenity
+in the mind of the patient.
+
+Naturally the great bulk of medical practice calls for no handling other
+than that of the straight medical sort. A man comes in with a crushed
+finger, a girl with anaemia--the way is clear. It is only in deeper, more
+intricate departments of medicine that we altogether fail. The
+bacteriologist and the pathologist have no use for mental treatment, in
+their departments. But when we come to the case of the nervously
+broken-down school teacher, or the worn-out telegrapher, that is another
+matter. Years may elapse before work can be resumed--years of dependence
+and anxiety. Here, a new view of life is often more useful than drugs, a
+view that accepts the situation reasonably after a while, that does not
+grope blindly and impatiently for a cure, but finds in life an
+inspiration that makes it good in spite of necessary suffering and
+limitations. Often enough we cannot promise a cure, but we must be
+prepared to give something better.
+
+A great deal of the fatigue and unhappiness of the world is due to the
+fact that we do not go deep enough in our justification for work or
+play, or for any experience, happy or sad. There is a good deal of a
+void after we have said, "Art for art's sake," or "Play for the joy of
+playing," or even after we have said, "I am working for the sake of my
+family, or for some one who needs my help." That is not enough; and
+whether we realize it or not, the lack of deeper justification is at the
+bottom of a restlessness and uncertainty which we might not be willing
+to acknowledge, but which nevertheless is very real.
+
+I am not satisfied when some moralist says, "Be good and you will be
+happy." The kind of happiness that comes from a perfunctory goodness is
+a thing which I cannot understand, and which I certainly do not want. If
+I work and play and serve and employ, making up the fabric of a busy
+life, if I attain a very real happiness, I am tormented by the desire to
+know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I
+usually get. The patient may not be cured when he is relieved of his
+anaemia, or when his emaciation has given place to the plumpness and
+suppleness and physical strength that we call health. The man whom we
+look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not well
+in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is living,
+why he is filling his life with activity. In spite of the elasticity and
+spring of the world's interests, there must come often, and with a kind
+of fatal insistence, the deep demand for a cause, for a justification.
+If there is not an adequate significance behind it, life, with all its
+courage and accomplishment, seems but a sorry thing, so full of pathos,
+even in its brightest moments, so shadowed with a sense of loss and of
+finality that the bravest heart may well fail and the truest courage
+relax, supported only by the assurance that this way lies happiness or
+that right is right.
+
+What is this knowledge that the world is seeking, but can never find?
+What is this final justification? If we seek it in its completeness, we
+are doomed always to be ill and unsatisfied. If we are willing to look
+only a little way into the great question, if we are willing to accept a
+little for the whole, content because it is manifestly part of the final
+knowledge, and because we know that final knowledge rests with God
+alone, we shall understand enough to save us from much sorrow and
+painful incompleteness.
+
+There is, in the infinitely varied and beautiful world of nature, and in
+the hearts of men, so much of beauty and truth that it is a wonder we do
+not all realize that these things of common life may be in us and for us
+the daily and hourly expression of the infinite being we call God. We do
+not see God, but we do feel and know so much that we may fairly believe
+to be of God that we do not need to see Him face to face. It is
+something more than imagination to feel that it is the life of God in
+our lives, so often unrecognized or ignored, that prompts us to all the
+greatness and the inspiration and the accomplishment of the world. If we
+could know more clearly the joy of such a conception, we should dry up
+at its source much of the unhappiness which is, in a deep and subtle
+way, at the bottom of many a nervous illness and many a wretched
+existence.
+
+The happiness which is found in the recognition of kinship with God,
+through the common things of life, in the experiences which are so
+significant that they could not spring from a lesser source, the
+happiness which is not sought, but which is the inevitable result of
+such recognition--this experience goes a long way toward making life
+worth living.
+
+If we do have this conception of life, then some of the old, old
+questions that have vexed so many dwellers upon the earth will no longer
+be a source of unhappiness or of illness of mind or body. The question
+of immortality, for instance, which has made us afraid to die, will no
+longer be a question--we shall not need to answer it, in the presence of
+God, in our lives and in the world about us. We shall be content finally
+to accept whatever is in store for us--so it be the will of God. We may
+even look for something better than mere immortality, something more
+divine than our gross conception of eternal life.
+
+This is a religion that I believe medical men may teach without
+hesitation whenever the need shall arise. I know well enough that many a
+blunt if kindly man cannot bring himself to say these words, even if he
+believes them, but I do think that in some measure they point the way to
+what may wisely be taught.
+
+There is a practice of medicine--the common practice--that is concerned
+with the body only, and with its chemical and mechanical reactions. We
+can have nothing but respect and admiration for the men who go on year
+after year in the eager pursuit of this calling. We know that such a
+work is necessary, that it is just as important as the educational
+practice of which I write. We know that without the physical side
+medicine would fail of its usefulness and that disease and death would
+reap far richer harvests: I only wish the two naturally related aspects
+of our dealing with patients might not be so completely separated that
+they lose sight of each other. As a matter of fact, both elements are
+necessary to our human welfare. If medicine devotes itself altogether to
+the cure and prevention of physical disease, it will miss half of its
+possibilities. It is equally true that if we forget the physical
+necessities in our zeal for spiritual hygiene, we shall get and deserve
+complete and humiliating failure. Many men will say, "Why mix the two?
+Why not let the preachers and the philosophers preach and the doctors
+follow their own ways?" For the most part this may have to be the
+arrangement, but the doctor who can see and treat the spiritual needs of
+his patient will always be more likely to cure in the best sense than
+the doctor who sees only half of the picture. On the other hand, the
+philosopher is likely to be a comparatively poor doctor, because he
+knows nothing of medicine, and so can see only the other half of the
+picture. There is much to be said for the religion of medicine if it can
+be kept free from cant, if it can be simple and rational enough to be
+available for the whole world.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THOUGHT AND WORK
+
+
+    I wish I had a trade!--It would animate my arms and tranquilize
+    my brain.
+                SENANCOUR.
+
+    "Doe ye nexte thynge."--_Old English Proverb_.
+
+Since our minds are so constantly filled with anxiety, there would seem
+to be at least one sure way to be rid of it--to stop thinking.
+
+A great many people believe that the mind will become less effective,
+that life will become dull and purposeless, unless they are constantly
+thinking and planning and arranging their affairs. I believe that the
+mind may easily and wisely be free from conscious thought a good deal of
+the time, and that the greatest progress and development in mind often
+comes when the thinker is virtually at rest, when his mind is to all
+intents and purposes blank. The busy, unconscious mind does its best
+work in the serenity of an atmosphere which does not interfere and
+confuse.
+
+It is true that the greatest conceptions do not come to the untrained
+and undisciplined mind. But do we want great conceptions all the time?
+There is a technical training for the mind which is, of course,
+necessary for special accomplishments, but this is quite another matter.
+Even this kind of thought must not obtrude too much, lest we become
+conscious of our mental processes and so end in confusion.
+
+One of the greatest benefits of work with the hands, or of objective and
+constructive work with the mind, is that it saves us from unending hours
+of thinking. Work should, of course, find its fullest justification as
+an expression of faith. If we have ever so dim a vision of a greater
+significance in life, of its close relationship to infinite things, we
+become thereby conscious of the need of service, of the need of work. It
+is the easy, natural expression of our faith, the inevitable result of
+a spiritual contact with the great working forces of the world. It is
+work above all else that saves us from the disasters of conflicting
+thought.
+
+A few years ago a young man came to me, suffering from too much
+thinking. He had just been graduated from college and his head was full
+of confused ideas and emotions. He was also very tired, having
+overworked in his preparation for examinations, and because he had not
+taken the best care of his body. The symptoms he complained of were
+sleeplessness and worry, together with the inevitable indigestion and
+headache. Of course, as a physician, I went over the bodily functions
+carefully, and studied, as far as I might, into the organic conditions.
+I could find no evidence of physical disease. I did not say, "There is
+nothing the matter with you"; for the man was sick. I told him that he
+was tired, that he had thought too much, that he was too much concerned
+about himself, and that as a result of all this his bodily functions
+were temporarily upset. He thought he ought to worry about himself,
+because otherwise he would not be trying to get well. I explained to him
+that this mistaken obligation was the common reason for worry, and that
+in this case, at least, it was quite unnecessary and even harmful for
+him to go on thinking about himself. That helped a little, but not
+nearly enough, because when a man has overworked, when he has begun to
+worry, and when his various bodily functions show results of worry, no
+reasoning, no explanations, can wholly relieve him. I said to this young
+man, "In spite of your discomforts, in spite of your depression and
+concern in regard to yourself, you will get well if you will stop
+thinking about the matter altogether. You must be first convinced that
+it is best for you to stop thinking, that no harm or violence can
+result, and then you must be helped in this direction by going to work
+with your hands--that will be life and progress, it will lead you to
+health."
+
+Fortunately I had had some experience with nervous illness, and I knew
+that unless I managed for this man the character and extent of his work,
+he would not only fail in it, but of its object, and so become more
+confused and discouraged. I knew the troubled mind, in this instance,
+might find its solace and its relief in work, but that I must choose the
+work carefully to suit the individual, and I must see that the nervously
+fatigued body was not pushed too hard.
+
+In the town where I live is a blacksmith shop, presided over by a genial
+old man who has been a blacksmith since he was a boy, and in whose hands
+iron is like clay. I took my patient down to the smithy and said, "Here
+is a young man whom I want to put to work. He will pay for the chance. I
+want you first to teach him to make hand-wrought nails." This was a
+good deal of a joke to the smith and to the patient, but they saw that I
+was in earnest and agreed to go ahead. We got together the proper tools
+and proceeded to make nails, a job which is really not very difficult.
+After an hour's work, I called off my patient, much to his disgust, for
+he was just beginning to be interested. But I knew that if he were to
+keep on until fatigue should come, the whole matter would end in
+trouble. So the next day, with some new overalls and a leather apron
+added to the equipment, we proceeded to another hour's work. We went on
+this way for three or four days, before the time was increased.
+
+The interest of the patient was always fresh, he was eager for more, and
+he did not taste the dregs of fatigue. Yet he did get the wholesome
+exercise, and he did get the strong turning of the mind from its worry
+and concern. Of course, the rest of the day was taken care of in one
+way or another, but the work was the central feature. In a week, we were
+at it two hours a day, in three weeks, four hours, and in a month, five
+hours. He had made a handsome display of hand-wrought nails, a superior
+line of pokers and shovels for fireplaces, together with a number of
+very respectable andirons. On each of these larger pieces of handiwork
+my patient had stamped his initials with a little steel die that was
+made for him. Each piece was his own, each piece was the product of his
+own versatility and his own strength. His pride and pleasure in this
+work were very great, and well they might be, for it is a fine thing to
+have learned to handle so intractable a material as iron. But in
+handling the iron patiently and consistently until he could do it
+without too much conscious thinking, and so without effort, he had also
+learned to handle himself naturally, more simply and easily.
+
+As a matter of fact, the illness which had brought this boy to me was
+pretty nearly cured by his blacksmithing, because it was an illness of
+the mind and of the nerves, and not of the body, although the body had
+suffered in its turn. That young man, instead of becoming a nervous
+invalid as he might have done, is now working steadily in partnership
+with his father, in business in the city. I had found him a very
+interesting patient, full of originality and not at all the tedious and
+boresome person he might have been had I listened day after day, week
+after week to the recital of his ills. I was willing to listen,--I did
+listen,--but I also gave him a new trend of life, which pretty soon made
+his complaints sound hollow and then disappear.
+
+Of course, the problem is not always so simple as this, and we must
+often deal with complexities of body and mind requiring prolonged
+investigation and treatment. I cite this case because it shows clearly
+that relief from some forms of nervous illness can come when we stop
+thinking, when we stop analyzing, and then back up our position with
+prescribed work.
+
+There may be some nervous invalids who read these lines who will say,
+"But I have tried so many times to work and have failed." Unfortunately,
+such failure must often occur unless we can proceed with care and with
+understanding. But the principle remains true, although it must be
+modified in an infinite variety to meet the changing conditions of
+individuals.
+
+I see a great many people who are conscientiously trying to get well
+from nervous exhaustion. They almost inevitably try too hard. They think
+and worry too much about it, and so exhaust themselves the more. This is
+the greater pity because it is the honest and the conscientious people
+who make the greatest effort. It is very hard for them to realize that
+they must stop thinking, stop trying, and if possible get to work
+before they can accomplish their end. We shall have to repeat to them
+over and over again that they must stop thinking the matter out, because
+the thing they are attempting to overcome is too subtle to be met in
+that way. So, if they are fortunate, they may rid themselves of the
+vagueness and uncertainty of life, until all the multitude of details
+which go to make up life lose their desultoriness and their lack of
+meaning, and they may find themselves no longer the subjects of physical
+or nervous exhaustion.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IDLENESS
+
+
+    O ye! who have your eyeballs vex'd and tir'd,
+      Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.
+                KEATS.
+
+    Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,
+    is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness
+    implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal
+    identity.
+                STEVENSON.
+
+It is an unfortunate fact that very few people are able to be idle
+successfully. I think it is not so much because we misuse idleness as
+because we misinterpret it that the long days become increasingly
+demoralizing. I would ask no one to accept a forced idleness without
+objection or regret. Such an acceptance would imply a lack of spirit, to
+say the least. But idleness and rest are not incompatible; neither are
+idleness and service, nor idleness and contentment. If we can look upon
+rest as a preparation for service, if we can make it serve us in the
+opportunity it gives for quiet growth and legitimate enjoyment, then it
+is fully justified and it may offer advantages and opportunity of the
+best.
+
+The chief trouble with idleness is that it so often means introspection,
+worry, and impatience, especially to those conscientious souls who would
+fain be about their business.
+
+I have for a long time been accustomed to combat the worry and fret of
+necessary idleness--not by forbidding it, not by advising struggle and
+fight against it, but by insisting that the best way to get rid of it is
+to leave it alone, to accept it. When we do this there may come a kind
+of fallow time in which the mind enriches and refreshes itself beyond
+our conception.
+
+I would rather my patient who must rest for a long time would give up
+all thought of method, would give up all idea of making his mind follow
+any particular line of thought or absence of thought. I know that the
+mind which has been under conscious control a good deal of the time is
+apt to rebel at this freedom and to indulge in all kinds of alarming
+extravagances. I am sure, however, that the best way to meet these
+demands for conscious control is to be careless of them, to be willing
+to experience these extravagances and inconsistencies without fear, in
+the belief that finally will come a quiet and peace which will be all
+that we can ask. The peace of mind that is unguided, in the conscious
+and literal sense, is a thing which too few of us know.
+
+Mr. Arnold Bennett, in his little book, "How to Live on Twenty-four
+Hours a Day," teaches that we should leave no time unused in our lives;
+that we should accomplish a great deal more and be infinitely more
+effective and progressive if we devoted our minds to the definite
+working-out of necessary problems whenever those times occur in which we
+are apt to be desultory. I wish here to make a plea for desultoriness
+and for an idleness which goes even beyond the idleness of the man who
+reads the newspaper and forgets what he has read. It seems to me better,
+whether we are sick or well, to allow long periods in our lives when we
+think only casually. To the good old adage, "Work while you work and
+play while you play," we might well add, "Rest while you rest," lest in
+the end you should be unable successfully either to work or play.
+
+A man is not necessarily condemned to tortures of mind because he must
+rest for a week or a month or a year. I know that there must be anxious
+times, especially when idleness means dependence, and when it brings
+hardship to those who need our help. But the invalid must not try
+constantly to puzzle the matter out. If we do not make ourselves sick
+with worry, we shall be able sometime to approach active life with
+sufficient frankness and force. It is the constant effort of the poor,
+tired mind to solve its problems that not only fails of its object, but
+plunges the invalid deeper into discouragement and misunderstanding. How
+cruel this is, and how unfortunate that it should come more commonly to
+those who try the hardest to overcome their handicaps, to throw off the
+yoke of idleness and to be well.
+
+When you have tried your best to get back to your work and have failed,
+when you have done this not once but many times, it is inevitable that
+misunderstanding should creep in, inevitable that you should question
+very deeply and doubt not infrequently. Yet the chances are that one of
+the reasons for your failure is that you have tried too hard, that you
+have not known how to rest. When you have learned how to rest, when you
+have learned to put off thinking and planning until the mind becomes
+fresh and clear, when you are in a fair way to know the joy of idleness
+and the peace of rest, you are a great deal more likely to get back to
+efficiency and to find your way along the great paths of activity into
+the world of life.
+
+It is not so much the idleness, then, as the attempt to overcome its
+irksomeness, that makes this condition painful. The invalid in bed is in
+a trap, to be tormented by his thoughts unless he knows the meaning of
+successful idleness. This knowledge may come to him by such strategy as
+I have suggested--by giving up the struggle against worry and fret; but
+peace will come surely, steadily, "with healing in its wings," when the
+mind is changed altogether, when life becomes free because of a growth
+and development that finds significance even in idleness, that sees the
+world with wise and patient eyes.
+
+In a way it does not matter, your physical condition or mine, if our
+"eyes have seen the glory" that deifies life and makes even its waste
+places beautiful. What is that view from your window as you lie in your
+bed? A bit of the sea, if you are fortunate, a corner of garden, surely,
+the top of an elm tree against the blue. What is it but the revelations
+of a God in the world? There is enough that is sad and unhappy, but over
+all are these simple, ineffable things. If the garden is an expression
+of God in the world, then the world and life are no longer meaningless.
+Even idleness becomes in some degree bearable because it is a part of a
+significant world.
+
+Unfortunately, the idleness of disability often means pain, the wear and
+tear of physical or nervous suffering. That is another matter. We cannot
+meet it fully with any philosophy. My patients very often beg to know
+the best way to bear pain, how they may overcome the attacks of "nerves"
+that are harder to bear than pain. To such a question I can only say
+that the time to bear pain is before and after. Live in such a way in
+the times of comparative comfort that the attacks are less likely to
+appear and easier to bear when they do come. After the pain or the
+"nervous" attack is over, that is the time to prevent the worst features
+of another. Forget the distress; live simply and happily in spite of the
+memory, and you will have done all that the patient himself can do to
+ward off or to make tolerable the next occasion of suffering. Pain
+itself--pure physical pain--is a matter for the physician's judgment. It
+is his business to seek out the causes and apply the remedy.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+RULES OF THE GAME
+
+
+    It is not growing like a tree
+    In bulk, doth make man better be.
+                BEN JONSON.
+
+    It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane
+    mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile
+    and decent qualities which we call character.
+                THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
+
+    The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to
+    yield to it.
+                PETRARCH.
+
+When I go about among my patients, most of them, as it happens,
+"nervously" sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I
+know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have
+no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness,
+some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the
+game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but
+it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress
+those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our
+transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or
+sinners. There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise
+and balance when these have been lost. These laws are less well observed
+and understood than those which determine our downfall.
+
+The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we
+need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable
+people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that
+nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical
+disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for
+us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens in the human
+economy when a "nervous breakdown" comes, nobody seems to know, but mind
+and body cooeperate to make the patient miserable and helpless. It may
+be nature's way of holding us up and preventing further injury. The
+hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.
+
+The rules we have wittingly or unwittingly broken are often unknown to
+us, but they exist in the All-Wise Providence, and we may guess by our
+own suffering how far we have overstepped them. If a man runs into a
+door in the dark, we know all about that,--the case is simple,--but if
+he runs overtime at his office and hastens to be rich with the result of
+a nervous dyspepsia--that is a mystery. Here is a girl who "came out"
+last year. She was apparently strong and her mother was ambitious for
+her social progress. That meant four nights a week for several months at
+dances and dinners, getting home at 3 A.M. or later. It was gay and
+delightful while it lasted, but it could not last, and the girl went to
+pieces suddenly; her back gave out because it was not strong enough to
+stand the dancing and the long-continued physical strain. The nerves
+gave out because she did not give her faculties time to rest, and
+perhaps because of a love affair that supervened. The result was a year
+of invalidism, and then, because the rules of recovery were not
+understood, several years more of convalescence. Such common rules
+should be well enough understood, but they are broken everywhere by the
+wisest people.
+
+The common case of the broken-down school teacher is more unfortunate.
+This tragedy and others like it are more often, I believe, due to unwise
+choice of profession in the first place. The women's colleges are
+turning out hundreds of young women every year who naturally consider
+teaching as the field most appropriate and available. Probably only a
+very small proportion of these girls are strong enough physically or
+nervously to meet the growing demands of the schools. They may do well
+for a time, some of them unusually well, for it is the sensitive,
+high-strung organism that is appreciative and effective. After a while
+the worry and fret of the requirements and the constant nag of the
+schoolroom have their effect upon those who are foredoomed to failure in
+that particular field. The plight of such young women is particularly
+hard, for they are usually dependent upon their work.
+
+It is, after all, not so much the things we do as the way we do them,
+and what we think about them, that accomplishes nervous harm. Strangely
+enough, the sense of effort and the feeling of our own inadequacy damage
+the nervous system quite as much as the actual physical effort. The
+attempt to catch up with life and with affairs that go on too fast for
+us is a frequent and harmful deflection from the rules of the game. Few
+of us avoid it. Life comes at us and goes by very fast. Tasks multiply
+and we are inadequate, responsibilities increase before we are ready.
+They bring fatigue and confusion. We cannot shirk and be true. Having
+done all you reasonably can, stop, whatever may be the consequences.
+That is a rule I would enforce if I could. To do more is to drag and
+fail, so defeating the end of your efforts. If it turns out that you are
+not fit for the job you have undertaken, give it up and find another, or
+modify that one until it comes within your capacity. It takes courage to
+do this--more courage sometimes than is needed to make us stick to the
+thing we are doing. Rarely, however, will it be necessary for us to give
+up if we will undertake and consider for the day only such part of our
+task as we are able to perform. The trouble is that we look at our work
+or our responsibility all in one piece, and it crushes us. If we cannot
+arrange our lives so that we may meet their obligations a little at a
+time, then we must admit failure and try again, on what may seem a
+lower plane. That is what I consider the brave thing to do. I would
+honor the factory superintendent, who, finding himself unequal to his
+position, should choose to work at the bench where he could succeed
+perfectly.
+
+The habit of uncertainty in thought and action, bred, as it sometimes
+is, from a lack of faith in man and in God, is, nevertheless, a thing to
+be dealt with sometimes by itself. Not infrequently it is a petty habit
+that can be corrected by the exercise of a little will power. I believe
+it is better to decide wrong a great many times--doing it quickly--than
+to come to a right decision after weakly vacillating. As a matter of
+fact, we may trust our decisions to be fair and true if our life's
+ideals are beautiful and true.
+
+We may improve our indecisions a great deal by mastering their unhappy
+details, but we shall not finally overcome them until life rings true
+and until all our acts and thoughts become the solid and inevitable
+expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to
+right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed
+every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential
+the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling
+of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous
+exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of
+cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously takes the snap and
+sparkle out of life and leaves us for the time being colorless and weak.
+
+Next to uncertainty, an uninspired certainty is wrecking to the best of
+human prospects. The man whose one idea is of making himself and his
+family materially comfortable, or even rich, may not be coming to
+nervous prostration, but he is courting a moral prostration that will
+deny him all the real riches of life and that will in the end reward
+him with a troubled mind, a great, unsatisfied longing, unless, to be
+sure, he is too smug and satisfied to long for anything.
+
+The larger life leads us inevitably away from ourselves, away from the
+super-requirements of our families. It demands of them and of ourselves
+an unselfishness that is born of a love that finds its expression in the
+service of God. And what is the service of God if it is not such an
+entering into the divine purposes and spirit that we become with God
+re-creators in the world--working factors in the higher evolution of
+humanity? While we live we shall get and save, we shall use and spend,
+we shall serve the needs of those dependent upon us, but we shall not
+line the family nest so softly that our children become powerless. We
+shall not confine our charities to the specified channels, where our
+names will be praised and our credit increased. We shall give and serve
+in secret places with our hearts in our deeds. Then we may possess the
+untroubled mind, a treasure too rich to be computed. We shall not have
+it for the seeking; it may exist in the midst of what men may call
+privations and sorrows; but it will exist in a very large sense and it
+will be ours. The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows
+himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and
+uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when
+he is ill. I cannot argue in favor of business laxity,--I know the
+imperative need of exactness and finality,--but I do believe that if we
+are to possess the untroubled mind we must make our lives larger than
+the field of dollars and cents. The charity that develops in us will
+make us truly generous and free from the reaction of hardness.
+
+It is a great temptation to go on multiplying the rules of the game.
+There are so many sensible and necessary pieces of advice which we all
+need to have emphasized. That is the course we must try to avoid. The
+child needs to be told, arbitrarily for a while, what is right, and what
+is wrong, that he must do this, and he must not do that. The time comes,
+however, when the growing instinct toward right living is the thing to
+foster--not the details of life which will inevitably take care of
+themselves if the underlying principle is made right. It must be the
+ideal of moral teaching to make clear and pure the source of action.
+Then the stream will be clear and pure. Such a stream will purify itself
+and neutralize the dangerous inflow along its banks. It is true that
+great harm may come from the polluted inflows, but they will be less and
+less harmful as the increasing current from the good source flows down.
+
+We shall have to look well to our habits lest serious ills befall, but
+that must never be the main concern or we shall find ourselves living
+very narrow and labored lives; we shall find that we are failing to
+observe one of the most important rules of the game.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE NERVOUS TEMPERAMENT
+
+
+    Beyond the ugly actual, lo, on every side,
+    Imagination's limitless domain.
+                BROWNING.
+
+    He that too much refines his delicacy will always endanger his
+    quiet.
+                SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+
+    The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered
+    them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life.
+                STEVENSON.
+
+It has been my fortune as a physician to deal much with the so-called
+nervous temperament. I have come both to fear and to love it. It is the
+essence of all that is bright, imaginative, and fine, but it is as
+unstable as water. Those who possess it must suffer--it is their lot to
+feel deeply, and very often to be misunderstood by their more practical
+friends. All their lives these people will shed tears of joy, and more
+tears of sorrow. I would like to write of their joy, of the perfect
+satisfaction, the true happiness that comes in creating new and
+beautiful things, of the deep pleasure they have in the appreciation of
+good work in others. But with the instinct of a dog trained for a
+certain kind of hunting I find myself turning to the misfortunes and the
+ills.
+
+The very keenness of perception makes painful anything short of
+perfection. What will such people do in our clanging streets? What of
+those fine ears tuned to the most exquisite appreciation of sweet sound?
+What of that refinement of hearing that detects the least departure from
+the rhythm and pitch in complex orchestral music? And must they bear the
+crash of steel on stone, the infernal clatter of traffic? Well, yes,--as
+a matter of fact--they must, at least for a good many years to come,
+until advancing civilization eliminates the city noise. But it is not
+always great noises that disturb and distract. There is a story told of
+a woman who became so sensitive to noise that she had her house made
+sound-proof: there were thick carpets and softly closing doors;
+everything was padded. The house was set back from a quiet street, but
+that street was strewn with tanbark to check the sound of carriages.
+Surely here was bliss for the sensitive soul. I need not tell the rest
+of the story, how absolutely necessary noises became intolerable, and
+the poor woman ended by keeping a man on the place to catch and silence
+the tree toads and crickets.
+
+There is nothing to excuse the careless and unnecessary noises of the
+world--we shall dispose of them finally as we are disposing of
+flamboyant signboards and typhoid flies. But meanwhile, and always, for
+that matter, the sensitive soul must learn to adjust itself to
+circumstances and conditions. This adjustment may in itself become a
+fine art. It is really the art by which the painter excludes the
+commonplace and irrelevant from his landscape. Sometimes we have to do
+this consciously; for the most part, it should be a natural, unconscious
+selection.
+
+I am sure it is unwise to attempt at any time the dulling of the
+appreciative sense for the sake of peace and comfort. Love and
+understanding of the beautiful and true is too rare and fine a thing to
+be lost or diminished under any circumstances. The cure, as I see it, is
+to be found in the cultivation of the faculty that finds some good in
+everything and everybody. This is the saving grace--it takes great bulks
+of the commonplace and distils from the mass a few drops of precious
+essence; it finds in the unscholarly and the imperfect, rare traces of
+good; it sees in man, any man, the image of God, to be justified and
+made evident only in the sublimity of death, perhaps, but usually to be
+developed in life.
+
+The nervous person is often morose and unsocial--perhaps because he is
+not understood, perhaps because he falls so short of his own ideals.
+Often he does not find kindred spirits anywhere. I do not think we
+should drive such a man into conditions that hurt, but I do believe that
+if he is truly artistic, and not a snob, he may lead himself into a
+larger social life without too much sacrifice.
+
+The sensitive, high-strung spirit that does not give of its own best
+qualities to the world of its acquaintance, that does not express itself
+in some concrete way, is always in danger of harm. Such a spirit turned
+in upon itself is a consuming fire. The spirit will burn a long time and
+suffer much if it does not use its heat to warm and comfort the world of
+need.
+
+Real illness makes the nervous temperament a much more formidable
+difficulty--all the sensitive faculties are more sensitive--irritability
+becomes an obsession and idleness a terror.
+
+The nervous temperament under irritation is very prone to become
+selfish--and very likely to hide behind this selfishness, calling it
+temperament. The man who flies into a passion when he is disturbed, or
+who spends his days in torment from the noises of the street; the woman
+of high attainment who has retired into herself, who is moody and
+unresponsive,--these unfortunates have virtually built a wall about
+their lives, a wall which shuts out the world of life and happiness.
+From the walls of this prison the sounds of discord and annoyance are
+thrown back upon the prisoner intensified and multiplied. The wall is
+real enough in its effect, but will cease to exist when the prisoner
+begins to go outside, when he begins to realize his selfishness and his
+mistake. Then the noises and the irritations will be lost in the wider
+world that is open to him. After all, it is only through unselfish
+service in the world of men that this broadening can come.
+
+There is no lack of opportunity for service. Perhaps the simplest and
+most available form of service is charity,--the big, professional kind,
+of course,--and beyond that the greater field of intimate and personal
+charity. I know a girl of talent and ability--herself a nervous
+invalid--sick and helpless for the lack of a little money which would
+give her a chance to get well. I do not mean money for luxuries, for
+foolish indulgences, but money to buy opportunity--money that would lift
+her out of the heavy morass of poverty and give her a chance. She falls
+outside the beaten path of charity. She is not reached by the usual
+philanthropies. I also know plenty of people who could help that girl
+without great sacrifice. They will not do it because they give money to
+the regular charities--they will not do it because sometimes generosity
+has been abused. So they miss the chance of broadening and developing
+their own lives.
+
+I know well enough that objective interest can rarely be forced--it
+must usually come the other way about--through the broadening of life
+which makes it inevitable. Sometimes I wish I could force that kind of
+development, that kind of charity. Sometimes I long to take the rich
+neurasthenic and make him help his brother, make him develop a new art
+that shall save people from sorrow and loss. We are all together in this
+world, and all kin; to recognize it and to serve the needs of the
+unfortunate as we would serve our own children is the remedy for many
+ills. It is the new art, the final and greatest of all artistic
+achievements; it warms our hearts and opens our lives to all that is
+wholesome and good. This is one of the crises in which my theory of
+"inspiration first" may fail. Here the charity may have to come first,
+may have to be insisted upon before there can be any inspiration or any
+further joy in life. It is not always charity in the usual sense that is
+required; sometimes the charity that gives something besides money is
+best. But charity in any good sense means self-forgetfulness, and that
+is a long way on the road to nervous health. Give of yourself, give of
+your substance, and you will cease to be troubled with the penalties of
+selfishness. Then take the next step--that gives not because life has
+come back, but because the world has become larger and warmer and
+happier. When the giver gives of his sympathy and of his means because
+he wants to,--not because he has to do so,--he will begin to know what I
+mean when I say it is better to have the inspiration first.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+SELF-CONTROL
+
+
+    He only earns his freedom and existence
+    Who daily conquers them anew.
+                GOETHE.
+
+A good many writers on self-control and kindred subjects insist that we
+shall conscientiously and consciously govern our mental lives. They say,
+"You must get up in the morning with determination to be cheerful." They
+insist that in spite of annoyance or trouble you shall keep a smiling
+face, and affirm to yourself over and over again the denial of
+annoyance.
+
+I do not like this kind of self-control. I wish I could admire it and
+approve it, but I find I cannot because it seems to me self-conscious
+and superficial. It is better than nothing and unquestionably adds
+greatly to the sum of human happiness. But I do not think we ought to be
+cheerful if we are consumed with trouble and sorrow. The fact is we
+ought not to be for long beyond a natural cheerfulness that comes from
+the deepest possible sources. While we are sad, let us be so, simply and
+naturally; but we must pray that the light may come to us in our sorrow,
+that we may be able soon and naturally to put aside the signs of
+mourning.
+
+The person who thinks little of his own attitude of mind is more likely
+to be well controlled and to radiate happiness than one who must
+continually prompt himself to worthy thoughts. The man whose heart is
+great with understanding of the sorrow and pathos of life is far more
+apt to be brave and fine in his own trouble than one who must look to a
+motto or a formula for consolation and advice. Deep in the lives of
+those who permanently triumph over sorrow there is an abiding peace and
+joy. Such peace cannot come even from ample experience in the material
+world. Despair comes from that experience sometimes, unless the heart
+is open to the vital spirit that lies beyond all material things, that
+creates and renews life and that makes it indescribably beautiful and
+significant. Experience of material things is only the beginning. In it
+and through it we may have experience of the wider life that surrounds
+the material.
+
+Our hearts must be opened to the courage that comes unbidden when we
+feel ourselves to be working, growing parts of the universe of God. Then
+we shall have no more sorrow and no more joy in the pitiful sense of the
+earth, but rather an exaltation which shall make us masters of these and
+of ourselves. We shall have a sympathy and charity that shall need no
+promptings, but that flow from us spontaneously into the world of
+suffering and need.
+
+Beethoven was of a sour temper, according to all accounts, but he wrote
+his symphonies in the midst of tribulations under which few men would
+have worked at all. When we have felt something of the spirit that makes
+work inevitable, it will be as though we had heard the eternal harmonies.
+We shall write our symphonies, build our bridges, or do our lesser tasks
+with dauntless purpose, even though the possessions that men count dear
+are taken from us. Suppose we can do very little because of some
+infirmity: if that little has in it the larger inspiration, it will be
+enough to make life full and fine. The joy of a wider life is not
+obtainable in its completeness; it is only through a lifetime of service
+and experience that we can approach it. That is the proof of its divine
+origin--its unattainableness. "God keep you from the she wolf and from
+your heart's deepest desire," is an old saying of the Rumanians. If we
+fully obtain our desires, we prove their unworthiness. Does any one
+suppose that Beethoven attained his whole heart's desire in his music?
+He might have done so had he been a lesser man. He was not a cheerful
+companion. That is unfortunate, and shows that he failed in complete
+inspiration and in the ordinary kind of self-control. He was at least
+sincere, and that helped not a little to make him what he was. I would
+almost rather a man would be morose and sincere than cheerful from a
+sense of duty.
+
+Our knowledge of the greater things of life must always be substantiated
+and worked out into realities of service, or else we shall be weak and
+ineffective. The charity that balks at giving, reacts upon a man and
+deadens him. I am always insisting that we must not live and serve
+through a sense of duty, but that we must find the inspiration first. It
+is better to give ourselves to service not for the sake of finding God,
+but because we have found Him and because our souls have grown in the
+finding until we cannot help giving. If we have grown to such a stature
+we shall be able to meet sorrow and loss bravely and simply. We shall
+feel for ourselves and for others in their troubles as Forbes Robertson
+did when he wrote to his friend who had met with a great loss: "I pray
+that you may never, never, never get over this sorrow, but through it,
+into it, into the very heart of God." All this is very unworldly, no
+doubt, and yet I will venture the assertion that such a standard and
+such a method will come nearer to the mark of successful and
+well-controlled living than the most carefully planned campaign of duty.
+If we plan to make life fine, if we say, in effect, "I will be good and
+cheerful, no matter what happens," we are beginning at the wrong end. We
+may be able to work back from our mottoes to real living, but the
+chances are we shall stop somewhere by the way, too confused and
+uncertain to go on. Self-control, at its best, is not a conscious thing.
+It is not well that we should try to be good, but that we should so
+dignify our lives with the spirit of good that evil becomes well-nigh
+impossible to us.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE LIGHTER TOUCH
+
+
+    Heart not so heavy as mine,
+    Wending late home,
+    As it passed my window
+    Whistled itself a tune.
+                EMILY DICKINSON.
+
+I have never seen good come from frightening worriers. It is no doubt
+wise to speak the truth, but it seems to me a mistake to say in public
+print or in private advice that worry leads to tragedies of the worst
+sort. No matter how hopeful we may be in our later teaching about the
+possibilities of overcoming worry, the really serious worrier will
+pounce upon the original tragic statement and apply it with terrible
+insistence to his own case.
+
+I would not minimize the seriousness of worry, but I am convinced that
+we can rarely overcome it by direct voluntary effort. It does not go
+until we forget it, and we do not forget it if we are always trying
+consciously to overcome it. We worriers must go about our
+business--other business than that of worry.
+
+Life is serious--alas, too serious--and full enough of pathos. We cannot
+joke about its troubles; they are real. But, at least, we need not
+magnify them. Why should we act as though everything depended upon our
+efforts, even the changing seasons and the blowing winds? No doubt we
+are responsible for our own acts and thoughts and for the welfare of
+those who depend upon us. The trouble is we take unnecessary
+responsibilities so seriously that we overreach ourselves and defeat our
+own good ends.
+
+I would make my little world more blessedly careless--with an _abandon_
+that loves life too much to spoil it with worry. I would cherish so
+great a desire for my child's good that I could not scold and bear down
+upon him for every little fault, making him a worrier too, but,
+instead, I would guide him along the right path with pleasant words and
+brave encouragement. The condemnation of faults is rarely constructive.
+
+We had better say to the worriers, "Here is life; no matter what
+unfortunate things you may have said or done, you must put all evil
+behind you and live--simply, bravely, well." The greater the evil,
+the greater the need of forgetting. Not flippantly, but reverently,
+leave your misdeeds in a limbo where they may not rise to haunt you.
+This great thing you may do, not with the idea of evading or escaping
+consequences, but so that past evil may be turned into present and
+future good. The criminal himself is coming to be treated this way. He
+is no longer eternally reminded of his crime. He is taken out into the
+sunshine and air and is given a shovel to dig with. A wonderful thing is
+that shovel. With it he may bury the past and raise up a happier,
+better future. We must care so much to expiate our sins that we are
+willing to neglect them and live righteously. That is true repentance,
+constructive repentance.
+
+We cannot suddenly change our mental outlook and become happy when grief
+has borne us down. "For the broken heart silence and shade,"--that is
+fair and right. I would say to those who are unhappy, "Do not try to be
+happy, you cannot force it; but let peace come to you out of the great
+world of beauty that calmly surrounds our human suffering, and that
+speaks to us quietly of God." Genuine laughter is not forced, but we may
+let it come back into our lives if we know that it is right for it to
+come.
+
+We have all about us instances of the effectiveness of the lighter touch
+as applied to serious matters. The life of the busy surgeon is a good
+example. He may be, and usually is, brimming with sympathy, but if he
+were to feel too deeply for all his patients, he would soon fail and
+die. He goes about his work. He puts through a half-dozen operations in
+a way that would send cold shivers down the back of the uninitiated. And
+yet he is accurate and sure as a machine. If he were to take each case
+upon his mind in a heavy, consequential way, if he were to give deep
+concern to each ligature he ties, and if he were to be constantly afraid
+of causing pain, he would be a poor surgeon. His work, instead of being
+clean and sharp, would suffer from over-conscientiousness. He might
+never finish an operation for fear his patient would bleed to death.
+Such a man may be the reverse of flippant, and yet he may actually enjoy
+his somber work. Cruel, bloodthirsty? Not at all. These men--the great
+surgeons--are as tender as children. But they love their work, they
+really care very deeply for their patients. The successful ones have the
+lighter touch and they have no time for worry.
+
+Sometimes we wish to arouse the public conscience. Do the long columns
+of figures, the impressive statistics, wake men to activity? It is
+rather the keen, bright thrust of the satirist that saves the day. Once
+in a New England town meeting there was a movement for a much-needed new
+schoolhouse. By the installation of skylights in the attic the old
+building had been made to accommodate the overflow of pupils. The
+serious speakers in favor of the new building had left the audience
+cold, when a young man arose and said he had been up into the attic and
+had seen the wonderful skylights that were supposed to meet the needs of
+the children. "I have seen them," he said; "we used to call them
+scuttles when I was a boy." A hundred thousand dollars was voted for the
+new schoolhouse.
+
+There is a natural gayety in most of us which helps more than we realize
+to keep us sound. The pity is that when responsibilities come and
+hardships come, we repress our lighter selves sternly, as though such
+repression were a duty. Better let us guard the springs of happiness
+very, very jealously. The whistling boy in the dark street does more
+than cheer himself on the way. He actually protects himself from evil,
+and brings courage not only to himself, but to those who hear him. I do
+not hold for false cheerfulness that is sometimes affected, but a brave
+show of courage in a forlorn hope will sometimes win the day. It is
+infinitely more likely to win than a too serious realization of the
+danger of defeat. The show of courage is often not a pretense at all,
+but victory itself.
+
+The need of the world is very great and its human destiny is in our
+hands. Half of those who could help to right the wrongs are asleep or
+too selfishly immersed in their own affairs. We need more helpers like
+my friend of the skylights. Most of us are far too serious. The
+slumberers will slumber on, and the worriers will worry, the serious
+people will go ponderously about until some one shows them how
+ridiculous they are and how pitiful.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+REGRETS AND FOREBODINGS
+
+
+    Regret avails little--still less remorse--the one keeps alive
+    the old offense, the other creates new offenses.
+                GOETHE.
+
+The unrepentant sinner walks abroad. Unfortunately for us moralists he
+seems to be having a very good time. We must not condone him, though he
+may be a very lovable person; neither must we altogether condemn him,
+for he may be repentant in the very best way of all ways, the way that
+forgets much and leaves behind more, because life is so fine that it
+must not be spoiled, and because progress is in every way better than
+retrospection. The fact is, that repentance is too often the fear of
+punishment, and such fear is, to say the least, unmanly. I would rather
+be a lovable sinner than one of the people who repent because they
+cannot bear to think of the consequences. Knowledge and fear of
+consequences undoubtedly keep a great many young people from the
+so-called sins of ignorance. But there must be something behind
+knowledge and fear of consequences to stop the youth of spirit from
+doing what he is inclined to do. Over and over again we must go back to
+the appreciation of life's dignity and beauty--to the consciousness of
+the spirit of God behind and in the world if we are to find a balance
+and a character that will "deliver us from evil."
+
+When we have found this consciousness--when we live it and breathe it,
+we shall be far less apt to sin, and when we have sinned, as we all must
+in the course of our blundering lives, we shall not waste our time in
+regret or in the fear of consequences. If the God we dream of is as
+great as the sea, or as beautiful as a tree, we need not fear Him. He
+will be tender, and just at the same time. He will be as forgiving as
+He is strong. The best we can do, then, is to leave our sins in the hand
+of God and go our way, sadder and wiser, maybe, but not regretting too
+much, not fearing any more.
+
+There is a new idea in medicine--the development of which has been one
+of the most striking achievements of modern times--the idea of
+psychanalysis as taught and advocated by Freud in Germany. The plan
+is to study the subconscious mind of the nervous patient by means of
+hypnotism, to assist the patient to recall all the mental experiences of
+his past,--even his very early childhood,--and in this way to make clear
+the origin of the misconceptions and the unfortunate impressions which
+have presumably exerted their influence through the years. The new
+system includes, also, the interpretation of dreams, their effect upon
+the conscious life and their influence upon the mentality. Very
+wonderful results are reported from the pursuit of this method. Many a
+badly warped and twisted life has been straightened out and renewed when
+the searchlight has revealed the hidden influences that have been at
+work and which have made trouble. The repression of conscious or
+unconscious feelings can no doubt change the whole mental life. We
+should have the greatest respect for the men who are doing this work. It
+requires, I am told, an almost unbelievable amount of patience and time
+to accomplish the analysis. No doubt the adult judgment of childish
+follies is a direct means of disposing of their harmful influence in
+life, the surest way of losing the conscious or unconscious regrets that
+sadden many lives. There are probably many cases of disturbed and
+troubled mind that can be cured in this way only. The method does not
+appeal to me because I am so strongly inclined to take people as they
+are, to urge a forgetfulness that does not really forget, but which goes
+on bravely to the development of life. This development cannot proceed
+without the understanding that life may be made so beautiful that sins
+and failures are lost in progress. Some of us may need the subtle
+analysis of our lives to make clear the points where we went astray in
+our thoughts and ideas, but many of us, fortunately, are able to take
+ourselves for better or for worse, sins and all. Most of us ought to do
+that, for the most part, if we are to progress and live. Sometimes the
+revelations of evils we know not of result in complications rather than
+simplification, as in the case of a boy who wrote to me and said that
+since he had learned of his early sins he had made sure that he could
+never be well. Instead of going into further analysis with him, I
+assured him that, while it was undoubtedly his duty to regret all the
+evil of his life, it was a still greater duty to go on and live the rest
+of it well, and that he could do so if he would open his eyes to the
+possibilities of unselfish service.
+
+I am very much inclined to preach against self-analysis and the almost
+inevitable regret and despair that accompany it.
+
+One of my patients decided some time ago that her life was wasted, that
+she had accomplished nothing. It was true that she had not the endurance
+to meet the usual demands of social or even family life, and that for
+long periods she had to give up altogether. But it happened that she had
+the gift of musical understanding, that she had studied hard in younger
+days. With a little urging the gift was made to grow again and to serve
+not only the patient's own needs, but to bring very great pleasure to
+every one who listened to her playing. That rare, true ability was worth
+everything, and she came to realize it in time. The gift of musical
+expression is a very great thing, and I succeeded in making this woman
+understand that she should be happy in that ability even if nothing
+else should be possible.
+
+Often enough nothing that can compare with music exists, and life seems
+wholly barren. Rather cold comfort it seems at first to assure a person
+who is helpless that character is the greatest thing in the world, but
+that is the final truth. The most limited and helpless life may glow
+with it and be richer than imagination can believe. It is never time to
+regret--and never time to despair. The less analysis the better. When it
+comes to character, live, grow, and get a deeper and deeper
+understanding of life--of life that is near to God and so capable of
+wrong only as we turn away from Him. "Do not say things; what you are
+stands over you and thunders so, I cannot hear what you say to the
+contrary." We shall do well not to forget that, whatever failures or
+mistakes we have made, there is infinite possibility ahead of us, that
+character is the greatest thing in the world, and that most good
+character has been built upon mistakes and failures. I believe there is
+no sin which may not make up the fabric of its own forgiveness in the
+living of a free, self-sacrificing life. I know of no bodily ill nor
+handicap which we may not eventually rise above and beyond by means of
+brave spiritual progress. The body may fail us, but the spirit reaches
+on and into the great world of God.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE VIRTUES
+
+
+    The virtues hide their vanquished fires
+    Within that whiter flame--
+    Till conscience grows irrelevant
+    And duty but a name.
+                FREDERICK LAWRENCE KNOWLES.
+
+In most books I have read on "nerves" and similar subjects, advice is
+given, encouragement is given, but the necessity for patience is not
+made clear. Patience is typical of all the other virtues. Many a man has
+followed the best of advice for a time, and has become discouraged
+because the promised results did not materialize. It is disappointing,
+surely, to have lived upon a diet for months only to find that you still
+have dyspepsia, or to have followed certain rules of morality with great
+precision and enthusiasm without obtaining the untroubled mind. We are
+accustomed to see results in the material world and naturally expect
+them everywhere. The trouble is we do not always recognize improvements
+when we see them, and we insist upon certain preconceived changes as a
+result of our endeavors. The physician is apt rashly to promise definite
+physical accomplishments in a given time. He is courting disappointment
+and distrust when he does so. We all want to get relief from our
+symptoms, and we are inclined to insist upon a particular kind of relief
+so strongly that we fail to appreciate the possibilities of another and
+a better relief which may be at hand. The going astray in this
+particular is sometimes very unfortunate. I have known a man to rush
+frantically from one doctor to another, trying to obtain relief for a
+particular pain or discomfort, unwilling to rest long enough to find out
+that the trouble would have disappeared naturally if he had taken the
+advice of the first physician, to live without impatience and within his
+limitations.
+
+The human body is a very complex organism, and sometimes pain and
+distress are better not relieved, since they may be the expression of
+some deeper maladjustment which must first be straightened out. This is
+also true of the mind--in which the unhappy proddings of conscience had
+better not be cured by anodynes or by evasion unless we are prepared to
+go deeply enough to make them disappear spontaneously. We must sometimes
+insist upon patience, though it should exist as a matter of
+course--patience with ourselves and with others. The physician who
+demands and secures the greatest degree of patience from his clients is
+the most successful practitioner, for no life can go on successfully
+without patience. If patience can be spontaneous,--the natural result of
+a broadening outlook,--then it will be permanent and serviceable; the
+other kind, that exists by extreme effort, may do for a while, but it is
+a poor makeshift.
+
+I always feel like apologizing when I ask a man or a woman to be
+tolerant or charitable or generous or, for that matter, to practice any
+of the ordinary virtues. Sound living should spring unbidden from the
+very joy of life; it should need no justification and certainly no
+urging. But unfortunately, as the world now stands, there are men and
+groups of men who do not see the light. There is a wide contagion of
+selfishness and short-sightedness among the well-to-do, and a necessary
+federation of protection and selfishness among the poor. The practical
+needs of life, artificial as they are among the rich, and terribly
+insistent as they are among the poor, blind us to larger considerations.
+
+If all matters of welfare, public or private, could be treated
+unselfishly, how quickly we should be rid of some of the great evils
+that afflict the race. I am inclined to think that much of the goodness
+of people does come in that way, unconsciously, naturally, as the light
+flows from the sun. Yet I suppose that in our present order, and until,
+through the years, the better time arrives, we must very often ask
+ourselves and others to be good and to be charitable, just because it is
+right, or worse still because it is good policy.
+
+A man grows better, more human, more intelligent, as he practices the
+virtues. He is safer, no doubt, and the world is better. It is even true
+that, by the constant practice of virtues, he may come finally to
+espouse goodness and become thoroughly good. That is the hopeful thing
+about it and the reason why we may consistently ask or demand the
+routine practice of the virtues. But let us hold up all the time in our
+teaching and in our lives the other course, the development of the
+inspiration that includes all virtues and that makes all our way easy
+and plain in a world where confusion reigns, because men are going at
+the problem of right living the wrong way around.
+
+The practice of good living will never be easy in its details, but if it
+is sure in its inspiration there will be no question of the final
+triumph. We shall have to fight blindly sometimes and with all the
+strength and persistence of animals at bay. We shall fail sometimes,
+too, and that is not always the worst thing that can happen. It is the
+glory of life that we shall slowly triumph over ourselves and the world.
+It is the glory of life that out of sore trouble, in the midst of
+poverty and human injustice, may rise, spontaneous and serene, the
+spirit of self-sacrifice, the unconquerable spirit of service that does
+not question, that expresses the divine tenderness in terms of human
+love. Through the times of darkness and doubt which must inevitably
+come, there will be for those who cherish such a vision, and who come
+back to it again and again, no utter darkness, no trouble that wholly
+crushes, no loss that wholly destroys.
+
+If we could not understand it before, it will slowly dawn upon us that
+the life of Christ exemplified all these things. Charity, kindliness,
+service, patience,--all these things which have seemed so hard will
+become in our lives, as in his, the substance and expression of our
+faith. The great human virtues will become easy and natural, the
+untroubled mind, or as much of it as is good to possess, will be ours,
+not because we have escaped trouble, but because we have disarmed it,
+have welcomed it even, so long as it has served to strengthen and
+ennoble our lives.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE CURE BY FAITH
+
+
+    The healing of his seamless dress
+    Is by our beds of pain--
+    We touch Him in life's throng and press,
+    And we are whole again.
+                WHITTIER.
+
+I cannot finish my little book of ideals without writing some things
+that are in my mind about cure by faith or by prayer. It is a subject
+that I approach with hesitation because of the danger of
+misunderstanding. No subject is more difficult and none is more
+important for the invalid to understand. We hear a great deal about the
+wonderful cures of Christian Science or of similar agencies, and we all
+know of people who have been restored to usefulness by such means. Has
+the healing of Christ again become possible on earth? No one would be
+more eager to accept it and acknowledge it than the physician if it
+were really so. But careful investigation always reveals the fact that
+the wonderful cures are not of the body but of the mind. It is easy
+enough to say that a cancer or tuberculosis has been cured by faith, and
+apparently easy for many people to believe it, but alas, the proof is
+wanting. The Christian Scientist, honest and sincere as he may be, is
+not qualified to say what is true disease and what is not. What looks
+like diseased tissue recovers, but medical men know that it could not
+have been diseased in the most serious sense, and that the prayer for
+recovery could have had nothing to do with the cure, save in a very
+indirect way.
+
+The man who discards medicine for philosophy or religion is courting
+unnecessary suffering and even death. The worst part of it is that he
+may induce some one else to make the same mistake with similar results.
+In writing this opinion I am in no way denying the great significance
+and value of faith nor of the prayerful and trustful mind. If it cannot
+cure actual physical disease, faith can accomplish veritable miracles of
+healing in the mind of the patient. No thoughtful or honest medical man
+will deny it. Nor will most medical men deny that the course of almost
+any physical illness may be modified by faith and prayer. I am almost
+saying that there is no known medicine of such potency. Every bodily
+function is the better for the conquering spirit that transcends the
+earth and finds its necessary expression in prayer.
+
+There really need be no issue or disagreement between medicine and faith
+cure. At its best, one is not more wonderful than the other, and both
+aim to accomplish the same end--the relief of human suffering. When the
+two are merged, as some day they will be, we shall be surprised to
+discover how alike they are. Christian Science is rightly scorned by
+medical men because it is unscientific, because it makes absurd and
+untenable claims outside its own field, and because it has not as yet
+investigated that field in the scientific spirit. When proper study and
+investigation have been made it will be found that faith cure, not in
+its present state, but in some future development, will have an immense
+field of usefulness. It will be worthy of as much respect in that field
+as medicine proper in its own sphere. As a matter of fact both medicine
+and faith cure are miraculous in a very real sense, as both depend for
+efficiency now and always upon the same great laws which may be fairly
+called divine. What is the discovery that the serum of a horse will
+under certain circumstances cure diphtheria? Does it not mean that man
+is tapping sources of power far beyond his understanding? Is man
+responsible save as the agent? Did he produce the complex animal
+chemistry that makes this cure possible? Did man make the horse, or the
+laws that control the physiology and pathology of that animal? Here,
+then, is faith cure in its largest and best sense. The biologist may not
+be willing to admit it, but his faith in these great laws of God have
+made possible the cure of a dread disease. Here, as in all matters of
+pure religion, it is what men say and write, not the fact itself, that
+makes all the misunderstanding; we make our judgments and conceive our
+prejudices from mere surface considerations. Call life what you
+will,--leave out the symbolic word "God" altogether,--the facts remain.
+The true scientific spirit must reverence and adore the power that lies
+behind creation. It is as inconsistent for the bacteriologist to be an
+unbeliever as it is for the Christian Scientist to deny the value of
+bacteriology. Medicine is infinitely farther advanced than Christian
+Science, and yet Christian Science has grasped some truth that the
+natural scientist has stupidly missed. When an obsession is thrown off
+and courage substituted for fear, we witness as important a "cure" as
+can be shown to the credit of surgery. If the Christian Scientists and
+the other faith-curers were only less superficial and less narrow in
+their explanation of the facts, if they would condescend to study the
+diseases they treat, they would be entitled to, and would receive, more
+respect and consideration.
+
+The cure and prevention of disease through the agency of man are
+evidently part of the divine plan. Our eagerness to advance along the
+lines of investigation and practice is but that divine plan in action.
+The truly scientific spirit will neglect no possible curative agent.
+When scientific men ridicule prayer, they are thinking not of the real
+thing which is above all possible criticism, but of the feeble and often
+pathetic groping for the real thing. We ask in our prayers for
+impossible blessings that would invert the laws of God and change the
+face of nature--very well, we must be prepared for disappointment. The
+attitude of prayer may, indeed, transform our own lives and make
+possible for us experiences that would otherwise have been impossible.
+But our pathetic demands--we shall never know how forlorn and weak they
+are. Prayer is the opening of the heart to the being we call God--it is
+most natural and reasonable. If we pray in our weakness and blindness
+for what we may not have, there is, nevertheless, a wonderful
+re-creative effect within us. The comfort and peace of such communion is
+beyond all else healing and restoring in its influence upon the troubled
+and anxious mind of man. The poet or the scientist who bows in adoration
+before the glory of God revealed in nature, prays in effect to that God
+and his soul is refreshed and renewed. The poor wretch who stands
+blindfolded before the firing squad, waiting the word that ends the life
+of a military spy, is near enough to God--and the whispered prayer upon
+his lips is cure for the wounds that take his life.
+
+The best kind of prayer seeks not and asks not for physical relief or
+benefit, but opens the heart to its maker, and so receives the cure of
+peace that is a greater miracle than any yet wrought by man. Under the
+influence of that cure the sick are well and the dead are alive again.
+With the courage and spirit of such a cure in our lives, we shall
+inevitably do our utmost to relieve, by any good means, the physical
+suffering of the world. We shall follow the laws of nature. We shall
+study them with the utmost care. We shall take nothing for granted,
+since by less careful steps we shall miss the divine law and so go
+astray. The science of healing will become no chance and irrational
+thing. We shall use all the natural means to relieve and prevent
+suffering--there will be no scoring of one set of doctors by another
+because all will have one purpose. But more to the point than that, men
+will discover that health in its largest sense consists in living devout
+and prayerful lives whereunto shall be revealed in good time all that
+our finite minds can know and use. There will be no suffering of the
+body in the old and pitiful sense, for we shall be so much alive that
+disease and death can no longer claim us.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Untroubled Mind, by Herbert J. Hall
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