THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lnx TORONTO f The Mastery of Nervousness Based Upon Self Reeducation BY ROBERT S. CARROLL, M.D. MEDICAL DIRECTOR HIGHLAND HOSPITAL ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA THIRD REVISED EDITION iQeto garb THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 A.U rights reserved 3 BIOLOGY LIBRARY COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Published, June, 1917 Second Edition, Revised, November, 1917 Third Edition, Revised, November, 1918 TO FATHER, WHO DREAMED; TO MOTHER, WHO WROUGHT 387671 THE PROBLEM THE modern man is to-day facing for himself or his children the problem of nervous adjustment that problem which is becoming more complicated each decade. In the com- plexity and intensity of modern life, this question is more and more fre- quently presented to the individual: 66 Shall I lower my standards, shall I surrender in whole or in part; or shall I select wisely and train for mastery 1" That the latter decision is possible for the majority of serious- minded men and women is the sole reason for the following pages. TABLE OP CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAfl , THE AGE OF NERVOUSNESS . 1 Prevalence of nervousness Man a splendid creation Man's capacity for complex adjustments Man essen- tially a nervous being The age of flux The effeminat- ing influences of civilisation Rapid modern advance of civilisation Nervousness now affecting all classes Modern restlessness Much attention given functional disorders Multiplication of cults and isms Conscious and unconscious suggestion in modern therapeutics Modern high tension life Modern intensity Modern stimulation multiplying faster than nervous adaptability Loss of habit of deliberation An age of specialism Complexity of choice offered man The intense competi- tion of modern life Complexity of modern existence Comforts becoming necessities Loss of the play life. CHAPTER II WHAT Is NERVOUSNESS? 9 The valuable nervous temperament Man's capacity for adjustment his greatest asset Physical adjustments Mental adjustments Moral adjustments Adjustments accomplished through the reaction capacity of the nerv- ous system Varying levels of reaction capacity Nerv- ous action the highest expression of vital force Nature of nervousness Nervous activity becoming nervousness when misdirected or overactive Reason given to direct choice Frequency of misdirected nervous activity Nervous overactivity common Will given to limit the expenditure of nervous activity Self, not nerves, at fault Nervous health a mental state Influence of mind on the body through the sympathetic nervous system Definition of nervousness. CHAPTER III TYPES OF NERVOUSNESS .. ...... . 17 The motor type Waste of energy The hypersensitive type Slaves to sensation The suggestible type Sug- CONTENTS PAOX gestion from without Autosuggestion Fatigue The fatigable type Emotional waste Neurasthenia popular The hypochondriacal type The self-centred type Conceited neurotics The repressed type Chronic energy leakage. CHAPTER IV GETTING BEADY TO BE NERVOUS 27 Heredity The enemy at the gate The neuropathic constitution transmitted through heredity Damaging influence of food intemperance on heredity Damage on posterity of alcohol indulgence The influence of heredity on the individual Abuse of tobacco Home training The relation of environment to nervousness Start- ing the child wrong The child tyrant The value of regularity in infant feeding Errors in early feeding Food antipathies Damage of neglected likes and dislikes The idly-bred child Teaching exaggerated self-love Treatment of big and little pains Dodging difficulties Nervousness and unconscious imitation Psychic in- fection Teaching damaging fear The moral element in home training- Education The personal influence of teachers Common ignorance of educators of applied psy- chology Forced learning Defective foundations Early mental exhaustion Teaching facts, not princi- ples Inculcating knowledge, not truth Education and excess of individualism. CHAPTER V EATING EERORS . , . . 41 Relation of food to body Man mastering heredity The human body an engine Food and air changed into heat and energy Increased food plenty and high living Classes of foods Food damage Instinct versus rea- son in eating Food fads The relation of food to work The food for physical work The food for nervous work Food excess common Digestive force wasted Autointoxication from food Damaging results of food abuse The irritants of indigestion Serious diseases from autointoxication Normal alkalin- ity of the tissues Alkaline- and acid-forming foods Damage from excess of sweets Frequency of subacidosis Breaking the chemical balance of nutrition Damage from salt excess Damage from water restriction Damage from drug foods Food and morals Mental and moral inferiority due to errors in diet Abomina- tions of cookery Unconscious criminality of the kitchen. CONTENTS CHAPTER VI PAOB THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 59 Man created for activity Primitive exercise The body made for work Muscle making man Conscious and unconscious muscles Storehouses of vitality Will and muscle Wit versus muscle Fatigue versus exhaus- tion Harmlessness of fatigue Fatigue the normal basis for appetite, sleep and strength Developing energy surplus Fatigue no excuse for inactivity False fatigue Muscular exhaustion seldom serious Nervous exhaustion from wrong methods of work Nervous exhaustion from autointoxication The penalty of in- activity Idleness the poison-breeder The toxins of in- activity Under-used bodies and overused brains De- fective muscular development The pampered body Girls and Mrs. Grundy Neglect of developed muscles Stopping play in youth Stopping physical work with maturity The "tabby-cat life" Exercising with teeth and tongue Fat, flabby and forty Real breathing and the muscles Pride in Inactivity Inactivity and flabby wills Idly busy Laziness destroying the sense of real- ity Man created for productive activity. CHAPTER VII EATING FOR EFFICIENCY .72 What to eat Efficiency dependent upon the nervous system The relation of food to work The profound in- fluence of food The value and danger of appetite Dietary perversions Nervous indigestion Air-swallow- ers Protein poisoning Acids from sweets. CHAPTER VIII EATING FOB EFFICIENCY CONTINUED .... 82 Right use of sweets Excess of sweets Acids versus sweets Moderation in sweets Right use of proteids Shall we eat meat? Simple versus elaborate foods Use and abuse of fats The uncontrolled palate The un- educated palate Oversoluble foods Bran preventing overabsorption Drugs as foods The influence of season- ing Efficient eating The benefit of water in diet Society's demands on the digestion Mastering the palate Food sprees Eating for muscular work Eat- ing for nervous work Overeating and under-thinking Forced feeding Fasting Cultivating an appetite The value of mastication Deliberate eating preventing excesses Dangers in rapid eating Fermentation or put- refaction Diet for the toxic Diet for the thin Diet for the fleshy Ease of influencing health through diet. CONTENTS CHAPTER IX WORK 99 Wits and brawn Advantages of wits Snobbery of idle- ness Hothouse women Penalty of idleness Relaxed muscles and relaxed characters Sham work Idleness and fatigue Nature of most overwork Worry and fatigue Relation of emotion to work Square pegs in round holes Discomfort or pleasure in action Rising above incidents Work's contribution to mastery At- tempting to outgeneral Nature The therapy of work Health through exercise Educating the involuntary muscles The buoyancy of health The price of unusual health The weariness of under-development Action the witness of the will Raising the fatigue limit The responsive voluntary muscular system Introspec- tion versus work Mastery through work The bless- ings of drudgery Pride in work. CHAPTER X PLAY 113 The fine art of play Society at play Play and the weather Out-of-door play Learning to play Whole- some forms of play Indoor play Getting into condi- tion Keeping in shape Attitude deciding between work and play Idealism of work Making play of work The master-man a true sportsman The moral element in play. CHAPTER XI TANGLED THOUGHTS 123 The mind's omnipotence The mind a superb instru- ment Sensation Perception Apperception Memory Ideation Judgment Reason Selection the mind's omnipotence Attention Inattention The thousand 4 different I's Selecting one's own world The critical faculty Tangled thoughts Limited interests Errors of interpretation False judgment Confusing feeling and reason Reviewing harmful memories Superficial knowledge Suggestibility Damage of self-attention Error and illness Damaging suggestions from profes- sional sources Nervousness as a defect of mental de- velopment Fixed ideas Fantasy confused with reality Morbid imaginings The power of the wish Hazy mental living Habits reducing life's effort Introspec- tion "Attention-pains" Damage of bad mental habits Health fundamentally a mental state. CONTENTS CHAPTER XII PAOE EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 142 Nature of the emotions Adjustments influenced by in- telligence, imitation and the pleasure-pain sense Emo- tions primitive and fundamental Emotional intensity of the nervous Emotions the source of all pleasure and un- pleasantness Mind and body linked by the emotions Intimate relation of emotions to the involuntary muscles Relation of emotions to voluntary muscles Subconscious emotional unrest Emotions influenced by toxic conditions Emotions of anticipation Emotions of participation Emotions of realisation Power of the emotions Emotions that invigorate Emotions that damage Emotions producing nervous disorders Moods the offspring of emotions Inaccurate emotional esti- mates Emotions impairing logic Emotional poise Emotional tyranny Destructive emotions Tremen- dous rOle played by fear Phobias, the disease of fear Worthy and unworthy invalidism Invalid ugliness Emotional slavery. CHAPTER XIII ILLS AND OUR WILLS 159 Nature of the will Man's will his battlefield Selection the power of the intellect Attention the power of the will The will's freedom of choice The effort of atten- tion The ability of attention the heart of character strength The feeling of effort and will Power of will- formed habits to simplify life Endurance increased through disciplined will Self-control rooted in the pow- ers of selection and attention Willing, not merely thinking, essential to progress Enemies of the will Indolence Indecision Doubt Self-indulgence Wilful- ness The vital mistake of failure to cultivate will Wills and our ills Discussing our ills The argument against stimulants and drug-comfort Surrender to small irritations Doing or doping Willlessness and wreckage. CHAPTER XIV CLEAR THINKING . . . 176 The interwoven mind Cures through suggestion Sub- stituting facts for error Thought selection Common- ness of passive attention Attention the product of in- terest in the untrained Interest the product of atten- tion in the trained All consciousness requires an object CONTENTS PAGE The selection of the object of attention Mental rejec- tion the art of forgetting Replacing wasteful by profit- able thoughts Cultivating the critical sense Training in clear thinking Eliminating mental error Mixing sentiment with ideas Reasoning in the face of prejudice Recognising reality Exaggeration of expression in- juring clear thinking Emotional intoxication Clear thinking associated with daily doing Failure through neglect of reality Swaying mental foundations Sub- stituting normal for disordered ideas Multiplying in- terests Thinking above self Forethought mastering life Scientific forethought The power of thought to at- tract thought of kind. CHAPTER XV MOULDING THE EMOTIONS ... . . . . . . 195 Physical help Attaining emotional comfort Thought help Reason replacing emotional complexes Basing judgment on knowledge, not feeling Replacing hurt- ful emotions Feeling help The curative power of helpful emotions Emotional topers Learning normal emotional life Emotional training in the home De- pression emotion's temptation Replacing the morbid with the wholesome Daily emotional training Dwarf- ing the higher emotions Emotional help for the irri- table Emotional help for the fearful Faith displac- ing fear Emotional help for the depressed The sick in moods Will help Big and little pains Self-control and emotions Remoulding the emotions Enduring en- joyment must be earned. CHAPTER XVI WILLING WILLS . ... . ... . . . . . 214 Necessity for will reeducation True will the only force which can effect right living Will keeps us in the road chosen by reason Action born of will Life's ills chal- lenge our wills Lost wills common Will-training and habit-formation Wilfulness transformed to normal will- ing Willing effort Volition versus the Isthmus Fail- ure counsels surrender Supremacy of mind over body realised through the will Judicious hardening Prac- tical helps in willing Willing decision Wishing or willing in character growth Indecision from toxicity Power through choice of the disagreeable Deciding to decide Decision is rest Spasmodic efforts at mas- tery Discipline from without -Willing control Will- CONTENTS PAOI power reduced from exhaustion The will's chief ene- mies Development of inhibition Breaking bad nervous habits Will versus pain Conquering inclination Turning dislikes into likes Facing the sinister The healing power of will Potent relaxation developing the forces of will Nervous cure is self -cure Inspiration and the inevitable. CHAPTER XVII OUR MORAL SELVES . . ..,.,., . . . 232 The moral nature Life complicated by the moral ele- ment Sliding moral scale Primitive fear-morality Utilitarian morality Idealistiq morality Morality the fight of the good with the better Morality answers the "why" and the "how" of conduct Morality de- cides the choice of attention Education and morality Our twofold moral habitat The moral and the relig- ious Religious self-torture Religion dispensing with morality Morality dispensing with religion Clever- ness not morality Morality independent of environ- ment Morals and nervous health Relation of moral and medical sciences Mind a gift, character a victory The struggle for perfection The nervous character by nature a moral character Our moral variability Nervous health fundamentally a moral state Moral sickness The restlessness of empty souls Learning how- good life is The moral adds something to every rela- tion True morality demands growth The choice which stands for destiny. CHAPTER XVIII REBELLION . . :,";. . v . 245 Defective adjustments Weak man confronting a mighty existence The outer battle with people and things The inner battle with self The power of things versus the power of attitude The battle of duty with de- sireConditions for continuous enjoyment non-exist- ent Provisions perfect for character growth The prob- lem of self-assertion Man an engine with a will Self- assertion versus self-repression Obedience which en- slaves Force essential to life Yoking self with the powers of Nature Our inability to create force Utilis- ing force wisely or ill Developing self into a dynamo Man capable of utilising elemental, physical, mental and spiritual forces Rebellion Our need of correction Un- guided force destructive The mob must be saved from CONTENTS PAOl itself The waste of anger Resentment of the "eternal grind" Cultivating dissatisfaction Despair and pes- simism The home of strife Academic and wilful con- tention Power of mind does not make us good Whole- some rebellion. CHAPTER XIX SURRENDER . . . . 259 Life's inevitable disasters The false value of things Early disillusionments Many losses but apparent Meeting calamity Surrender in the face of trouble Recklessness The appeal of power Rebellion in the face of loss Wholesome recklessness Surrender to smould- ering rebellion Resenting life's industrial relations Disregard of duty Cooperating with the laws of well- doing Despair The surrender of restraint to reckless- ness Living at half-power Grumbling in the midst of plenty Defeated life foreordained for small souls Craving the unpossessed Illness pleaded as an excuse for failure Devitalising the subconscious The disease of self-pity The test of solitude The habit of self-com- munion Moral catastrophes Despair making existence intolerable The bitterness of defeat The calamity of spiritual loss The incentive of disaster. CHAPTER XX DISCORD WITH SELF . .... . . . . . 272 The burden of self The common burdens of existence Inevitable burdens The rectifying sense of unworthi- ness The spiritual conflict Man's capacity for suffer- ing The mission of suffering Accepting burdens as reasons for failure Essential strife with self Damag- ing strife with self The worry habit The worrying world The nature of worry. The leakage of worry Little worries Worry masquerading as worthiness The morbid conscience Worry and conscience The suf- ferings of conscience normally developmental Con- science but a medium for truth Conscience defacing truth The easy-going conscience The selfish con- science The conventional conscience The esthetic con- science Beauty not essentially moral The artificial standards of the morbid conscience The scruples of mor- bid conscientiousness The helpful leadership of the vir- tuous conscience Fatal moral damage through per- verted conscience Consciousness of evil a mark of pro- gress Conscience making slaves or victors. CONTENTS CHAPTER XXI PAG1: SUBLIMATION OF STRIFE . V '. . . . . . 283 Selfish strife The eternal ego Desire is insatiable Pride of externals Striving for the worthless Pride of existence bartered for pride of appearance Pride re- senting correction Unavoidable battles Soul the real master of life Life the soul's opportunity The soul creating its own environment Life's inevitable battles Desires versus needs Limiting strife to our needs Man must fight The traitor, self-pity Mutineers in life's army False pride displaced by constructive pride Wholesome acceptance of limitations Disciplined freedom is righteous freedom Freedom through faith and hope Faith curing moral illness The strife that saves Commanding one's internal weather Catastro- phe creating character The selective power of the soul Power through renunciation Every choice repre- sents a surrender Development through striving Find- ing the good, not the easy The sublimation of strife. CHAPTER XXII THE FULFILMENT OF SELF . . . .... . 295 Life's failures Becoming a victim of circumstances Seeking pleasure, not mastery Mechanical lives Lone- liness seeking the heights or the depths Cultivating brain, neglecting soul The certain defeat of the self- ish self Training for efficiency The unseen builders First-hand acquaintance with things Armchair piety Disaster sharpening wits Conquering through endur- ance A larger self, a larger life Our many-sided per- sonality Living with a purpose Finding the victorious self No life necessarily sordid Lop-sided moral de- velopment Finding the best in the worst Making life generous Saturating labour with friendship Filling self with constructive energies The beauty of fine liv- ing. CHAPTER XXIII HARMONY . . 307 Life's aims The individual's certain need of moral directorship Man free to do his worst or his best Measuring self against Nature Measuring self against the unseen The only satisfying answer to the query of CONTENTS PAGE existence Setting body, mind and soul to work Life's adjustments The possible versus the actual self Choos- ing comfort of body or comfort of soul Self moulding life Trembling at life's feast Unused beauties of life Harmony is life's crowning adjustment The spiritual seeks the best in everything Harmony in complexity The din of human discord Where is peace? Destroy- ing life's harmonies Learning that life is ready to yield happiness An optimistic philosophy essential to nervous stability The healthy soul is self in order The serene self The harmony of the simple life. THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS CHAPTEE I THE AGE OF NEBVOUSNESS Prevalence of Nervousness. Man was a splen- did creation; he is to-day capable of being a splendid creature. His greatness, while ex- pressed in many lines, is distinctly most evident when we consider his superb capacity for complex adjustments. He has conquered his planet ; he has charted the heavens; he foretells to the nicety of seconds movements stirring the unseen limits of space. The sea is his ; and he floats at will above the clouds. Fire, earth, air and water are his slaves but he has failed to master himself ! His superb powers, probably even to-day in their in- fancy, are possible because of his intricate, sensi- tive, responsive nervous system. Man is essen- tially a nervous being. Blood, muscle, bone, digestive apparatus, his complex secretory system, all exist to minister unto brain and nerves. Evi- dence is plentiful that through all time this regal, delicate apparatus has been the chief cause of his suffering, as well as of his progress. Ignoring the laws of his being, every great step forward in the complexity of his existence has been marked 2 - : THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS by nervous disasters. Throughout all time man has known his surroundings better than he has understood himself. We are to-day living in an age of flux. Caesar long ago decried "the effem- inating influences of civilisation. " Never in mankind's splendid history has discovery chased discovery, invention succeeded invention, as dur- ing the last generation. Never did civilisation advance with such bewildering strides. Never did she give of herself to so large a proportion of earth's humanity. From the lowliest farmer on his hillside, through all walks of mankind, response to changes and changing conditions of thought and action is felt. Nervousness, once a disease of the elect, now invades the homes of all classes. My neighbour's domestic tranquillity has been disturbed these nine months because his faithful, two-hundred-pound black Mary is suffer- ing with the " nervous prosteration. " "De heat ob de gas range has sort o' a drying 'feet on de brain," and she now must take a rest. Modern Restlessness. The prevalence of mod- ern nervousness cannot be computed. No neigh- bourhood is without its nervous sufferer. Few homes exist in which some member is not the ob- ject of special solicitude because of weak nerves. "He is a nervous child;" "She is taking the rest- cure;" "He has gone to pieces;" "My wife is just recovering from a nervous breakdown;" "I am as nervous as a cat ; " " Let me alone until I pull myself together;" "Jones is 'all in,' he acts batty" are matter-of-course, daily exchanged expressions these modern days. In fact, the man THE AGE OF NERVOUSNESS 3 or woman who to-day truthfully and quietly can say, "As for me and my household, nervousness is unknown/' is indeed rare and good to look upon. In the effort to help this multitude of the nervous, civilised lands are dotted with sanitaria, special hospitals and rest-cure resorts. Thou- sands of skilled men are making the study of these disorders their life 's work. The chemist is evolv- ing a constantly growing list of more or less damaging compounds to combat the multiplied manifestations of this disease. Special foods, elaborate systems of exercise, spinal supports and rubber heels, specially tinted walls and harmless waters from faraway springs, begoggled noses, and beds placed compass-wise and insulated with glass casters, slamless doors and dogless towns all speak eloquently of modern man's nervous estate. Few magazines published are of so high a tone that they do not carry lengthy advertise- ments of some new method of thought healing. New religions spring into existence full-fledged, soon counting their followers by the tens of thousands, because of their capacity to eradicate that long list of disorders which accurate science recognises as manifestations of nervous disease. Probably the majority of civilised men and women are to-day making conscious concessions to their nerves, avoiding this and doing that, eating meat or not eating meat, exercising or resting, living this life or avoiding the other, suffering or expect- ing to suffer because of their nerves. The truly intelligent physician recognises that 4 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS more than half of his work is directed to the overcoming of functional, not organic, diseases. He also recognises that in his multiplied and complex efforts to relieve patients, many of the beneficial effects of his treatment are due to con- scious or unconscious suggestion. He will tell you that dependable, yes, potent as are certain medicines, the most of his prescriptions produce no change whatever in either the quality or the action of the tissues of the body; that in only a small per cent, of drugs used have the most accurate scientific investigations been able to show definite physical or chemical action. The effects of the majority of medicines are produced upon the patient's mind. In many of the other means used by physicians for treatment, the benefits are largely the result of mental sugges- tion. Electricity, hailed a generation since as the great rejuvenator of nervous strength, has long since been discarded by the educated phy- sician, excepting for a few known, definite, chemical or mechanical effects which it is capable of producing. Science now recognises that many of the wonderful cures in the past were due to its influence on the sufferer's mind, and that to- day these effects can be more surely, definitely and honestly obtained by more direct means. Hydro therapy the method of treating disease by means of water has devised many compli- cated forms of water application; and the devotees of water cure have invented intricate apparatus to carry out these elaborate forms of treatment. Hydrotherapy intelligently used does THE AGE OF NERVOUSNESS 5 produce definitely helpful physical reactions, which can not be so well secured otherwise; but its distinctively curative principles are few, and the scientific use of water has an unquestioned but limited scope of benefit. All of these various and multiplied means of combating nervousness but emphasise the widespread prevalence of the disorder. Modern restlessness is everywhere in evidence. Stolidity is rare, stability exceptional. Our chil- dren are restless and uneasy, constantly plan- ning diversion and pleasure. Even the three- year-old child begs to go down-town to the picture show. Young manhood and womanhood rush from school into the great vortex of the world's work with a restless eagerness, long before the nervous system has been trained to stand strain without damage. The mania for work alternates with a frenzy for pleasure, and intensity becomes the key-note in many modern families. All too frequently the soothing hand of age fails to quiet the restless pulse. The household has hardly been adjusted to the return from the winter home before the summer vacation is taken in the midst of hustle and bustle and a commotion which is never peace and at best but doubtful pleasure. Modern life is high tension life a life, of in- creasing strain. To meet it, our schools and colleges are raising their standards and increas- ing their demands. Less than a century ago a Master's degree from the best colleges was given after a course of study which is now but a high school requirement. Often our children's intel- 6 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS lects are forced and their minds keyed to concert pitch the minds of mere boys and girls, still in knickerbockers and short dresses; and modern standards pursue them like the Fates of old, nor dare they pause nor turn back. Intensity not as a periodic flash of force to meet an emergency, but as a chronic, devitalising process marks much of so-called modern education. Not only is the intellect thus damagingly forced, but the emotional life is trained into early disequilibrium through the vivid horrors of the daily news, reek- ing with slime and crime the world 's garbage heap laid on the breakfast table. Modern social intercourse puts a premium on emotional inten- sity. Brilliancy, vivacity, piquancy command universal homage ; while calmness, simplicity and repose are ofttimes passed by as wearisome. Will development is neglected 'tis an old-fash- ioned process. Only a few years have elapsed since our educational leaders have recognised the fundamental necessity for physical training. Will and body alike are neglected in the average home in this day of high speed, high pressure, high finance and straining for high places; and the strain of modern living grows apace. . Modern Intensity. Modern stimuli are increas- ing much faster than our nervous training for adaptation. Great as is man's capacity for com- plex adjustments, the multiplying demands of modern life are coming too fast. We live as travellers on a limited train. Farms, homes, villages, cities, rivers, mountains whirl by. There is no time to carefully note or know any THE AGE OF NERVOUSNESS 7 of them. Stops are few, and those only in the midst of rush, turmoil and bustle; and life has become but "one jammed thing after another. " The telephone alone has brought the nation into our homes, and has increased our points of con- tact a thousandfold. The electric car and the auto have enlarged our field of action immensely, and multiplied our duties, responsibilities, inter- ests and opportunities in geometric ratio. Modern living is high living intellectually, emo- tionally, socially. It is a kaleidoscopic maze, with increasingly less time for deliberation and con- templation. It is so cluttered with external inter- ests with their insatiable demands that the study or even the recognition of life's fundamentals is becoming a lost art to the average man. He looks to the specialist in all branches of knowl- edge and effort to think for him, while he lives a life of emotional intoxication and superficial judgments in the nerve-exhausting struggle. As for himself, the silver cord of reason is loosed and the golden bowl of poise is broken. Never has such an infinite variety of choice been offered man choice demanding repeated series of readjustments. Ours is an age of com- petition. Many industries have long ceased to expect profit from their regular products, depend- ing entirely upon scientific utilisation of once rejected by-products for gain. Industrial strife increases with the years. Brawn resents the in- dependence of brain, and struggles with increas- ing might for its larger portion. Brain conspires and connives to retain its lion's share. The pro- 8 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS f essions are crowded with men and women seeking to rise above the average of their kind, seeking by intellectual displacement more of the comforts and honours of superiority. Gold and art and talent and time and ability and intensity are the prices paid for social supremacy. The demands of all walks of life are those of increased intricacy and complexity. Each succeeding generation of workers carries a heavier burden of responsi- bility. Modern life lays upon every normal in- dividual a demand for either increased aggres- siveness, if he will maintain his position at the forefront of progress, or an increasingly com- plicated self-defence, if he is not to be hopelessly trampled by the onrush of civilised feet. All things simple are being accounted cheap or are subject to ridicule. In almost every home the comforts of a generation gone have become to-day's necessities; while luxury, increasing though it does life's complexity counties sf old, is sought and claimed by the majority as an essen- tial comfort. Pleasure ever beckons to the weary modern life the life which demands to be pleased, demands to be amused, but which has long since lost the joy and blessing and recreation of the art of play. CHAPTEE II WHAT IS NERVOUSNESS? The Valuable Nervous Temperament. As we have already seen, in man's unequalled capacity for adjustment to his physical, mental and moral surroundings resides his almost limitless powers. His body apparently thrives best in the temperate zone, but perfect specimens of physical strength and health may be found from the eternal ice- packs to the sweltering tropics. Human flesh and blood have now stood at the earth's axes where the temperature stays so deadly low as to congeal the mercury in the thermometer ; while the trained puddler works regularly and rapidly, guiding the flowing rivers of molten steel in temperatures ranging high above 200 degrees. The aviator climbs mile upon mile into the rare air of the deep sky ; his brother seeks the bottom of the sea or lives his working life entombed in the black- ness and heaviness of the mine's depths. It is given the human body to adjust itself to these and a thousand more variations. When man's mind awoke, he found himself sur- rounded by bewildering intricacy. Curiosity gave place to wonder, wonder to investigation, investigation to knowledge; and knowledge is to-day grouped into the large family of sciences 10 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS which have revealed to human understanding the operations of the laws determining the growth of the bluet of the mountainside, the iris-tinted sparkle of the dewdrop, and the everlasting, un- swerving hurtling of systems of worlds through the limitless void of space. Within the human intellect resides a power of adjustment that is marvellous, a power which makes possible an intimate acquaintance with all the varied and wondrous manifestations of world stuff and order. Man lives under a hundred forms of gov- ernment, ruled wisely, brutally, self-ruled and enslaved. A thousand religions and philosophies have ordered his conduct, and to all these the mind has responded with adjustments which have maintained a surprising degree of sanity. In his moral nature progress has been less rapid and universal; nevertheless, some of the greatest miracles of human adjustment have occurred in this sphere of his being. Few civili- sations now exist which do not demand that much which is humanly instinctive be made secondary to the will of man or the interpreted will of God. The civilised individual is indeed rare who does not, early in his development, rise above the power of animal impulse to rule. Physical disabilities and perverse mental habits of years may be changed in a night, when some great light breaks in upon the human soul! light which stands for liberty, or mastery, or victory, or purity or God- liness. There is truly no more miraculous ad- justment conceivable in human nature than that which tears the soul away from the multiplied WHAT IS NERVOUSNESS? 11 and unquestioned pleasures of selfishness, from the seductive and tantalising wooings of the phy- sical, from the dominating and masterful biddings of ambition, to the surrender of all that we are wont to call liberty and individuality, in response to the callings of the still, small voice. The soul's capacity to accept personal injury and injustice and humiliation for righteousness' sake, while rare, illustrates incontestably the scope of human capacity for moral adjustment. Where, may we ask, resides the power which makes this almost infinite variety of actions and reactions possible? What is the secret of this almost God-like ability? Infinite in variety as it is, its accomplishment results alone from the reaction of man's nervous system to external and internal stimuli, in the response to the infinitude of influences which surround him in his many- sided universe, or which challenge him through the complexities of his own ever-changing mind. Let the word " mother " be spoken in a company of ten. Love, sorrow, responsibility, tenderness, remorse, gratitude, fear, determination, pride or bitterness may be stimulated; visions of child- hood flash out of the past, memories of illness, recollections of the art and the efficiency of disci- pline, the tender face with its halo of age. These and countless other emotions and impressions but illustrate the variety of reactions possible to the sound of two syllables. Most of the reactions of physical adjustment are carried on through this marvellous nervous system in a manner quite unknown to its owner, 12 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS activities beneficently placed below the surface of consciousness to be continuously executed with- out effort of mind, still ever subject indirectly to the activities of consciousness. Many mental operations become automatic through habit, and as we grow older more and more of our mental accomplishments are carried on with little or no conscious thought effort thanks to this great law of mental economy. Still at all times, in all sit- uations, the normal brain with its myriad-sided mind is the controlling centre. The capacity for reactions and adjustment varies with the individual. No two minds possess equally all of the varying possibilities of reaction power. Every one of life's experiences adds to or subtracts something from this capacity. Some beings are mere phlegmatic dolts, respond- ing with less activity than the average animal to the ceaseless stimuli of their surroundings. In the dull brain a few ideas only have been given birth. To feed, to laze, to avoid effort little else counts in this life of magnificent possibilities. The "thousand-souled Shakespeare " attends and responds, and ten thousand beauties of thought and pages of rare, new wisdom and undying truths, and appealing, convincing, living portraits of the human soul are penned pages to delight, teach and inspire the sons of men through pass- ing generations. Again the response may be that of the wretched, overwrought, sensitive-plant, starting with every sound, shrinking and quiver- ing at every manifestation of force, resenting and suffering in the presence of real or fancied mis- WHAT IS NERVOUSNESS? 13 understanding, keenly and painfully alive to every discomfort; weakening and wilting and retreating from every hurt. The capacity for human responsiveness is limited only by the capacity of the mind to know, the emotions to feel and the will to act. When we understand how inseparable all of man's activities are from his nervous system, it is easy to realise how infinitely rich is the pos- sessor of the nervous temperament. Give the dullard his comforts; the world's work, the am- bitions of men, the joys, the beauties and mas- teries of life are possessed by those of keen, ac- tive, nervous organisation. Let no one so blest ever decry his heritage. True it is that side by side with the finest capacity for conceiving, accomplishing and enjoying, abides the keenest capacity for suffering. But it is for us to realise that the latter stands for unnecessary disorder in the operation of nervous action that greatest expression of human vital force, that incompar- able gift to mankind. Nature of Nervousness. It is impossible to conceive such a complex and highly organised capacity without recognising its inherent tendency to disorder. This disorder of the nervous mechanism has for years been loosely styled "nervousness," " neurotic " being the scientific term for one so afflicted. A study of the many possible deviations from normal nervous activity makes it clear that two departures from the nor- mal include practically all the nervous. Nervous activity becomes the disease " nervousness " when 14 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS it is misdirected or when it is overactive. Man was endowed with reason to direct his choice of objects to which his mind should respond. Bea- son, the mind's great counsellor, selects from the multitude the object of each moment's attention. In the nervous, waste, injury and hurt are con- stantly occurring because the mind has not fol- lowed the direction of reason, but rather the coun- sel of fear, enmity or desire, or has drifted upon damaging quick-sands, guided only by instinct. Nervous activity misdirected is as common as human life. We all turn at times from reason's calm, often colourless, counsel, led by the rain-' bow or midnight of our emotions. A certain amount of emotionalism is possible to the average person without lasting damage, but to all who surrender and allow perverted nervous action to become a habit, the penalty of wasted and misused vital energy will assert itself as " nervousness." Such a penalty is paid by him who allows his life to be controlled by moods. Such is the cost, in human strength and happiness, of surrender to fear. A life of emotional riot inevitably invites the depths of nervous discomfort. Man was given a will to choose, control and limit his nervous expenditure. While the reason may select and give direction to thought and feel- ing responses, it is the will that gives to these responses the force necessary to success, or, in its deficient action, allows desire, impulse or feel- ing to urge nervous action on to damaging, ex- hausting and even destroying extremes. Uncon- trolled nervous activity, even when directed as WHAT IS NERVOUSNESS? 15 advised by reason, may wreck itself through overintensity or exhaust itself through overindul- gence. In studying the nature of " nervousness, " we must dispel the common error that it is a disorder of the nerves. The nerves are mere insensate cords, carrying impressions to and from the brain. All of man's infinite responses take place, not in his nerves, but in his central nervous system. Mind, not nerves, is at fault. Nervous health is a mental state, not a physical condition. We shall find that physical disturbances play a large part in the production of nervousness; we shall also find that normal reason and will can face extremes of physical suffering without surrender. Many of the mistaken ideas connected with nerv- ousness are easily displaced when we consider the intimate relation of mind and body. The body's organs are constantly influenced by the mind through what is called the sympathetic nerv- ous system. The relation between mind and body is so active, and the nervous system so able to record an infinite variety of sensations, that the sufferer finds dire confusion in distinguishing nervous discomforts from those produced by mechanical or chemical injuries to the tissues or organs of his body. When it is realised that there is a nervous counterpart for every organic dis- ease; that no form of physical damage exists which is not imitated and reproduced by sensa- tions practically identical with those accompany- ing the organic disease, it is easy to understand the immense variety of nervous symptoms and 16 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS the practically unlimited manifestations of nerv- ous discomfort. To repeat, nervousness is a disease of numberless possible expressions. There is no form of illness, pain, distress, prac- tically no alteration in circulation, no disturbance in the various processes of digestion, no disease of the respiratory organs indeed, no defective bodily function which a highly-wrought, dis- ordered nervous system may not imitate. Sen- sations as varied as the scale of human capacity for feeling, sensations apparently recording dis- turbances in a dozen organs, may one and all be but expressions of an overresponsive brain. With this conception, from the almost hopeless tangle of nervous sensations emerges the com- forting truth, that when the central nervous sys- tem is restored to normal, all will be well. The brain, itself insensible, reflects its discomforts to a thousand nooks of the body, and its ill mind blames every one of its co-workers with wrong-doing. Nervousness, then, is truly a mental, not a physi- cal, illness. Nervousness represents a high ca- pacity for response to external and internal stimuli, with lack of selective and inhibitory con- trol. CHAPTEE III TYPES OF NERVOUSNESS As we have already seen, disturbances of the central nervous system manifest themselves in an infinite variety of responses. These responses produce numerous types of nervous sufferers, no two being identical, as no two individuals are identical; yet, like individuals, the nervous types are conveniently and rather easily grouped. Our understanding of nervous disorders will be sim- plified through an insight into their most com- monly observed forms. The most conspicuous of all nervous sufferers belong to the so-called motor type. In this form of the disorder constant restlessness is the rule. It would seem that those parts of the brain which control muscular activity are in an extremely overactive state, and constant misdirected energy in the form of useless, often purposeless, move- ments, attracts the attention of all observers. The patient's inability to control this waste of energy discloses the helplessness of his will. Most persons of nervous temperament are con- stantly losing more or less energy through some of the many useless, wasteful habits of action. Few of us converse without an accompaniment of chair-rocking or foot- jerking, grimace of face or extravagant gesture of hands. The average 17 18 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS school-child in writing his lesson expends far more energy with his tongue and face and feet than with his fingers. Our young lady has be- come well trained in the better social customs when, even in public, she does not handle her face, pull at her gloves, repeatedly adjust her neck- dress, tuck up imaginary strands of hair, and finger and fumble her ornaments. These are but minor expressions of this form of the disorder, which includes many more seriously exhausting habits of useless movement, notably the tics or so-called " habit spasms." Under the influence of these, strength-wasting shrugging of shoulders, twisting of necks, tugging of moustache or twitch- ing of face continue year after year in hopeless efforts to adjust body or clothing. These, and many like wasteful actions, become such inveterate habits as to make life totally wretched if the com- pelling impulsions to repeat and ever repeat the movements are not humoured. Nervous activity has become overactive damagingly and exhaust- ingly so. In the most extreme forms of this variety of weakness, the patient becomes entirely incapacitated for purposeful action, all his strength and attention being expended in a chaos of useless doing. The hypersensitive nervous type is the most common. In these sufferers, reason fails to select wisely, and as a result the victim responds more and more constantly, not by action, but by feel- ing, to useless and wasteful sensations. Many " would-be" aristocrats pride themselves upon their sensitive nature. Their feelings are too TYPES OF NERVOUSNESS 19 delicate for vulgar contact. True sensitiveness is one of the finest strains of character. It knows no selfish discriminations. True sensitiveness responds eternally and unselfishly to human good- ness and human need. But it is not so with the unhappy hypersensitive. He suffers from con- stantly enlarging varieties of contact. Each change in the weather affects his comfort; the voices of progress and industry affect his rest; all forms of physical and mental discomfort are avoided as the plague; the quality and prepara- tion of his dinner are vital to his evening's serenity; peace in the household depends upon a slavish observance of the niceties of his dominat- ing sensibilities. He is a veritable slave to sen- sation, feeling being the only motive for doing, reason being helpless before the tyrant sensation ; and will has long since surrendered in the fight with impulse. So sensitive are these slaves of feeling that the inflection of the morning greeting, the frown or smile, the misunderstood word or action, may be producers of poignant misery. Unchecked, the disorder ultimately ostracises its victim from all normal concourse and useful activity. All life's energies are spent in the avoidance of discomforts. The clock's ticking must be stopped, the electric bells muffled, the voices of the children hushed. These sufferers are ofttimes driven into obscurity, seeking the quietude demanded by their overwrought brain and sickly, sensitive mind. It is from this class that the large and wretched company of drug users is recruited, suffering individuals who 20 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS rapidly become the helpless and hopeless victims of drug and drink, and finally, miserably wretched, dangerous dregs of humanity. The suggestible type is also common. Sug- gestibility, or the capacity of being influenced by feeling rather than by reason, is normal in childhood before reason has developed, and it is purely an individual matter as to the degree of control reason will ultimately assume. Accur- ately considered, the suggestible type represents a failure of reason to attain masterful develop- ment. In the normal, full-grown mind, reason weighs all information, all appeals, all influences, and directs choice. In the suggestible this guid- ing counsel is secondary to the demands and in- structions and insinuations of the emotions. Damaging suggestion may come, as it usually does, from without. The patent medicine adver- tisement, with its vivid descriptions of disease, creates an impression so strong in the suggestible mind as to stimulate the subconscious and produce symptoms which sooner or later appear to the conscious mind as the identical or a kindred disease. Herein abides the power of " cure-alls " to suggest dollars from the pockets of the sug- gestible. Newspaper reproductions of vicious and impossible creatures labelled "germs," impel the fearsome housewife to besprinkle her goods and chattels with vile-smelling disinfectants, even to the neglect of wholesome, health-saving cleanli- ness. The scarlet fever placard, flaming forth its warning from the house front, sends the suggest- ible to the opposite side of the street, where, with TYPES OF NERVOUSNESS 21 face averted and breathing suspended, they pro- tect themselves from impossible dangers. In another form of suggestibility, termed auto- suggestion, the patient is influenced by impres- sions originating within his own mind. The discomforts of an illness of many years ago may be unconsciously treasured in the memory, and as the result of depression following some dis- appointment or sorrow, or through the disturbing influence of some shock or fear, the painful sen- sation may be resurrected from memory, and reconstructed in the mind as a return of the old disorder. Many quite normal individuals will sicken, and at times even vomit, by simply re- calling some nauseating experience or scene of the far past. In hysteria, which is the typical form of nervous disorder in which suggestibility is the basis, there is absolutely no known physical disease which is not counterfeited, mimicked, reproduced in the sensations of the sufferer. The modern physician in treating this disorder searches the patient 9 s mentality for the damaging root idea, which has occasioned the emotional dis- turbances fear, anxiety, apprehension or what may be, which are the basis of the physical sensa- tions interpreted by the patient as true disease of the body. Suggestibility unchecked may reach a degree of intensity in which reason is helpless and will absolutely without effect, in which the suf- ferer becomes a vapid puppet of weird, demoralis- ing, disintegrating sensations, bred simply in his own mind. We are tempted to speak of hysterical symptoms as being imaginary disorders ; we must 22 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS realise, however, that they are disorders of the imagination. In our modern life with its rapidly lessening demand for physical activity, muscular develop- ment and strength and resistance are becoming increasingly defective. The demands upon our nervous energies and responses have multiplied a thousandfold since the quiet days of our grand- fathers. Physiology tells us that all forms of fatigue are essentially mental. Prone to think that our muscles are tired, we often sink down expressing complete exhaustion. A sudden dan- ger puts strength and speed into our momentarily sense-wearied frame; a life-saving emergency develops capacity for effort which we are apt to call ' ' superhuman. ' ' We were not exhausted ; we felt that we were. Fatigue is practically always nervous. Most of the fatigue and exhaustion so common to-day is not produced by physical effort, but results from emotional wear and tear, friction and waste. Modern days are producing an increasingly large number of those who suffer from undue fatigability. The neurologist speaks of this form of nervous inadequacy as neurasthenia. In an analysis of the neurasthenic type we rarely find the individual suffering damaging fatigue through the calm, masterful carrying out of a reasonably .selected course of activity. Emotional waste is /the most rapidly fatiguing and exhausting of all forms of effort. A physically frail woman may suddenly develop acute mania, and for hours and days and weeks keep up an almost ceaseless TYPES OF NERVOUSNESS 23 activity, expending a hundred foot-tons of energy daily to each ten she apparently possessed before her illness, such endurance being spoken of as the " superhuman power of the maniac. " Truly nothing has been added to her strength ! But in- sanely unconscious of the sensations of fatigue, insanely intent on carrying out her irrational activity, she expends power which in her normal state was unknown. The sufferer from fatig- ability of the neurasthenic type is a victim of disorder of energy, usually involving the growth and training of will. Even more frequently, the fatigable type develops from the basis of over- sensitiveness to the normal discomforts of fatigue. Probably no form of nervousness has become so popular as neurasthenia. Pronounced neuras- thenia, it is indeed quite an aristocratic disorder. Many men and women of usefulness and ability, usually living in unconscious violation of the laws of nervous health, date numerous events of their life's calendar in relation to their first, third or fifth nervous breakdown. Many neurotics, con- sciously or unconsciously shrewd, are able to secure periodic vacations, comfortably spent under hospital or sanitarium care, or a long rest at some health resort, through an opportune breakdown of this type. The time is rapidly com- ing when the uselessness of such lapses from productiveness will be regarded with the same sense of shame as an attack of typhoid fever or other preventable filth-borne disease. The hypochondriac presents quite a difficult type of nervousness. His selection of reaction 24 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS subjects (for he is usually masculine) is prac- tically limited to those relating to his own body, and upon these subjects he reacts most actively, constantly and consistently. The stomach is the organ most frequently selected. We all have a certain hazy consciousness of what is occurring in this section of our digestive apparatus, but the hypochondriac studies its every mood. "Too much acid" to-day, "too sluggish " to-morrow, again "overactive" and later "turning every- thing into gas." This usually innocent offender, which would attend to its own business very efficiently if let alone, furnishes food for thought, attention, converse, fear and despair through many of the hypochondriac's waking hours. Again the heart may be the object of his attentive devotion, and he becomes a chronic pulse-feeler, stopping in the midst of his meal to see if the last swallow of ice-water was not overstimulating, or does not threaten to suddenly paralyse the action of this faithful servant. Or the eyes may be subject to repeated scrutiny, and their normal actions misinterpreted. They "have an unnat- ural look," "the pupils are too large," he "knows they are wrong," even after painstaking exam- inations by experts have failed to reveal any abnormality. The various excretions and secre- tions of the body are studied with infinite care, and abnormal importance laid on the normal manifestations of healthy bodily activity, to many of which are ascribed an import and signi- ficance absolutely unknown to science. The hypo- chondriac's will is thoroughly active in the TYPES OF NERVOUSNESS 25 defence of his preconceived ideas, and his con- fidence in his own opinion is so vain and deter- mined that he will defy the hopeful opinions of a score of physicians as to his recovery. The self-centred type of nervous illness is clearly marked in many cases. Self-centredness is very prone to deface the character of all nerv- ous sufferers; reasonably so, for the source of the suffering is a perverted self. Perhaps no type of human illness so inevitably produces the bore as this form of sickness. Eeason and will are derailed. Petty, selfish interests and the concerns of self, contract and narrow, even to deformity, lives of brilliant promise. Self-atten- tion blocks the efforts of reason to go afield for the material of new interests. Will is inevitably weakened in the face of devitalising self-pity, contracting self-study, and demoralising self- interest. In this self-centred group are found the conceited neurotics who exalt their symptoms as true divinities which they worship in and out of season. They are capable of instantly waxing eloquent on the endless details of their illnesses, ever asserting their claims of suffering superior- ity even as they might enlarge on virtues won through a life of sacrifice. The conceited neurotic insists that there never was a case like his; that medical science has never witnessed suffering such as his and with just his set of symptoms. Conceited sufferers they are, who frequently are quite satisfied to remain so, and continue to seek counsel, unsatisfied, until they do find the physician who admits that he never saw 26 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS a like case. While in fact he is usually the ordi- nary, self-satisfied, self-centred neurotic, as com- mon to the nerve specialist as toothaches to the dentist. These patients are visibly restless in the face of any discussion or activity which does not allow them self-expression of self. Many of the manifestations of nervousness are so selfish, so crude, so ignorant, as to call forth impatience, or at best to excite only charitable pity. There remains one class of the nervous, how- ever, to whom a certain homage should be given those who, through a determined, but unfor- tunate, overactive expression of the will, develop abnormal repression. The repressed nervous type suffers acutely but silently, without demon- stration or effort to attract attention. Frequently calm in the midst of turmoil, hubbub, strife, often very efficient under conditions in which others lose self-control, these silent sufferers deserve high respect. The energy leak goes on for years. The mind is literally feeding upon itself, but the control remains apparently unbroken, until finally the tension exceeds endurance, and a hysterical or neurasthenic outbreak reveals the effects of the years of repression. Even in this type, however, careful mental analysis will show that there have long been unwise or unworthy intellectual or emotional reactions, producing chronic energy leakage. The considerate, determined efforts at mastery place the repressed nervous patient on a distinctly higher plane than the average self- pitying, attention-craving, responsibility-avoid- ing, sympathy-demanding, self-centred neurotic. CHAPTEE IV GETTING BEADY TO BE NEBVOUS Heredity. Does an enemy stand at the portal through which humankind enters upon life, an enemy who is willing to brand one child out of three with tendencies and weaknesses which may later result in nervous wreckage? It would so seem, for parents not only pass to their children hue of skin, contour of face and limit of stature, but mental characteristics and tendencies, abilities and defects, dispositions and temperaments. Powers and weaknesses which lead on to success- ful independence or to nervous disaster may be traced through succeeding generations. The Mendelian law of heredity finds accurate fulfil- ment in the mental as well as the physical characteristics of descent. It is not alone his personal heritage that a man is capable of trans- mitting to his offspring, but also certain weak- nesses and powers which he has himself acquired weaknesses and powers quite independent of those he received from his parents ; these too may be passed on as factors determining the weal or woe of his children. A few diseases, practically always the result of some form of self-indulgence in the parent, may reappear in the second and even the third genera- 27 28 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS tion. Too much emphasis cannot be placed on the fact that the damage man does through intem- perance in certain of his indulgences is not limited to its effects upon himself, but these weaknesses find expression in the multiplied miseries and erratic, defective nervous systems of his children and grandchildren. These innocent victims are condemned before birth to live with nervous systems attuned to discord, nervous systems at best capable of expressing life only through minor strains, and often hopelessly deficient in capacity for whole-souled chords of joy or paeans of vic- tory, pitiable, depressed, morbid, blighted lives. None of us is responsible for the heritage he re- ceives from his forebears; all of us are everlast- ingly responsible for the use we make and the care we take of that heritage, and when we increase its perversity and double its power to damage the flesh of our flesh, we sell the most sacred responsibility of our birthright for the mess of pottage. Ignorance formerly excused and still excuses the ignorant; but while knowl- edge is rapidly increasing, the strength of will to put that knowledge into living use is diminish- ing. A few years ago a writer on the question of intemperance would have headed his list of dam- aging indulgences with alcohol. While in no way discounting the frightful toll of nervous wreck- age which alcohol has wrought and is still work- ing, the primary emphasis must be laid upon a more common and seductive enemy. Food intem- perance is a larger factor in producing the damage GETTING EEADY TO BE NERVOUS 29 which results in defective nervous offspring, than any other single cause. Food intemperance in our land of plenty is almost universal. Self- poisoning from overeating produces far greater total damage to nervous health than overindul- gence in alcohol. Excesses in meats, sweets or fats, if habitual and not neutralised by proper exercise, will, within the first or second genera- tion, result in a condition of overacidity, now recognised as one of the most common and funda- mental physical causes of modern nervous irrita- bility. Nations, as well as individuals, are accepting the unquestioned nervous damage of alcohol, used even in moderate amounts. Many appalling and unquestionably distorted statements have been made to frighten the drinker from his cups. But it would seem that when a committee appointed by a government to investigate the harmful effects of alcohol, after an exhaustive study reports that the drinker's life is shortened twenty-five minutes by every glass of alcoholic liquor, even the reckless would hesitate. Six years are knocked off the earthly existence of the average regular drinker. Within his rights, the tippler answers that it is his own life that he is shortening, and if he pleases to so live and die, he alone is hurt. Few so live to-day that they can thus curtail their lives without adding to the burdens of others. But self-damage and ruthless ignoring of kith and kin are insignificant when compared to the very mark of Cain which the alcoholic passes on to the majority of his children. Three out of 30 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS four of the offspring of average drinkers show inherited defects, chiefly of the nervous system. Many an intense, unhappy, miserable, high-strung neurotic of to-day is the defective daughter of a genial, jovial, easy-going, easy-living, old-school gentleman, whose mint juleps of good fellowship burn hot in the brains of his children. Numbers of fearsome epileptics go through lives of fierce uncertainty, the unhappy products of a single ancestral spree. It is the helpless offspring, the little ones brought into a world of strife and work, robbed before birth of that stability which stands for ability, of that poise which is essential to peace, to whom the drinking father or wine- bibbing mother is to be pointed. For the sake of their posterity, either parenthood or alcohol in any form must be denied. No father or mother may indulge, ever so moderately, in this arch poison of the nervous system with any certainty that his or her children will not be nervously marred. Excessive use of tobacco, a habit rapidly grow- ing because of the temporary relief which it gives to the increasing nervous tension of the average individual, like chronic food poisoning, can but deface the delicate nervous mechanism of the off- spring. So the inexorable and . irrevocable laws of heredity should never be forgotten by parents, even as they should never be remembered by children, save as a spur to the individual to stim- ulate him to unusual efforts in self-knowledge and self-control, such unusual efforts in rational living as are necessary to compensate for the accumu- GETTING BEADY TO BE NERVOUS 31 lation of ancestral defects, for the brand of the enemy at life's portal may be effaced by a life of such wholeness of living as will outweigh the damning heritage of ignorant or selfish indul- gence. Home Training. Many children of nervous parents, if transplanted into surroundings where simplicity, law and order prevailed, would surely develop into happy, productive men and women. ( iBut all too often the influences of home surround- ings are but a continuation of the tendencies of heredity.) The neurotic who has learned to live comfortably and successfully with himself is the ^ra^B exception. As a rule, those defects which he has put into the blood of his child are intensified by year after year of injurious personal influence. The family, whether normal or neurotic, is rare indeed, in which true wisdom directs the new- comer's early months. In the average well- regulated family, order and punctuality disappear with the baby's advent, and yet for no one in the household are order and punctuality more needful. A large share of the common waste in care, effort and anxiety attendant upon the early weeks of parenthood would disappear if system and disci- pline were introduced from the first, and labour- saving and strength-giving habits of eating, sleeping, and bathing established. The properly-trained child has become adjusted to his new life by his fourth month a life which should, above all things, stand for quietude and simplicity. The overstimulation of useless, dam- aging attentions grows out of the average parents ' 32 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS forgetfulness that the little one has but recently arrived from a land of sleep arid silence, and their ignorance of the serious facts that its nervous system is as delicate and subject to injury as the bloom on the fruit, and that its needs are the very simplest, chief of which, after proper feeding, are weeks and months of rest and quiet. The hours of prolonged stimulations, the excessive carrying, swinging and rocking, the feverish jolting to which the average baby is subjected, are indeed sufficient reason for many of the addled brains of maturity. By four months the sensibly-reared child has become a model baby, comfortable and happy. Too frequently, how- ever, four months finds him the tyrant of the home, and tyrant the little one remains often through childhood, until hard and wholesome worldly contact displaces his despotism by a tardy recognition of the rights of others. The modern physician gives very explicit and earnest directions to the mother as to her child's feeding, emphasising his admonitions with the statement that over half the children who die from summer complaint were fed to death; and, looking into the child's future welfare, he warns her that the seeds of chronic digestive weaknesses are usually sown during the first twelve or fifteen years of child-life. He cannot lay too great em- phasis upon the benefits, physical and nervous, of wise feeding. Wise feeding is regular feed- ing, is moderate feeding, is the feeding, of simple foods, is the protection of childhood from that long list of unnecessary ailments and ill- GETTING BEADY TO BE NERVOUS 33 nesses which are the penalty of ignorant feeding. Excessive feeding of sweets is the commonest temptation. The richer meats, foods cooked in grease, and above all, foods containing alcohol, should be denied. For the very habit of self- denial, the recognition by the child that there are many things in life which are not for his earlier years, is one of the fundamental lessons in self- control which makes for safety. On the other hand, food antipathies should be early combated. Many scrawny, weak, miserable-looking children, lacking resistance to fight any serious infection, are the irritable, nervous products of cake and chocolates, refusing to eat, and in the minds of their incompetent mothers, unable to eat the simple, wholesome bone and blood producing foods children starving in the midst of plenty. Many children of apparently intelligent families are allowed to grow into maturity untaught in the enjoyment of many wholesome foods, living on diets so limited as to rob them constantly of beneficial food elements. The parent is excep- tional to-day who sees to it that his children learn as a matter of course to eat what is served, including properly-cooked cereals and vegetables, understanding that if not sufficiently hungry for plain food they certainly are not in need of dessert. We are prone to allow the likes and dislikes of our children to run riot, not taking the trouble to see that they are alike wholesome. We do not give them the benefit of mature counsel, guid- ing them from damaging habits of. preference or antipathy. Likes as the years go on become 34 THE MASTEBY OF NERVOUSNESS powerful factors in development; even as the simple dislikes of childhood may grow into habits which keep us from much that is good. The care- ful mother becomes alert when she hears her child's "I don't like." There are dislikes to be taught. Dislike of damaging influences must of necessity be taught, and taught with emphasis; but the more likes we can add to life, the more frequently we can say and feel "I like," the greater will be our supply of comforts. Both industrious and idle mothers are apt to over-protect their children from the exactions of duty. There is little danger of infringing the child-labour act in the modern home. A part of the play-life of even the three-year-old child should include simple duties teaching order. Too often the mother, practising the sin of unselfish- ness, develops a selfish, idle child, a child denied the lasting benefits of productive physical activity, a child whose mind drifts almost inevitably into sentimentalism and cheap romanticism, crowding out common sense and saving reality. Industry can be so early taught as to unconsciously become a habit which would set the seal of success upon many lives now destined to failure, and lay the foundations for happiness in lives now haunted by wretchedness. Exaggerated self-love is as certain to blast the joy of living as the midwinter cold to blight the bloom of the hillside. Self-love early infects the spoiled child through the damaging teachings of doting, selfishly unselfish parents parents lack- ing the will to deny their children those thousand GETTING READY TO BE NERVOUS 35 harmful gifts which unknowing childhood begs; parents lacking the self-control to teach that vital quality to their children; parents too devoid of moral courage to face the issue. To escape a scene, to avoid painful but wholesome and strength-producing discipline, they make conces- sions to their children's whims, concessions which early inculcate a fundamental disregard for law. All too frequently the home is one of double standards, one parent's requirements not being supported by the other, a disparity rapidly recog- nised by the average child and seized upon by him to secure his own way. Few elements so quickly teach a double standard of living in the child him- self one to meet his father's requirements, another for his mother's. And so, early in child- hood, disregard for accuracy and truth and disrespect for authority enter to add to the jangle and conflicts of adjustment, to multiply standards of conduct, and, at the same time, to lower all standards. Another far-reaching home influence, harmful in its productiveness of nervous disorders, is the unwise management by parents of the inevitable little pains incident to childhood hurts. There are pains* big ones to which every worthy par- ent will give quick and feeling sympathy, but the large number of little pains and minor discomforts of daily bumps, falls and knocks, are usually weakly and even harmfully utilised; whereas each one of them should be an opportunity for growth of control, development of resistance and means of strength. The average nervous house- 36 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS hold lives on the qui vive, ready to jump and rush to the rescue in response to every wail; and ten- sion begets tension, and attention begets wails. Such harmful care can only develop exaggeration, and the cries multiply, often becoming more and more unreasonable under the influence of this injudicious attention. The true sympathy that saves is the sympathy which breeds early self- help in the child, and few more valuable lessons are taught our children than those which lead them to rub their own bumps, to extricate them- selves from their own little difficulties, and through all to acquire a tolerance of the disagree- able. All must meet with difficulties. The aver- age child is so protected as to consider a difficulty a disaster. The properly-reared child learns to meet the disagreeable as a matter of course, a thing to be faced and overcome. Children so trained early develop a reserve of control suffi- cient to put many of their elders to shame. All children are unconscious imitators. Just as during childhood days we are particularly prone to infection by contagious diseases, so are all children subject to psychic infection. Impatience, irritability and injustice are dis- tinctly damaging influences, influences which shock the delicate sensibilities of youth. Yet they are defects of conduct early acquired, defects which may become habitual long before ma- turity, and which are almost vitally damaging to nervous stability. These infections produce a fundamental hurt, essentially productive of nerv- ous disorder. They stand for overreaction to GETTING READY TO BE NERVOUS 37 inadequate causes, and when this habit has become fixed, it proves a constant drain upon nervous vitality. Fear is absolutely necessary in the development of the normal mind : fear of that which will harm, fear of filth or evil. But the great mass of fear found in the mind of the average child is but a damaging possession, the result of ignorant or vicious or heartless training. Childhood fears are not instinctive. They are all acquired. The child does not dread the fire until he has been burned. The little one knows nothing of the terrors of the dark until some enemy of his peace has disturbed his rightful faith and serenity with imaginary horrors. It is just as easy to teach a child love for insects and the harmless creeping and crawling things of nature as to fill its mind with useless and harmful dreads and antipathies. Every parent should be alert to know his chil- dren's fears, and quick to dispel all vagueness and to explain away all imaginary sources of terror. He should teach his child to face his fears, to love the dark, to sleep alone, and to feel that the unknown world is peopled with spirits of the good and not of evil. The fear-distraught child is the child of careless, ignorant or heart- less home training. The parents' influence in developing the moral element in the child-life is profound. There are two hurtful extremes. To evolve a wholesome thought-life, all influences which tend to the de- velopment of the spirit of malevolence must be thoughtfully avoided. The wise parent will never 38 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS allow his child to hear unkind criticism or com- ment of any one. Child nature may early be influenced to think evil; to think evil is to feel evil, and to feel evil is to have within a bit of soul- poison. The other extreme, while far less offen- sive in its results, is equally damaging to the individual. Unbending rigidity in training, a relentless hectoring of the child-life with rules and regulations, and permitting no development of personality, if it does not produce an ultimate dare-devil recklessness, will result in a morbid conscientiousness which stands for unending strife and fear. Such conscientiousness produces unrelenting self-analysis, checks real growth, warps and contracts and narrows the joy of life. A taste of liberty, a bit of license, a wee bit of wrong-doing make for ultimate salvation. Education. Sooner or later, the influence of parents is shared by the teacher, and a rich opportunity is given him to impress the benefits of his own personality upon his students. Dull or perverted indeed is the pupil who does not feel the keen, moving stimulation of some early teacher's influence, and unfortunate indeed is the scholar who cannot look back on one or more of his teachers as having slipped into his character some principles which have stood and continue to stand for a stronger, better self. Inevitably, unless he is hopelessly defective, as the child associates at school with a score or more of others representing a wide variety of home training, consciously or unconsciously he is drawn toward staple habits of conduct and thought. Influence GETTING READY TO BE NERVOUS 39 of child upon child and teacher upon all is potent for good or evil. The very fact that one attempts to teach presupposes a special preparation and ability for wholesome, strengthening child-train- ing; but the common ignorance of educators in schools and academies, and even in colleges, of the fundamental laws governing normal mental development, and especially of those equally fundamental laws which underlie mental disorder, is appalling. Children of a certain grade are forced to attain certain standards, are forced into a certain mould, and expected to be transformed thereby. Individual needs and defects, heredi- tary tendencies, and the weaknesses of faulty home training are but vaguely recognised. It is "Make your grade, " " Attain this standard, " at any cost, and the teacher who is able to pass the largest percentage of his students is accorded best, even though his pupils may have been stim- ulated and forced by rewards or demerits to build upon defective foundations. The higher the grades, the more intense is the forcing process. In high school, and more decid- edly in college, many pupils are mechanically grinding through their tasks, remembering masses of facts for examination day. Straining, struggling and striving in the face of hazy mental living, many students acquire a stitfce of super- ficial knowledge, and at the same time damage their minds through chronic mental indigestion, an indigestion which can only produce an early mental exhaustion; inattention alternates with spasmodic spurts of strained attention, as the 40 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS pupil victim ebbs and flows onward through his forced process of learning. In the system in vogue throughout our land, facts are piled upon facts, instead of careful, rational teaching of principles and insisting upon the development of reason and not of mechanical memory, of the acquisition of truth and not the accumulation of knowledge. There is much education which does not educate ; education which crams the mind with glittering superficialities and generalities; educa- tion which under analysis shows defect after defect in mental construction; education which does not develop the will and reason, which stand for strength and character, for truth and resist- ance. There is education which all too often breeds an excess of individualism, based upon a snobbery of learning. The burden of education is increasing with the years, with the multipli- cation of sciences and the demands of educators who, in their pride of scholastic standards, have long since forgotten the needs of the scholar, and ignorantly or arbitrarily employ methods which are not only multiplying our neurotics, but are increasing the proportion of the insane holding college degrees at an alarming rate. Much edu- cation, especially in our higher women's col- leges, stands for an intensity of application, for prodigious expenditure of unrelenting effort through the formative years of life, carried out in utter disregard of the individual needs or weak- nesses of the student. As a result, thousands of inadequate minds are annually being sacrificed on the altar of higher education. CHAPTER V EATING ERRORS Relation of Food to Body, There are a few conditions in the individual's life which he is powerless to modify, or at best is limited in his ability to control. Man is a passive being from the viewpoint of his heredity and the influence of his earlier surroundings. Otherwise he is, or should be, his own master, and few there are who can justly contemn Fate for the total discrepancies of their lives; for many weaknesses ascribed to heredity, and more deficiencies charged to our early training, can slowly but certainly be eradicated, supplemented, or adjusted by rational and resolute living. In the chapters which fol- low, those numerous elements in the art of normal living which play an essential part in the pro- duction, prevention, or cure of nervous suffering will be practically discussed. In dealing with these important, these vital questions of living, the individual is an independent, active agent. In the large majority of lives, when all has been said, we discover that man, through his ignorance or indulgence, has been his own worst enemy. But the laws producing nervousness are now be- coming so well understood, and most nervous sufferers are so subject to distinctly helpful in- fluence, that he is deficient indeed who cannot 41 42 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS be rescued if he will but earnestly and sincerely learn, and having learned, honestly and persist- ently do. No conception of man's nervous needs is ade- quate which does not consider his physical, mental and moral natures, and no study of nervously suffering man is just which does not recognise the unity of his nature, and the intimate, unceasing interrelation of body, mind and soul. In the following pages the essential principles damag- ingly affecting him physically, mentally and morally, with the fundamental principles upon which rests health or cure, will be studied. Man's body is a marvellously constructed engine. It takes in carbon in the form of food, and oxygen through his lungs, and in the sub- stance of the billions of living cells which consti- tute his tissues the carbon and the oxygen combine to produce heat and energy. In the healthy body, the relation between the amount of possible force in a given weight of food and the amount of energy derived from that food shows a perfection of utilisation which is the marvel and the envy of the mechanical engineer, unknown in any man- made machine. No other animal is able to make use of so large a variety of foods. Flesh of beast, fish and fowl, leaves of trees, the nests of birds, fruits and flowers, roots and stalks, the juices and the oils of trees and shrubs, the salts of the sea, the minerals of the earth all come to his table; and various and complex manipulations change, modify and blend this great variety of food materials into ten thousand dishes to please his EATING ERRORS 43 palate. Many men, many women, many children live to eat, so this potent engine labours unceas- ingly^never stopping in some of its activities throughout the entire span of life to care for the unending variety of foodstuffs thrown into it for its fuel and its consumption. Through the untold ages of man's history food material was so simple and limited that humanity was forced to strive and toil to attain a sufficiency. The great-grandparents of most of us were still following the Biblical injunction, and earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. Of how few of their descendants is this true to-day, even in a small part! Food is abundant, and the luxuries of a generation past are plentiful. A few syllables uttered to our servant, Electricity, and lo! a banquet such as Solomon in his glory never knew, is before us. The iced cocktail con- tains fruit from the Isle of Pines and cherries from Spain; the stock of the bouillon grew on the plains of Texas and comes frozen from the abattoirs of Chicago; the relishes are from Kussia's inland seas or the sunny shores of Italy, the fish from the coasts of Newfoundland or the waters of the Pacific; the fowl was flying last week over the marshes of the Northwest ; the roast was reared with hothouse care on the great farms of the Middle West; the punch is flavoured with spirits from the Caribbean; the peas are from France, the potatoes from the far-off State of Washington, the corn from Maine; and the salad is prepared from crisp, green stuff expressed from Florida, dressed with oils from France and 44 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS seasoned with condiments from Turkey and Prussia; fruit has been brought from Persia, coffee from Brazil, cigars from Cuba, and wines rich and old from Spain and the Ehine. Thus our dinner! And the sated diner rises with a shrug indicating the commonplace. Steam, elec- tricity and gasoline have brought the world's market to our door, and poor is the family which does not daily enjoy foods which a generation since were considered only possible for the wealthy. High living is becoming a matter of course, and the demands of the palate are multi- plying even faster than the ability of art and the industry of commerce to satisfy them. It would seem that only a miracle-working engine could select from this infinite variety of foodstuffs that which could be used by the body; but in the midst of this apparent chaos of intricacy Science slowly but certainly discloses her simple operative laws ; ten thousand foods are but multi- ples of four primary food elements. Scientifically considered, the digestive apparatus has to deal only with the proteins, such as meats and a few vegetables, including beans; the carbohydrates, that is, the various forms of starch and sugar and their numerous combinations ; and the hydro- carbons, which include the oils and fats of vege- table or animal source. These three organic groups, with the inorganic substances which are called the salts, and water, comprise the entire range of edibles and drinkables as seen by the eye of Science. Simply considered, the most im- portant chemical element of the three organic EATING ERRORS 45 groups is carbon. In the boiler of the heating plant, wood, coal, paste-board, leather, rubber, waste material from a hundred industries may be used to produce heat. Simply speaking, the carbon is the element which burns. Carbon is the chemical which, uniting with the oxygen of the air, produces the heat to furnish comfort and power. And so, practically, man scours the seven seas with his commerce, haunts the recesses of the wilds, ploughs and cultivates and sprays and prunes for ten thousand foods, to the end that he may furnish his body with a bit of carbon, that it may be comfortable and have the force to do. Just as certainly as the steam boiler works more perfectly, produces with more certainty a depend- able quantity of heat and power when fired with wood or coal than it possibly can when stuffed and cluttered and choked with the trash of a hun- dred industries; so the human furnace operates more perfectly with moderate, simple feeding than it possibly can when stuffed and cluttered, yes, and poisoned with food-trash of a hundred prov- inces. Food Damage. Every hour of life the tissues demand food. Through many generations our an- cestors were forced by ever-impending starvation to constant food-seeking. Through necessity and cultivation the human palate has become a gor- mand, an insatiable gormand, and with individual and nation the days of plenty have been days of feasting, and gorging is common at social festivi- ties of high and low. The human palate knows not reason. The puling infant turns from its 46 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS natural food to the sugar-teat, while Thomas Parr, one of England's oldest men, died a few hours after his 152nd birthday dinner,- his king's guest, from over-eating. Few individuals are so blessed with a protective animal instinct that they do not need the help of educated reason to modify the demands of their palates. True scientific knowledge of the value and harm of foods, and the food needs of the body in health and disease, is of but comparatively recent acquisition. The volume of suffering, direct and indirect, and the toll of human illness and death growing out of errors in eating are too monumental for com- prehension. Slowly, all too slowly, and not any too surely, the knowledge is growing that a shamefully large proportion of human ailments is the result of ignorance, indifference, or indulgence in eating; and all sorts of remedies are being introduced. The shelves of the pharmacist fairly groan with digestive aids, tablets and elixirs and wines and powders galore, all intended to let greedy man eat as he pleases, to relieve him of the immediate discomforts of his gluttony, to put off the evil day of reckoning. Food faddists have developed by the score. There are meat eaters even raw meat eaters and those whom eating meat "doth grievously off end. " There is the uncooked food crank, while fearsome souls invest in fireless cookers that the food may cook all night. Some would restrict diet to nature's crude products, and feed mankind on fruits and nuts and herbs, while others teach that if you will but chew, and chew, and chew, it makes little EATING ERRORS 47 difference what you chew. Some condense their food to liquid and tablet form, some to wafers and buns guaranteed to educate their digestive tract "how to perform;" while still others fairly drown their interiors with imported waters of rare digestive quality all of which says eloquently to him who thinks, that there is a world of dis- comfort growing out of the food question. All of these food faddists could only exist in the presence of a vastly larger number of food errors. Medical Science has had so many problems to meet problems involving tragedies of accident, infection and death-bearing contagion, problems which have only within the last generation been solved, problems which demanded the best of medical skill and science until they were mastered that but recently has she turned her attention to the equally vital but less dramatic problem of diet. The day has now arrived when the in- dividual's food needs can be accurately estimated, and diet directions of almost mathematical exact- ness be given. For some generations empirical efforts have been made to influence disease through diet, but even yet the great underlying principle of the relation of food to work is practically unconsidered by either physicians or laity. The fireman recognises that the best boiler steel will not withstand unwise firing; but to-day ministers, jurors, professors of philosophy and science, physicians, artists, and even our wives and mothers, are digging their graves with their teeth. One of the most marked tendencies of modern life is the rapid substitution of nervous 48 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS for muscular work. The food requirements for the day-labourer, the athlete, the trapper and the farmer are distinctly different from those of the professional man, the business man, the student and the housewife, but how few recognise this! The banker at forty-five is eating the buckwheat cakes and sausage, the fried potatoes and boiled ham, the mince pies and quince preserves that gave strength to his farmer father and to his own boyhood activities, and at forty-eight he is dead of Bright 's. The Southern merchant knows nothing so good as the hot bread, yellow with soda, and saturated with its chunk of melted butter, swimming in t ' black-strap " or home-made sorghum, his vegetables soggy with greasy "pot- licker, ' ' his steaks cut thin and fried black in lard, buried in onions and burning hot with pepper. Mr. Merchant's financial successes are of little use, as at fifty he is a nervous wreck, hopelessly damaged by foods prepared by his negro cook foods fitted for her and her field-hand husband. Active physical work with its constant using of muscular tissue, its demand for deep breathing and constant throwing off of poisons through the perspiration, requires rich foods, scientifically spoken of as highly- organised foods. For muscle- workers, meats, fats and richer sweets are prac- tically essential certainly rarely harmful; but for the nervous worker and such are practically all our women, whose daily use of muscular force does not equal that of an active two-year-old child foods of this nature are dangerous, and usually damaging. EATING ERRORS 49 Some individuals inherit exceptionally strong digestive systems. They eat heartily and appar- ently are never hurt by any excesses at the table full-blooded, robust, usually good-natured, happy souls. The large surplus of food taken in but not used in active effort is cared for by re- markably competent organs of elimination. The liver, kidneys, skin and the muscles also carry the burden of garbage incineration so perfectly as to keep the system free from damaging accumula- tions. Such men and women are becoming less common. Their children do not usually inherit equal digestive strength. Unquestionably, there are humans who can eat recklessly and at will without apparent damage, but many of them go off suddenly at about sixty with a stroke. The doctor knows that something burst in the brain. Some boilers go the same way. In others food excesses pile up rapidly in the form of fat. It is surprising what a small amount of nutrition will furnish them all the necessary energy for their sedentary lives and still show a surplus in the form of many, many undesired pounds. One of the fortunate individuals is he whose stomach rebels and continues to rebel at its misuse and abuse. Its owner fairly curses it for its protest. He blames it morning, noon and night for its faithful efforts to tell him that he has been seduced by his palate. It is a bit difficult, however, to impress the average dyspeptic with a due sense of gratitude to his protesting stomach. If he but knew, he is fortunate. He is being warned daily and chronic stomach indigestion is not fatal. 50 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS Too often this organ meekly does its part, grind- ing away like some insensate machine, and pass- ing on to the intestines material for which the body has absolutely no need. Many men and women, generally intelligent, who have suffered for years from unrecognised stomach indigestion, will speak with pride of their ability to eat any- thing. "I have the digestion of an ostrich; noth- ing ever hurts me," they will say when fairly reeking with the poisons of food decomposition in the intestinal tract. Now and then, in the more sensitive make-up, chronic loss of appetite, even aversion to food, is an indication of the great damage which has already been done by errors in eating. A more or less crude understanding of the con- dition of chronic self -poisoning, technically termed autointoxication, has entered the minds of most magazine readers. Hazy, and often distorted and inaccurate, the fears bred by this knowledge may be as harmful as the condition itself. The simple truth should be brought forcibly and clearly to all who would be well, that perfect health cannot be maintained without an intelligent regulation of the quality and amount of food and the nature and amount of exercise. When this balance is broken, the door is open for many of the ills to which flesh is heir ills usually quite remote from any intimate connection with stomach, liver, pan- creas or intestines. A number of the most chronic, distressing and disfiguring skin diseases are primarily the result of autointoxication, and the specialist has no hope of treating them EATING ERRORS 51 successfully save through a proper regulation of diet and exercise. Many sufferers from catarrhal conditions of the nose, throat and other mucous surfaces are paying a penalty for unwise food indulgence. The irritating poisons within the system have produced irritating secretions the basis of these catarrhal inflammations. The army of the thin and bloodless, or sufferers from anaemia and malnutrition, are underfed through overeating. Excess of foods and wrong foods ferment or putrefy, and instead of wholesome, vitality and blood-producing elements being ab- sorbed, daily doses of blood and tissue poison are taken up. 1 1 Biliousness " rightfully merits the gentle appellation of "hoggishness" far too often. The work of the liver is to further the process of digestion, to take from the food-material which has undergone stomach and intestinal digestion, elements which would be damaging to the system if allowed to circulate in the blood, and to convert these poisonous substances into bile, which is re- turned to the intestinal tract, a definite aid to normal digestion. In biliousness the liver has been overworked by the demands put upon it. It has failed to successfully convert all this toxic material into bile, and the patient is miserable and temporarily ill because he is poisoned by his own poisons, because he has overpowered the guard at the gate. Again, autointoxication produces premature old age, which is manifested by an early hardening of the arteries, frequently resulting in apoplexy, with death or paralysis. The large percentage of 52 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS Bright 's disease develops from damage to the kidneys through the constant irritation of the toxins which are but the logical result of food excess. When skin, liver arteries and kidneys suffer toxic damage, what is to be expected of the more vulnerable nervous system! The headaches and backaches, and not infrequently the wearing, nagging foot pains usually attributed to weakened arches, are but the appeals of nerves capable of evincing pain, protesting that their sensitive end- ings are being bathed in fluids unfit for health, announcing, with the emphasis of acute physical discomfort, that there is a secret enemy in the household. Much physical torture and intensity of suffering, criminally relieved by the deadening smother of morphin or other powerful drugs, are but agonised appeals of chronically irritated sen- sory nerves for less damaging food to corrode, or more oxygen to burn up these vicious poisons. And this is but a partial list of the suffering through eating errors. The basis of all physical life is a substance called protoplasm, not unlike the white of egg. The chief part of the cells of the body, hence the bulk of the body itself, is composed of this sub- stance. It is in the substance of the protoplasm that all physical and most chemical activities take place. The tears are formed by the protoplasm of certain special cells ; the tireless beating of the heart is possible because of the living protoplasm in a different kind of cell. Thought and will and feeling are reactions which take place in the proto- plasm of highly specialised nerve cells. Chemi- EATING ERRORS 53 cally it has been found that a slight degree of alkalinity is essential to the normal life of this primary and vital tissue substance. A very- slight change in the chemical reaction of the fluids of the body results in a disturbance of the well- being of the protoplasm. It is imperative that blood, lymph and other fluids which go to nourish and protect the body be always moderately alka- line in reaction. If the body fluids or tissues become even slightly acid, death of part, or death of body quickly results ; and so, chemically speak- ing, health is possible only when the balance between the acids, and the bases, as alkaline sub- stances are called, is delicately and accurately maintained. Excess of alkali and dominance of acidity are alike fatal. The latter condition is called acidosis, and the tendency of many food excesses is to decrease the alkalinity of the tissues and so to break that vital chemical balance which is necessary for health and even for life. Every mouthful of food taken is a chemical influence. Some foods are base- or alkaline- forming; others, acid-forming. Meat is the most generally used of the proteid foods by our race. All meats are acid-producing. Of the carbohy- drates, sweets in excess of the actual need of the system, and of hydrocarbons, overindulgence in fats or oils as well, result in overacidity. While the fatal condition of acidosis is rarely met, a modified form called subacidosis, in which there is a marked decrease in the alkaline reserve and a lessened ability of the tissues to resist the dam- aging influence of acids, is a condition found in 54 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS the average sedentary individual. Subacidosis is a logical, chemical basis for nervousness, whether manifested in the form of the torturing neural- gias and sensory pains referred to, or in the excessive nervous irritability which seems to make physical restlessness imperative and to rob the sufferer of muscular control, or in the form of the chronic weariness of nervous exhaustion. Whatever its manifestations, the physical damage of nervousness is practically always due to a self- intoxication in which the vital alkalinity of the sensitive protoplasm forming the nervous tissue has been reduced. This damage, to repeat a truth which should be shouted from the house-tops, may be avoided only by maintaining that essential chemical equilibrium possible through a correct balance of food and exercise, of fuel and draft in the furnace. Let us realise that it is not the meat we eat or do not eat, it is not the excess of sweets, bonbons, preserves or syrups, it is not the grease kneaded into our biscuit or fried into our steaks that maims, pains, weakens and finally kills, but it is the years of lack of balance between food and exercise, between fuel and fire ; the difference between the clean, alkaline ash of complete oxi- dation and the clinkers and soot and acid smudge of the choked furnace with defective draft. The inorganic substances taken with our food affect our well-being through the laws of physics, as well as through the laws of chemistry. The circulating fluids of the body must not only main- tain a specific chemical reaction, but a definite density. Water, while possessing no food value, EATING ERKORS 55 is vitally essential to feeding, as no food which is not soluble can be used by the cells ; and numbers of the most damaging poisons to the system are removed in the excretions, after being dissolved in water. Water is the indispensable vehicle for carrying food to the tissues, and for removing tissue waste. Protoplasm is quickly disorganised by pure water. A little more than one-half of one per cent, of ordinary salt, however, added to water makes a solution in which protoplasm thrives. Over seventy per cent, of the body weight is water water containing six-tenths of one per cent, of salt. Silver and even gold are eagerly exchanged, weight for weight, for salt, in communities remote from adequate supply ; for without salt fatal weaknesses soon supervene. On the other hand, excess of salt in food, or lack of water with food, increases the density of the fluids of the body, and interferes with many of the finer processes of nutrition. Consequently many suffer nervously, because through high seasoning their taste has become perverted, and they are constantly overusing salt. This damage would be greatly lessened if quantities of water were also taken, but underdrinking is a common fault of the nervous, particularly among women. The guest is rather exceptional with intuition so fine as to compliment the preparation of the food by accepting his host's standards of seasoning as his own. It is usually a shower of salt and a cloud of pepper on every dish, even before it has been tasted. The habit of overseasoning has be- come so ingrained in many that all delicacy of 56 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS taste and sensitiveness of palate have long since disappeared. The injury to stomach and kidneys is probably more practically harmful than the hurt to one's manners. Tea and coffee in moderation can be cared for without harming the system of the average healthy person. They both contain a chemical substance caffein which in excess is a poison damaging alike to heart and nerves. Their effect in large quantities, like that of alcohol and tobacco, is to produce an artificial sense of adequacy, of ability, of strength ; to temporarily eradicate the sense of fatigue. And the inadequate, the ones with the least reserve, in their impatient or ignorant seek- ing for that which will bring quick comfort, are usually the tea and coffee topers, enslaved by their so-called "temperance cups." Food and Morals. The day has now come when each individual can have the benefit of accurate scientific advice as to food restrictions. The rapid increase in the damage from errors in eating, with the perfecting of dietary knowledge, is hastening the day when an enlarging number of the nervous, particularly, will seek and follow saving counsel. Were the damage limited to the physical effects, the evils of eating should be sufficiently serious to arouse the thoughtful to protective action; but just as alcohol sends its curse echoing through the generations, so food poisoning is adding its burden, a burden of mental and moral inferiority, to our race. One of the earliest advances in necessary re- formation will be made in the kitchen. The good EATING ERRORS 57 housewife may select the food for her flock with all the wisdom of the physician prescribing for a critically ill patient, and have her plans for the strength and safety of her family wrecked by the cook. The abominations perpetrated under the name of cooking are legion. Overcooking will convert nutritious meats into modified raw-hide. Eggs emerge from some kitchens about as digest- ible as chamois-skin. Breads and pastries are served in a consistency differing little from putty. The delicacy of flavour and the nutrition is cooked out of soups, and the most delicate foods come to the table saturated with greases which have been rendered nutritionally impossible through overheating and the liberation of their fatty acids. Fruits and desserts are sticky with sugar; salt, pepper and other condiments are used in excesses which cause actual pain to the normal palate. Food so prepared is practically incapable of diges- tion by the normal stomach, until it is overstimu- lated by pepper or whipped up with alcohol. Thousands of periodic drunkards begin a spree, unconsciously seeking in alcohol a temporary ap- pease from the nervous harassings growing out of their inability to assimilate the unconscious criminality of the kitchen. The average wife of such an unfortunate would resent with indignation the charge that she was largely responsible for her husband's humiliating drunkenness. Not only does ignorant cooking frequently produce the craving for alcohol, the demand for the sooth- ing, either of nicotine or drugs, or the ever-return- ing call for the " pick-me-up " of strong tea or 58 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS coffee, but it is to-day, and has been through gen- erations, actively creating immorality. The re- lation between the immoral, and nervous insta- bility, will always be a close one. The old drunkard philosophised well when he complained, "The neighbours always talk of my drinking, but they never speak of my drought. " He certainly knew the meaning of that depression, that crav- ing, that insistent demand which autointoxication lays upon the nervously unstable. CHAPTER VI THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY Man Created for Activity. The problem of physical exercise did not concern primitive man. For him inactivity meant a prompt departure for the land of the unknown. Upon his strength, his agility, his speed, hung the thread of his precar- ious life. To him Nature said, "Work or starve, fight or die, run or be eaten." Archeologists are daily uncovering evidences of the almost unbeliev- able work of primitive man's hands; but the testimony of Egypt's pyramids and the stone cities of Peru discloses but a minute portion of his productive handiwork. "Fight or be killed, " and with bare hands he wrestled with the beasts of the wilds; and with every man's hand at his throat it was for him to possess powerful, hardy muscles, or succumb. Ever hunted by biped, quadruped and crawling thing, with little pro- tection in his cave home or stone shack, the future of many generations rested in his speed and en- durance. The question of muscular exercise for our remote forefathers was well seen to by Mother Nature. Work, work, work has been the insis- tently reverberating cry of human necessity since things went wrong in Eden; and what a mass of it there has been and still is for man to do ! In 59 60 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS how magnificent a home of opportunities was he placed, and how superbly was he equipped in body and mind with capacities which have developed ability and energy rivalling that of his own ancient gods! Our brawny ancestors endowed their children with physiques built largely of purposeful muscle. When we examine the body, we find it half muscle, unless overweighted with fat or shrunken and shrivelled by disuse or misuse half muscle, and most of this active tissue is under the direct com- mand of man's will. The voluntary muscles, when normal, are eager to do his bidding, and to perform for him an ever-increasing variety of pro- ductive and pleasurable movements. A Great "Wisdom, however, was evidently concerned about man's tenure of earthly existence, and so placed certain vital processes requiring muscular move- ment in charge of the brain, yet independent of the conscious action of will. The ceaseless activities of the heart, the life-long throb of the blood-carrying vessels, much of the ebb and flow of breathing and of the necessary transfer of food from one department of digestion to another these and other activities essential to human life take place through the action of the so-called in- voluntary muscles, subject to no direct control by the will. But essential as muscular movement is to the carrying out of man's multiform activities, this remarkable tissue has other scarcely less import- ant uses uses unthought by the average mind. THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 61 Food and oxygen are brought through the blood to the muscles, where they unite, producing heat and power. The demand of the muscles is the legitimate call for a large part of the food actually needed by the human body, and muscle activity instantly and persistently demands an increased intake of oxygen. The muscle tissue is man's great consumer of food and air, which within the muscle cells are transformed into human energy. Muscle is not only the furnace ceaselessly turn- ing food and air into warmth and power and reserve strength, but it is the body's incinerator, burning into harmless ash the nerve-nagging toxins which so quickly form through indulgence and inactivity. Much that would be noxious to brain, nerves and other delicate tissues of the body, is oxidized into harmlessness within the cells of healthy muscle tissue. From the standpoint of general health, of resistance to infection, of that rare chronic sense of strength and well-being, of the development of an increasing reserve of power, muscles properly fed and energetically used constitute the vitality-giving tissues of the body. Use is good for muscles. Many months before birth the tiny heart begins to pulsate, and seventy-five times a minute throughout life, its daily contractions representing the lifting force of a powerful engine, it works on and on, often continuing its faithful pulsating hours or days after other vital forces have ceased. The heart is but a hollow muscle, but all of man's victories rest in the tireless persistence of its action. 62 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS The relation of the will to the strength and de- velopment of the voluntary muscles is intimate. They remain soft, inactive, sluggish, an increas- ing menace to his well-being, till commanded to act, to exert, to grow strong by work. The master man has attained much of his health, his inde- pendence of fatigue, his superiority to disease, his fearlessness in action, his resoluteness in decision, his calm confidence of conscious reserve, through the years of interaction of will, muscle and work. Man was created for activity for a thousand, yes, for many thousand activities ; and only in action, and rarely except in productive action, does he find the satisfaction which comes through the conscious fulfilment of purpose, and that gratified sense of completeness gained through accomplishment. Brain, will, muscle only attain their highest development and great- est power through use earnest, active, intensive use. In due time our ancient forefathers discovered easier ways of disposing of their enemies than by cracking their skulls with cobble-stones at short range; and since that eventful day man's wits have never ceased devising new means of tickling Nature into smiling productiveness, of killing his neighbour at longer and longer dis- tances, until to-day, in the trenches of war, huge cylinders of steel vomit forth tons of explosives to destroy his unseen foe at the edge of the hori- zon. By one stab at the vitals of his sea-going palace a torpedo sends a thousand unconscious lives gurgling to death. Steam and electricity THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 63 are whirling his engines of peace and war through space, across the continents and skimming the surface of the deep with the speed of the tornado. It seems that man's wit has made his muscle of little importance. When ages ago, with a thong about its lower jaw he subdued the beast of the field, the pride of mastery and possession began its devitalising work of rendering him brain- proud. Since that day ever-increasing numbers have returned from the blessings of activity to the pride of indolence, and each century of brain- mastery has lessened the necessity for muscle use and increased the aristocracy of idleness; and humankind, still in its youth, still facing its hun- dreds of centuries of maturity, is growing tired. Tired men, tired women, tired children are about us. Tired faces greet us in the morning; tired voices complain through the work hours; tired and mirthless laughter is heard at the play. The penalty of generations of physical neglect is being exacted. Man is wearied, fatigued, exhausted, because he has not worked. Fatigue Versus Exhaustion. Within a short generation only have Science and educators raised the voice of authority against the certain evils of physical inactivity. The growing influence of wise counsel has multiplied gymnasiums in col- lege, city and town, is popularising golf, tennis and other sports ; while in more and more homes daily time is devoted to constructive physical activity. Herein exists a prediction that our grandchildren may find rest. There is much ignorance connected with our generation's weari- 64 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS ness. Daily fatigue of muscle is the natural basis for appetite, sleep and strength. Daily fatigue 4 is not only harmless, but so essential as to be moral. Food unearned through body activity is a drug to the system; sleep which does not come as a reward of tasks earnestly done is often but an enervating period of insensibility; while no man or woman can know the keen joy of exuberant strength who has not felt the heavy, drowsing hand of fatigue. Normal fatigue is as harmless as the quiet of night, and the sober drapings of worthy weariness but hide the growing form of reserve of power. Energy surplus develops through those daily activities which mean acute, even sheer, physical fatigue. Thousands who complain of being chronically tired are but describing weakness. Their weariness is a weak- ness which has never been replaced by that strength which comes to many latter-day men and women only through consistent, persistent mus- cular doing. Fortunate is the intelligent man whose will commands that his fatigue be no excuse for inactivity. Normal muscular fatigue of the healthy body should be soon followed by a sense of well-being and eager buoyancy, which to possess is to half master the ills of life. Most of the " tired " and " tired-out " are either chronic loafers of life or the nervously-exhausted sons and daughters of toxic or emotional excess; but " weariness " and "fatigue" are to-day terms much too mild to express their feelings. "Exhaustion" "utter and complete exhaustion" follows the trip to town shopping; exhaustion is THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 65 the " morning after" result of the evening's entertainment; is the mistress ' aftermath of a wordy misunderstanding with her servant; it follows as a shadow modern under-developed lives through useful and useless activities. Muscular " exhaustion, " even when quite complete, is rare, and seldom serious in its effects. Unaccompanied with mental or emotional disturbance, and in the absence of severe organic disease, recovery quickly follows the temporary incapacity of even extreme physical effort. The offices of the neurologists are crowded with those who have come to seek relief for their nerves relief chiefly for the damage done by "over- work. ' ' Among a hundred one may be found who has gone through years of pent-up drudgery, generously self-sacrificing, patiently striving to make ends meet, probably the while suffering from defective food oxidation. Most of the others are inherently weak because they have never developed power, or are poisoning their powers of endurance by excesses at the table or at the bar ; or belong to that larger group daily scatter- ing their strength broadcast by the friction of worry, or the devitalisation of fear, or the de- moralisation of wrong-doing. Overwork, when work is rightly and wisely done, is truly a rare cause for neurasthenia, but nervous exhaustion is common; it is rife in our land. The normal nervous system may resist the damage of the accumulated poisons of inactivity or the energy- leakages of fear and worry through many years. Nervous exhaustion in the average person, even 66 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS in the face of misuse, abuse or disuse, comes slowly; it is recovered from slowly. Normal muscular fatigue may be produced in a few min- utes or hours, and disappears with a short period of rest. The nervous system resists its surrender through the years, ofttimes until abuses have become habits habits so insistent and clinging that in re-education alone may the neurotic find restoration. The Penalty of Inactivity. We have seen that muscle in the average man is half his body weight, a living tissue intended for active, ener- getic use fifty to a hundred pounds of strength, vitality and joy-producing tissue if sanely cared for. But these same muscles hang to many modern bones sluggish, inert, weakness-producing masses of near-decomposition. Unused muscle tissue, like the unstirred water of the swamp, breeds within itself vitiating poisons. This same poison-infected swamp-water, allowed to dash down the mountain side, is soon lashed and oxidized into refreshing purity even so may toxic muscles be purified by that use which daily wrings every drop of fluid from their structure, leaving them eager for constructive food and oxygen. The toxins of inactivity are akin to the toxins of food-indulgence, and these two poison groups ac- count for much that makes man physically and nervously miserable, and go far to rob him of comfort and ambition, of ease of mind and peace of soul. Within these pounds of flesh abides a dynamo which, wisely operated, converts food into strength, yokes the carbon and oxygen into ever- THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 67 returning power, and destroys to a vestige many lurking dangers. These pounds of tissue may be made man's open friends; in all too many bodies to-day they are his secret enemies. Physical health should be but a simple matter. With the daily balancing of food and exercise all is well, and all should stay well through a long and comfortable span of useful years. But underused bodies and overused brains tell the story of a world of nervous suffering, tell the story of many incapacitating and pain-producing organic diseases, and should be the epitaph on many tombstones of those who die at forty-five and fifty. Ignorance, indolence, cheap pride, sentimentalism, excess of plenty, love of ease and the mastery of pleasure stand between man and the simple law of physical health, which com- mands that his muscles earn what he eats. The food necessary for nervous use is of the simplest kind. Such food in small amounts will supply all the requirements of brain, heart, lungs and glands. Active muscular work, however, calls for food of increased quality and quantity. He who keeps his great muscle bulk active and whole- some may humour his palate with reasonable im- punity. Though well-muscled individuals do go to pieces nervously through other causes than defective food oxidation, the majority of the nervous are muscularly defective. Scrawny muscles and flat chests are common with the nervous, and are almost constantly found in those who suffer from the " blues." A poorly developed chest means 68 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS deficiency of oxygen and a consequent excess of toxin. Men and women whose flabby muscles have received but a small part of their possible development recruit the ranks of the nervous. Many reach maturity, full-grown and practically muscleless, unconscious caricatures of the human physique. Bodies which have been pampered through the first twenty years of life, protected alike from heat and cold, work and developing play, nursed and coddled, too often contain a nervous system tense and distraught, capable of little but expressions of depression, sensitiveness to discomfort and awareness of the pains of exist- ence. Many a girl is robbed in her early teens of much of her chance for lasting health and saving robustness through the carpings of Mrs. Grundy. Her skirts, the enemy of freedom of movement and action, are lengthened, and warnings from mother and maiden aunts doom her to restrictions of action and primness of conduct which early discount the promise of abundant health. To hide a few inches of stocking she becomes a slave of propriety, perchance a victim of muscular non- development. Women to-day are rare whose muscles have come into their fulness. How few are muscularly equipped to safely meet the bur- dens of maternity, or even the wear and tear of a life of self-support! Some feminine men and the majority of modern women fail to prepare themselves for a life of merely average health through hardy muscles. Most men, through the out-door life and active sports, the rough-and-ready games and the give- THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 69 and-take, fight-or-get-licked habits of boys, reach their majority with a fairly useful set of muscles. But the play habit, poorly developed in girls, is rapidly lost in men after twenty; and with an increasing number of successful men practically all work of hands or body is discontinued by middle age, and physically, the remaining days are spent in the midst of the violence and excite- ment of the " tabby-cat life." By forty the average woman is exercising with little but her tongue, and the average man with little but his teeth. There were gods in olden days who sat on old Olympus. To-day there are the voices of Science. Even as Jove struck the jeerer of his powers with sudden death, so to-day the presump- tuous mortal who, through decades of physical indolence and inactivity, jeers at the unalterable truths of Science, jeers at a fate which may strike as suddenly and relentlessly as did mythic Jove. Fat, flabby and forty is written across many a satisfied, vapid, characterless face; while lean, wrinkled and wizened, distorted by years of wasted agitation, those other unhappy faces of neglected oxidation haunt us with their restless misery. Both types are suffering from oxygen hunger. One puffs and waddles through life, doughy with useless fat. The other fusses and fumes, irritable and irritating, knowing and giv- ing no hour of comfort, chronically, miserably, painfully toxic. Neither has ever done any real breathing, for real breathing is done in the muscles. The air enters the lungs and gives up its oxygen to the blood, because it is seeking for 70 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS the food carbon in the tissues, and the bulk of our tissue is muscle. Most brain-workers and such are most of us ministers and clerks, lawyers and stenographers, doctors and merchants, artists and editors, contractors and watch-makers, have no necessity for muscle use. Fed and clothed and enriched through their wits, they steadfastly ignore the call of their biceps. Seeking home and rest for the weakness which is theirs through non-development, buying pills for their pains, for years they creep along the uncertain margin separating their precarious health from nervous wreckage. Whether the cause of one's defective homage to the rational demand of his muscular system be due to the futile pride in inactivity, common to cheap aristocracy, or to the even less worthy inertia of indolence, a constant danger of will damage lurks behind habitual muscular inactivity. Flabby wills often cling to flabby muscles. Many there are, idly busy, occupying themselves with small things, selfishly small things playing at work, deceiving themselves and perchance some others into the belief that they are really useful and industrious. They belong to that strange class with great ideas but small duties those whose converse promises much, whose hands do little, whose ideals soar, whose fingers dabble; or to that almost equally satisfied type whose occupation consists in preoccupation. Whichever the form of high thinking and low doing, the sav- ing, developing sense of reality, that genuine human relationship with facts and truth, is THE PENALTY OF INACTIVITY 71 dimmed, even destroyed. Serious investigation into the nature and character of man reveals the truth that he was created for productive activity. Nature suggests man's immortality by frequently delaying the penalty of the individual's neglect of her laws, but in the life of the individual him- self, or in that of his offspring, her revenge is sure and bitter upon those who ignorantly or persistently defy her laws of activity. CHAPTER VII EATING FOE EFFICIENCY What to Eat. The person is rare who has not recognised self-damage from unwise eating. It may have been but acute indigestion with its burning sour stomach and nausea, or the more miserable sick headache, or the acute, relentless stabs of abdominal pain; or again, the physical heaviness and sluggishness, the mental dulness and inertia which proclaimed harmful indulgence. These acute expressions when accepted as pen- alties may become the incentives to resolutions to avoid this or that food upon which the suspicion rests. But the more insidious effects, the evils of chronic food-poisoning the autointoxications, the subacidosis, the anaemia, the malnutrition, the restless, sleepless nights, the irritable, fretful, impatient days with the inability to relax and to know repose, the nerve-racking neuralgias* these and kindred hosts come to many, the absolutely unrecognised results of eating errors. And each ill and pain robs the sufferer of efficiency, dis- credits the pleasure of living and discounts per- sonal usefulness. Strength of muscle, keenness of intellect, breadth of judgment, beauty of ideation, tenderness of sympathy, are all depend- ent for their proper expression upon a normally 72 EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 73 active nervous system. But the man who is on edge, oversensitive, questioning his own strength, poorly administers his muscle, his intellect and the expression of heart, mind and soul. We have already seen the serious menace to physical whole- ness and nervous stability which abides in the defective handling of food by the tissues of the body. The principles have been repeated and emphasised that food and work, carbon and oxygen, must be balanced; that herein, roughly but unequivocally speaking, rests the chemical basis of nervous efficiency; and nervous efficiency is human efficiency. What to eat? What vistas of thought and what possible answers this query suggests! As these words are written for men and women living in the midst of twentieth century plenty, men and women whose choice alone can constitute the answer, the question is practically simplified, and for them the answer should be found in the voice of reason. But reason is assailed on the subject of food by many teachers. When we recall our axiom that it is not what we eat, but what we eat that is not utilised that does us harm, we readily see that varying individuals with varying inherit- ances, following divers occupations, may eat the rankest extremes of foods and thrive, and by their very health advertise a multitude of diets and menus. It will be several decades before numer- ous intricate problems of the chemistry of the body are adjusted to the complex chemistry of foods, and not until that time will teachers be in agreement. The teachings of this chapter have 74 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS grown out of a quarter century of careful study and intimate experiences with the relation of food to nervous well-being, and while the suggestions contained might not meet with favour at a foot- ball training table, would raise a storm of pro- test in a logging camp, and be turned from with disdain by the hardy, ravenous, harvest hand, yet much of lasting good will be found by men and women whose life's usefulness and efficiency is being robbed by nervousness. For too many years the nervous sufferer has not asked himself, "What shall I eat?" It has always been, "What shall I take?" So drugs have multiplied to lull discordant nerves into a night 's repose drugs which could not feed, could not strengthen, could only stun. Not recognising the intimate relation between food and suffering, many of the nervous have grown less reasonable and more impatient, more insistent, more demand- ing about their food, the appetite being the only voice at the feast to which they have listened; and the appetite is for most of us a creation of habit, the product of youthful training. This mentor at our table is too frequently but an igno- rant, uninstructed desire, ever asserting, "I want what I want when I want it." Let the stall-fed ox break into the field of green corn, and the farmer is in haste to drive him out, to save him from death by ' l foundering, ' ' through the call of the "natural appetite." Yet even enlightened to-day finds us as a nation following the untutored leading of our appetites, not often to sudden death, but to undervalued lives and to curtailed EATING FOE EFFICIENCY 75 lives. Normal appetite is a blessing. The zest for food is one of the joys of life; but it is easily misled, rapidly becomes confused in the midst of excess, and is quite certainly perverted as the result of disease. The farther man departs from the serenity of the primitive life, the more cer- tainly he must rely upon cultured reason, and the less safe does he become under the leadings of desire. Appetite normally reaches a stage of almost irresistible intensity, especially in the boy, during the period of rapid growth and development between thirteen and seventeen. Youth and maid at this time need food, increased quantities of food; and the demand is so urgent that almost anything to eat is good, just so there is enough of it ! During these ravenous years eating habits are largely formed, and often through the future years those dishes " which mother made," prob- ably quite fit and proper for the robust, energetic boy, stimulate the business or professional man or the housewife to food excesses, because of the lasting influence upon appetite of those joyous food associations of youth. Years after the foods needed by the growing body are no longer safe because of changed habits of life, they continue to tickle the palate and this is as far as the average eater thinks. Particularly fatal is that appetite earned by the youth in the gymnasium, in field sports, in the factory or on the farm, which he adopts as his counsellor in the sedentary after-years ; and this single defect in rational eat- ing annually accounts for tens of thousands of 76 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS untimely deaths in the higher ranks of success and usefulness. It would seem that in a matter so vitally connected with health, efficiency and comfort, physician and intelligent layman would be keenly alive to the situation, but the eating abominations go on unrecognised and devastating. In so many departments of life we are looking for and demanding the latest knowledge. Prog- ress and improvement are the order of the day, system is being introduced into factory and office and home that life may be more productive, and yet we eat what we want, many of us never getting away from the food desires and antipathies formed in our youth, and passing on to our chil- dren the same thoughtless methods. Dietary Perversions. 'The appetite may be as unreasonable in its dislikes as in its desires: "I can't eat turnips ;" "I don't like buttermilk ; " 1 1 My appetite does not call for that kind of diet ; ' ' "My mother never could eat eggs;" "I got sick on fish once, and never have tasted any since." Who is free from some food antipathy not an outgrowth of true knowledge, not based upon the laws of nutrition, but the result of a whim, a pre- judice or an accidental dislike? It is common in the treatment of serious nervousness to hear the patient assert his inability to take milk. His mother before him could not drink milk, and he had to be weaned before he was a year old because milk disagreed with him. He does not recognise that he is confessing a fundamental digestive deficiency. Of all known constructive foods, milk is the simplest, the most innoxious, the most EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 77 responsive to normal digestion; and to be unable to handle this simple food indicates a perversion which should cause him to seek counsel. Health will improve hand in hand with the ability to comfortably subsist on milk, and there is no one who cannot be readily taught to benefit by an addition of "milk to his diet, if he will displace antagonism and preconceptions by determination (and Vichy!). It is unfortunate that man's mind is able, even though dimly and inaccurately, to keep track of what is going on in his stomach. Particularly unfortunate is this for the nervous sufferer. We have recognised that there is no sensation which may not be an expression of nervous oversensi- tiveness. Attention to any organ or part only increases our consciousness of its condition and actions. Nervous indigestion so frequently re- ferred to is not in itself a disease. It is but a localised expression of general nervous inade- quacy. The nervousness of nervous indigestion is but the patient's oversensitiveness and in- creased consciousness of what is occurring in his digestive tract, although very often these sensa- tions are increased by the food decomposition of autointoxication or the overacidity of fermenta- tion, for in most instances the nervous patient is a sufferer from defective digestive force. The damage to the patient's nerves growing out of his unwise attention to and concentration upon his stomach and intestines is frequently only less hurtful than that resulting from the food-intoxi- cation. The neurotic's study of what is going on 78 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS below his diaphragm is of a most disconcerting and depressing character, and his investigations but add fuel to his nervousness. There are few nervous dyspeptics who do not early learn the air- swallowing habit the habit of gulping down a mouthful of air and immediately forcing it back in an effort to relieve a heaviness of the stomach. Those having the habit usually protest with emphasis that they do not swallow air, that they are just relieving the stomach of gas, which forms in such quantities that five to thirty minutes are spent after meals "getting rid" of it. Nine-tenths of this so-called gas is noth- ing but swallowed air, gulped down and belched up, a habit easily acquired by humans and horses, and which in the quadruped knocks a cool hundred off his value. The physician who attempts to assist his patient in overcoming this miserable habit usually meets with indignant protests, and with resentment in old offenders who have been playing with their stomachs in this way for ten or twenty years. Some air is always swallowed with food, and in mixing in the stomach acid and alkaline foods, some gas will certainly be formed. The amount of this, however, is comparatively small, and will be spontaneously expelled. The habit of churning air in and out of the stomach is one which proves inevitably damaging. Other nervous dyspeptics complain that every- thing they eat sours. Again we discover that they have been telephoning to their interior when they should have been paying attention to the singing of the birds and the washing of the dishes. EATING FOB EFFICIENCY 79 But when the wise doctor assures them that a normal stomach is sour, he is usually thought, if not called, a fool. Yet he is right. The gastric juice is literally as "sour as vinegar. " It con- tains hydrochloric acid, and the man whose stom- ach lacks this intensely sour acid is in a bad way. But another says: "My stomach is as sour as vinegar and as bitter as gall. I cannot conceive that this is a natural condition.*' Yet the daintiest morsel of the breast of the quail must become ' ' as sour as vinegar and as bitter as gall, ' ' or the stomach has failed in its duty. All pro- tein foods, when normally acted upon by the gastric juice, are converted into an acid, sour, intensely bitter fluid called peptone. Air-swal- lowers are very prone, in their mischievous man- ipulations of their internals, to bring up portions of partially or completely digested food, sour and bitter; thoroughly convinced that everything inside is hopelessly and totally wrong, they pile in soda mints or digestive elixirs to correct an already normal digestion. There are sour stomachs which stand for fer- mentation and not for normal digestion. Ex- cesses in most sweets frequently result in a sour- ness which is vinegar in truth, while in the overloaded stomach the oils and greases may undergo changes similar to those which occur in the formation of rancid butter, liberating irri- tating and damaging acids. Let the poor sufferer cease his unpleasant, ignorant and harmful investigations of his stomach, and realise that gas and acid and bitterness are normal in the 80 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS healthiest and strongest during digestion. These same unwise and inquisitive peepers into Nature's business are apt to make the eventful discovery that they cannot drink milk without its being turned into curds. Neither could Adam (if he got any), nor Ham, nor Moses, nor Napoleon, nor the healthiest baby nor the biggest-muscled athlete. Nature provides the stomach with a special secretion having no other purpose than to curdle milk into nice, fine curds, which melt in the normal gastric juice as a snowflake on the cheek of health. The amount of damaging anxiety which comes to mothers of normal babies who, in the midst of health and plenty and unseasonable shakings, gurgle and smilingly laugh out a mouth- ful of soft curds, is only surpassed by the self- harm done by self-centred grown-ups who have paid more attention to their stomach's business than to their own. So again a little knowledge becomes a danger- ous thing. A few misinterpreted truths and food superstitions limit and pervert the eating habits of thousands of our otherwise intelligent and progressive neighbours. Too many of the nerv- ous do daily homage at the altars of their stomachs that would put to shame the zeal of the Hindoo devotee before his clay god. Sooner or later all should wisely adjust the balance between food and work, but the nervous should be advised with emphasis either to remain profoundly igno- rant of any knowledge of their digestive processes, or to seek and be guided by wise professional counsel. From our previous discussion it should EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 81 be clear to the victim of nerves that through a wise choice of food he may materially assist in overcoming his nervousness. He will recognise the necessity of making some definite changes in his eating habits, of substituting likes for dis- likes, and of emphasising his self-mastery through denial. CHAPTER VIII EATING FOR EFFICIENCY Continued Right Use of Sweets. The first nutritional damage which later develops nervousness most frequently has its origin in the abuse of sweets. This type of food, when needed, is one most quickly and economically converted into energy. Most of the sweets are readily soluble, and the digestive processes necessary to prepare them for the tissues are comparatively simple. Through the ages, however, sweets were relatively rare. Honey and the fruits were sufficient to provide mankind with but a small percentage of what he could have profitably and healthfully used, and so the desire for sugar acquired an intensity which is now a human characteristic. Within recent generations, only, have systematic planting and improved processes of agriculture, with economi- cal methods of extraction and purification, ren- dered this food, once worth its weight in silver, as cheap as the proverbial dirt. Never had man- kind so bountiful a supply of sweets, and never so little need for this form of food as to-day. The inherited love of sweets is so strong, the evidences of the joy they bring our children so obvious, and the deliciousness of the multiplied forms in which they are now prepared so un- y EATING FOB EFFICIENCY 83 questioned, that it is small wonder that children, large and small, are overfed with them. Sugar in endless variety tempts young and old at every turn, though needed only in limited amounts by the muscle-worker, and in decidedly less quantity by children and all who are living lives of nervous and mental activity. The damage from abuse of this appealing and seductive food may be far- reaching. Sweets in excess may keep the_entire digestive tract in a^state of acidity, an acidity which provides the soil for the growth and devel- opment in the small intestines of germs which normally have no place in the body excepting in the lower bowel. Thus through excessive eating of sweets many children grow into maturity with their intestinal digestion perverted through years of overindulgence in candy, cakes, syrups, over- sweetened fruits, cereals and "what not." Girls of the boarding-school age in their budding love- liness are the natural objects of love missiles delectable two- and five-pound boxes of chocolates and bon-bons. To eat before bedtime a half- pound of the richest sweets that can be devised by the confectioner's art is no stunt for our modern maid. Yet she has swallowed a half- pound of highly concentrated food, useless in producing constructive tissue, but capable of elab- orating force and heat sufficient food to provide the strength and bodily warmth necessary for two days' arduous labours for a Chinese coolie. What is the effect of such masses of high-potency foods in the undeveloped digestive organism of the brain-working girl but to waste digestive 84 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS force, to clog the organs of elimination, to slowly but surely corrode the vital machinery? A certain ignorant conception of sweets places them as the opposite of acids. Sweet is certainly the antagonist of sour as recorded by the palate, but the palate knows no chemistry. The citric acid of the lemon, orange and the grapefruit becomes an alkaline citrate in the fluids of the body, if given a decent chance. But the palate says the grapefruit is acid and the sugar is sweet, therefore, neutralise the sour of the grapefruit by the sweet of the sugar. We have already learned that excess of sugar, sweet though it may be as it slips between palate and tongue, deliciously succulent, as a matter of fact rapidly becomes vinegar if taken in excess. Many who for years have denied themselves the morning orange or grapefruit because of its objectionable " acidity " will find that this will disappear if they eat their fruits unsweetened by sugar this, of course, provided they can accept the statements of science on this question, because when all has been said and done, the nervous sufferer is largely con- trolled by his beliefs ; and we have just seen that he can always find acid in his stomach, if that will prove his case. Living lives of muscular disuse and nervous stress as most of us do these days, with sweets offered us in such excess of our real needs for even so valuable a food, it would be well for us to adopt a few simple rules for our protection. One spoonful or one lump to the cup of tea or coffee, none on our cereal, and the avoidance of EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 85 f rait that is not sufficiently sweet to be eaten un- sugared, candy only in the place of dessert and the avoidance of all richly sweetened dishes these restrictions will help much in our fight for efficiency. Many youthful ills would not appear if children were protected from the formation of the sweet crave, at least until the secondary muscular development of puberty provides the furnace needed. A few weeks of resolute self- denial on the part of any one seriously desiring to escape the mastery of sweets for this abuse develops a craving not unlike that for tobacco or alcohol will result in a gratifying realisation of the rapidity with which the appetite will learn to enjoy moderately sweetened foods. A child properly reared in reference to this question never suffers from that intense eagerness, that almost insatiable crave, which by many is considered a command of the appetite asserting a need. Pro- longed misuse of the sugars and under-exercise frequently results in one of the most miserable forms of autointoxication, spoken of by physicians as " green bile cases, " in which even the gall- bladder and ducts of the liver have become in- fected by the same germs, which could not have developed in the upper intestines had it not been for the years of sugar-produced overacidity. Such patients are particularly subject to periodic attacks of mental depression. Their multiplied pounds of sugar have failed to sweeten their dis- positions. Let nothing which has been said in reference to the abuse of sweets be taken as an objection 86 THE MASTEBY OF NERVOUSNESS to the legitimate use of a reasonable amount of this food by all who exercise. An earned dessert is a most wholesome and welcome addition to the meal. Even to active growing children, sweets should not be given except in small amounts, and after other wholesome food has been taken. The sugar- eating habit is particularly in evidence in those homes where children are allowed to "piece" between meals on cakes, cookies, candies and preserves ; and this habit in children, as well as in adults, rapidly displaces the desire for more simple, wholesome foods. Right Use of Proteids. The second modern eating error which wrecks nerves is the misuse of the protein foods, especially the abuse of meats. The growing child needs protein, not necessarily in the form of pork and beef, as simpler and less damaging proteins are found in milk, eggs and vegetables. All muscle workers must have pro- tein in some form to replace tissue, as this is the only food which can replenish the protoplasm of the cell, and in all activities of the body, cells are being destroyed and must be replaced by new ones. The controversy over the use and abuse, the value and damage, of a meat diet, is an old one. Its advocates point with conviction to the energetic, meat-eating Caucasians as being the world-conquerors, and compare the strength and aggressiveness of the carnivorous lion and tiger with the docile meekness of the vegetarian donkey and lamb. The opponents of meat point with equal conviction to the hardihood and endurance and the ability and the capacity of certain EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 87 branches of the rice-eating yellow race, to the strength and longevity of the elephant, and darkly hint that the explanation of the rapid increase in appendicitis and cancer will ultimately be laid at the door of much meat-eating. We shall not pretend to decide this question for the man in the street, but for the nervous sufferer a few definite truths may be educed. Our long-lived forefathers, whose brawn and muscle pushed back the frontier state by state, wringing from the reluctant wilds a halting sus- tenance, using their wits some, their physical forces much, lived and thrived upon a diet largely of meat ; and our fathers believed in meat, and we were reared on meat. But our fathers were not quite so comfortable as the frontiersmen, and we are trying to avoid nervous wreckage. Unlike the damage from sugars, the harm from meat- eating rarely comes in youth. Meat properly prepared, in reasonable amounts, is well appro- priated by the growing body. The danger comes in later years. With the small amount of tissue destruction in the comparatively inactive lives of business and professional men, meat becomes a drug in early maturity. Good digestion and good kidneys will take care of it for many years, but meat is an acid-producer, and unmerited red meats, especially, are subject to decomposition in the intestinal. tract in all who have not aggressive stomach digestion; and such digestion is rarely long enjoyed by those who are not earning it by muscle work. This particular decay of meats, common in the middle-aged and old who indulge 88 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS in excess of this type of food, is evidenced by a breath which is distinctly characteristic and offensive. For the man who would be truly effi- cient in counting-house and office and study and pulpit, reduction in the amount of meat, even the elimination of all meat, may be instituted as a definite step toward conservation of strength and increase of health and nervous comfort. That unreasoning tyrant, the appetite, will resent this change, and the resolution must be strong if reason is to succeed, for the meat-eating habit is often deeply ingrained. However, a few days only of discomfort need be experienced by those who decide that they will eliminate this toxin- producing, nerve-harassing meat excess; and it is remarkable how quickly simple, properly pre- pared foods will replace the roasts, steaks and cutlets of beef and mutton, if resolution attends on decision. Meat of fowl or fish, properly cooked, is a distinctly wiser diet for the nerves than pork in any form, or excess of beef or even of mutton and veal. All white meats are con- sidered less irritating in their ultimate effect upon the nervous system than the dark or red meats. Use and Abuse of Fats. The fats and oils pro- duce much more heat and energy, weight for weight, than any other food. They also require more digestive force to prepare them for the body's use. In our country, the chief damage from this type of foods results from unwise mix- tures of grease in combinations which retard or interfere with the digestion of other articles of diet. A steak which has been saturated with hot BATING FOB EFFICIENCY 89 lard or the cotton-seed products now commonly used in frying will remain in the stomach nearly twice as long as it would if ibroiled rare. Flour in the form of bread properly baked digests easily. The same flour mixed with lard and eaten as hot biscuit is only digested by a special effort, and after a delay which too often permits fer- mentation. Many nervous disturbances unques- tionably result from the damage to normal diges- tion caused by these unwise mixtures of grease with foods which would otherwise be easily cared for by the digestive tract. Butter and cream are wholesome, quite digestible and most excellent forms of fat for food use ; still, all fats in excess of the needs of the body tend either to accumulate in the form of undesirable adipose, or to interfere with the whole digestive serenity through the excess of fatty acids produced and liberated dur- ing disturbed digestion. Again it is the question of adjusting food to the needs of the system as a whole, and nuts and rich gravies and mayonnaise and French dressing and ice-cream and fried cakes, called goodies by the wilful palate, may be taken in excess only under a threat, too often executed, of nervous injury. Cooking ingenuity has been stimulated as the world has shrunk from impassable distances to an affair of neighbour- hoods, and as to-day the nations fairly rub elbows, the ideas and tastes and luxuries of all lands are becoming common property, and foods more and more complex, and by the man of the world and his wife elaborate menus are expected. Every step that we depart from simplicity in food is. 90 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS a stride nearer to indigestibility, and all forms of indigestion leave a harmful residue, to be ab- sorbed and thrown off, if the organs are sufficiently strong, otherwise, to remain and damage. Oversoluble Foods. Lacking in common sense, the palate has attained a degree of sensitiveness rivalling that of a virtuoso or prima donna, to humour which the miller grinds his cereals finer and finer, the butcher trims his meats and roasts more closely, the cook has multiplied utensils to mince and pulverise and crush and mash, to the end that all that comes to the table may be super- latively smooth and delicate and soft. As a result, much of our food is quite too soluble, too completely dissolved, and quite too fully absorbed, leaving an insufficient residue of insoluble mat- ter. Man's intestinal tract normally requires a relatively large proportion of insoluble material. Many vegetables contain such a substance in the form of cellulose, as for example, the bran of wheat, the hull of sweet corn, the pod of the string- bean, the peel of apples and potatoes; but these are pared or strained or bolted away before the food reaches the modern table. And, as a result, overabsorption takes place, substances enter the system which otherwise would not be taken up, and the residue is often so small as to render sluggishness of the lower intestinal tract habitual. For these reasons it is well for those suffering any degree of autointoxication or sluggishness of the bowels to provide for more insoluble matter in their daily food. One of the simplest and most convenient methods of compensating for this EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 91 modern food defect is the daily use of one or two table spoonfuls of coarse wheat bran, which is improved in flavour by toasting to a moderate brown. This is easily taken when added to the breakfast food, and it is quite a palatable dish served with a sprinkle of salt and moistened with cream. When the need for insoluble food is very marked, it is well to use the bran for breakfast and an extra tablespoonful at bedtime. The habit of starting breakfast with citrus fruits, as orange or grapefruit, is also of great assistance to those who find a sluggish bowel condition the cause of nervous disturbance. Drugs as Foods. Even as the tide of contro- versy has ebbed and flowed on the question of eating or not eating meat, so with more intensity, acrimony, and often with even less logic, the use of tea, coffee, tobacco and alcohol has been argued. These are not true foods, although through the influence of the powerful chemicals which they contain they unquestionably influence digestion and nutrition. But it is not for this limited, often questionable value, that they are used. The stable, poised man and woman have no need and feel none for any of these drugs, which tempor- arily relieve sensations of depression, disability, irritability temporarily relieve. Not being real foods, and lacking the inherent value of the foods they replace, they ultimately reduce efficiency. To the unstrung, food-poisoned neurotic they all offer passing, seductive comfort. "They cry' 'Peace, peace!' when there is no peace.*' In moderate amounts the healthy body may care for 92 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS these drugs without apparent damage. There are centenarians who ascribe their longevity to tea, to coffee, to tobacco or to alcohol ; there are others who claim to have lived their hundred years of health because they used none of these. But the individual case is not a proper example to be used in an argument of the relation of food to health. Few will question the evidence of national and insurance statistics indicating strongly that the many who daily depend upon these food drugs are distanced in life's race in health of body and vigour of offspring by the total abstainers. The more nervous the race, the more dependent we find the individual upon some form of drug ease. The evidence of the nervous damage growing out of unrestrained excess of any of these substances is so incriminating as to render detailed discussion on this point superfluous. Excess of salt and condiments in fact, all forms of high seasoning is generally used to whip up a flagging appetite, to stimulate the palate to accept that which even its ignorance does not crave. Delicacy of taste is thereby rapidly lost, thus developing a vicious circle the harm- ful increasing the demand for that which harms. Excessive secretion of mucus is the stomach's protection from such insults, and this retards digestion. Even the remote kidneys are made much more susceptible to harmful changes, Bright 's disease being invited through overuse of salt. A normal, hearty appetite is the safest sauce for any meal, and the steak that has to be showered witji Worcestershire and the vegetables EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 93 which are acceptable only when spiced with Cayenne are a double menace, not only to diges- tion but to ultimate nervous efficiency. Efficient Eating. Until recently physiologists taught the avoidance of water drinking with meals. For many years all teachers have encour- aged those suffering from most dietary defects to drink more water, but to shun fluids at meal time as a real danger. It is now known that the gastric juice, which our fathers feared would thus be diluted, is not secreted ^f or ^ at lejasi a Jtialf . hour ' after eating, while fluids are absorbed directly by ' the stomach wall before this time. Insufficient water drinking is a fault of many of the nervous. Water should never be used in the place of mas- tication to wash down foods which require chew- ing, but one to three glasses of water with each meal is regarded to-day as an actual aid to diges- tion. There are few who will not benefit by increasing the total amount of pure water taken daily. In many lives the stomach is a literal " beast of burden. " At any time, without rhyme or reason, it is loaded with a heterogeneous mess. Eebel it does, but unfortunately all too rarely in comparison with the abuses it receives. Modern society makes demands upon digestion only less barbarous than the orgies of the heathen. At morning functions, afternoon functions, evening functions, foods are served which would tax the digestion of a hod-carrier. The richest of salads, spiked punch and afternoon tea, cakes, creams and bonbons, sandwiches fairly oozing richness, 94 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS are all smilingly downed, with compliments to "mine host." Many are so weak of will or mind as to be unable to go from one meal to another without pop-corn or peanuts, ice-cream sodas or phosphates, beer 'and sandwiches, or cake and preserves. To press food or wine upon every guest is still a common standard of hospitality a pride of entertainment which ignores possible discomfort or damage. Eegularity in food in- sures for the stomach some of that habitual cer- tainty of action, the lack of which in heart con- trol would have long since eliminated the majority of the human race. Not that any normal individual should convert himself into a time- indicator and be a slaye to the clock ; but reason- able regularity, essential moderateness and sim- plicity in foods promise health, comfort and nervous efficiency. There is no question but that the healthy man can with practical impunity go on a food spree now and then. At his alumni banquet, on the trip back to the old home farm, at the hunting camp, and on other state occasions, he can digest and assimilate even an excess with comfort' provided he has earned his reserve of force. But many live too close to their margin for this. Many more live chronically toxic, and food excesses but hasten the day of reckoning and retribution. He who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow needs three good, hearty meals. The brain-worker is distinctly better off with two. A simple breakfast, as one of fruit, cereal, eggs, potatoes and toast ; a lunch of a whole-wheat bread sandwich and buttermilk, and a four- or five- EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 95 course dinner with a small portion of one of the milder meats, will bring him to the end of a year in obviously better condition, more fit for the cares and demands of life, distinctly more clear- brained and nervously comfortable, than is pos- sible upon three heavy meals in imitation of his muscle-worker brother. There are some in whom overeating is a disease which becomes a veritable food-mania, with demands as insatiable and un- reasonable as those of the drunkard for his cups, and overeating will probably always be associated with under-thinking, and high living with low efficiency. Babies are properly fed on a strict milk diet eight times a day at first,, then seven, then six. Many " nervous wrecks " should dietetically be taken back to babyhood, put to bed, and given four or five ounces of milk with an ounce or two of Vichy-water eight times a day for several days, and then with milk and cream gradually added, and later raw eggs, be reeducated in their habits of nutrition, and develop again as from babyhood through childhood. As flesh piles on the evi- dence that nutrition is being restored gradually increasing exercise should be taken. And with the return of strength food can be increased, until in addition to milk and eggs, properly cooked vegetables, fruits and their natural juices, and cereals, offer a wholesome, safe bill-of-fare which, with honest daily exercise, will go far toward eliminating all chemical and physical causes for nervous deficiency. There are many so diges- tively weak as to need regularly a small feeding 96 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS of simple food four to six times daily, while more would find their ills rapidly reduced by the omission of one meal and the formation of the two-meal-a-day habit, particularly if the service of meat were eliminated. Many of the autotoxic, therefore, should follow a modified form of fast- ing, while many of the undernourished need an increased number of meals practically feasting on the foods of childhood. The appetite responds to cultivation. He was a brave man who first swallowed a raw oyster, but modern appetites have been educated to con- sider the succulent bivalve a delicacy ; and yet the bon-vivant who would imperturbably initiate a dinner with a dozen raw Linnhavens, strains and gags when asked to swallow a raw egg. The real food value of the egg is thrice that of the oyster, while the danger of its undergoing intestinal de- composition is but a small fraction of that existing in the sea-muck-bred delicacy. "Eat three olives and you will always like them." "Don't look at the lobster until after you have taken a bite. ' ' So we train our appetites to enjoy the indiges- tible s aristocratic indigestibles with an assi- duity unknown in learning to enjoy simple food. Modern food preparation has taken away much of the work belonging to the teeth. Thorough mastication adds an element to certain foods which means much to their ultimate digestion. Careful mastication develops delicacy of taste and enjoy- ment of flavours unknown to the gormand bolter. Real use of the teeth is one of the best preventives of decay, and healthy gums and clean mouths EATING FOR EFFICIENCY 97 are additional rewards for thorough chewing of foods foods not too mushy and soft and fine, but foods which give work for the teeth to do. Deliberate eating is one of the best methods of avoiding overeating. Eapid eaters dump the food into their stomachs with such rapidity that dam- aging excess has been swallowed before the appetite realises it is satisfied. Eapid eaters are usually the overeaters who suffer from retarded digestion because of the mechanical stretching of their stomach walls during early life. Air- swallowers as well as food-gulpers often weaken the essential stomach contractility and thereby suffer from retarded digestion throughout their lives. An excellent plan to avoid the overeating of those foods which are particularly appetising is to request a moderate service only, with a de- termination that a second service will not be accepted. We are apt to forget how much has gone before, and to pass our plates the second or third time, finally having eaten a total which would have appalled us had it been heaped in one lot before us. In the final reckoning, the foods which ferment, such as the sugars and starches, many vegetables and fruits, are ultimately less harmful than the meats which putrefy. And so one of the first changes for the toxic sufferer should be the sub- stitution of fermentable foods for the foods of putrefaction. Many are undernourished and nervously half-starved the thin and anaemic who have never developed, or through abuse have weakened, their ability to digest fats. For these 98 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS a careful course of dietetic training should be considered, beginning with milk and Vichy, then adding cream and after ten days three raw eggs, which can be gradually increased to a dozen, fifteen or even twenty a day, with often a very gratifying increase in weight. The overfleshy are usually overindulging in sweets or fats and under- exercising. In fact, the whole eating question is so interrelated with that of exercise as to make any dietary rules of limited value when not asso- ciated with plans for muscle use. One fundamen- tal truth must be reiterated to the nervous sufferer he must eat to live and not live to eat. In the very fact that he is nervous exists much more than a hint that the balance between food and exercise is broken, and that in food regulation, in the wise adjustment of what he eats to what he does, he will be able to reduce the whole question of the physical basis of health to utter simplicity. CHAPTER IX WORK Wits and Brawn. All mankind not utterly de- fective has something to do, and the majority find that life holds for them serious effort. Civilisa- tion saw its dawn in the separation of those who work into two groups, the brain-worker and the muscle-worker. The latter has ever been, by far the larger class. It has been through dogged, unrelenting tug and pull and strain of muscle that the great bulk of the labour of mankind has been executed. Through the greater portion of the span of centuries, the man of brawn has been under the mastery of the dominating minority, the brain-worker. Slave, serf, vassal, servant the physically and numerically stronger have executed the bid and call of their more keen-witted masters. There cannot be the slightest question as to the incomparable advantage of brain over brawn. Under its direction useless, wasteful, dangerous activities have given place to produc- tive, economic and constructive effort, with the result in many lands to-day, that mankind is quite comfortably caught up with his work. He has passed the stage of a hand-to-mouth existence ; he has pulled down his barns and built greater. The man of brain is beginning to share his plenty 99 100 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS with the sons and daughters of toil, whose chil- dren are tasting some of the advantages of his children. Wits are multiplying, and as a result of the last century's unprecedented advancement in knowledge and spread of learning, slavery has disappeared, serfdom is doomed, and servants hard to find. It is indeed unreasonable to question the right of brain to lead and direct, and to reap the fruits of its knowledge. But through the centuries damage in two forms has continually hovered near to threaten or to curse mental superiority. Brain has ever presumed to look down upon and discredit muscle, to hold itself superior, as though cast from a finer material in a different mould; and cruelty and brutality have hardened the superior heart, and jealousy and envy and hate have poisoned the heart of labour ; and even to-day the peace between master and him who serves is too often but a truce of convenience. And in addition to these unholy class distinctions, brawn has ever been subject to swift demoralisation through the snobbery of idleness. And what a levelling factor this ever-repeated result of plenty has been! The rich man's son is reared a child of luxury; his offspring becomes a rake and a spendthrift ; then comes the reformation, initiated through a generation or so of poverty in response to the eternal edict, "Work or starve. " Ever and again, through the skill of cleverness, the necessity for true effort that productive effort which men call work has been avoided by one or two generations. Virtuous frugality and honest, WORK . f > v successful endeavour have accumulated plenty and spread the downy couch of idleness for their children wit, success, ability, energy, skill, genius and mastery in this generation breeding underwork and indolence in the next. Soft- palmed men and hothouse women throng life's highway to-day, caring and planning for little but their own ease and amusement, autocratically endeavouring to usurp and crowd to the by-paths their superiors the sons and daughters of toil arrogantly drawing close their unearned skirts of obvious opulence as they pass by, conspicuously inferior, as is every mortal who scorns honest work. Too long have wealth, station and cleverness dominated and humiliated, or at best, patronised labour. But the toll paid has been excessive, paid in frail, undeveloped bodies, weak of muscle, tense of nerve, with underdeveloped, displaced vital organs, and characters as relaxed. In seek- ing its parasitic ease, brain has ever overreached itself, and ever has and ever shall suffer and fall a victim of its own misdirected shrewdness. Plenty is prone to early produce physical in- dolence, the poison-breeder of the body, and idle- ness, which develops into a practical inertia idleness, the arch enemy of strength, the incubator of disease, the destroyer of character. Idleness early assumes the form of fatigue the fatigue which excuses from duty, and shifts responsibility and effort upon others, and which will certainly be followed by a fatigue which is real the fatigue of flabbiness, the fatigue of inability and weak- 102 THE MASTERY OP NERVOUSNESS ness. Content may be associated with such worth- less living, happiness never. Happiness pines and dies when separated from effort. Some ex- cellent intellects, active and not lacking in progressiveness, abide in lazy bodies. But mental indolence is probably more common than physical the indolence which procrastinates, which neg- lects to plan and arrange, and avoids the efforts attendant upon responsibility; which shirks from decision and the demands of resolution ; the mental indolence which plays at work or is content with sham work such mental indolence as makes pos- sible habits of inaccuracy, slovenly and superficial thinking. And fatigue is offered as the excuse, while inefficient, disorganising worry attends. Many workers with natural skill and cleverness have not taught themselves methodical habits of thought in their daily work, through months of systematic routine, of earnest, attentive, self- forgetful probation; so skill is discounted and ability cheapened. Partial success or failure mars the usefulness of many who would otherwise have attained an appreciated proficiency, and whose worth and skill and masterful superiority would lift life's work above the thought of ten- sion. But dissatisfaction and the sense of drudgery, the weariness of wasteful energy leak- age, the products of disorder and confusion, and sense of incompetence, make work a burden to multitudes. And so mind and body deteriorate under the withering touch of indolence. The damage of overwork is far less common than that of underwork. Few suffer nervously WORK 103 who do not use overwork as an excuse, and in most cases, seriously and honestly. The factory drudge may blight and weaken and fail, but the damage is rarely from the physical effort alone. It is usually a combination of defective ventila- tion and imperfect food food more frequently lacking in adaptation to the needs of the worker than in quantity or the result of the erosion of some infection undermining strength ; or the dis- integrating influence of some burden of anxiety or enmity weighing down the heart. There are unquestionably many who do not truly live; be- cause of man's cruelty to man, of their own neg- lect of the higher life, the poisoning of the well- springs of the better nature, they merely drag out an existence. To such unfortunates, nervous ill- health may come, but rarely as the result of overwork. A devoted mother, slaving year after year, denied the inspiration of love or the heal- ing touch of kindly sympathy, falls by the way- side, a "victim of overwork. " She was more probably starved through lack of wholesome food and absence of pleasure ; or faint because deprived of the waters of happiness. Close observation brings conviction that the great majority claim- ing overwork as the reason for their nervous de- ficiencies are victims, not of earnest, honest, productive work itself, but of defective methods of work, of work discounted by haste, stress and strain, by impatience, worry and fear. The one who has acquired proficiency and accuracy, who knows no methods but those of earnest endeavour, who has learned to love his work, which he can 104 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS only do when that work is a consecrated thing for such a worker nervous disaster is unknown, save when the very superiority of his splendid attitude surrenders to the damaging intoxications of ill-advised or ignorant eating. No single factor plays so prominent a part in the blessing or damage of work, physical or men- tal, as the associated feelings. The emotional life is intimately related to nervous well-being or deficiency. There is no leakage of nervous force comparable to that from unworthy and harmful emotions. Many workers who would otherwise be efficient, successful and able to serve their day and generation happily year after year, are regularly laid up for repairs because of the wasteful emo- tional intensity associated with their activities. Some of them take themselves and their duties quite too seriously. They carry a useless, wasteful burden of anxiety to each day's labour, and return home bearing an even heavier load. Others de- stroy all possibility of happiness and content with fear fear of failure, fear of criticism, fear of being supplanted, fear of illness or loss of ability. Others are ever robbing their strength and resistance through impatience and overanxiety for promotion, and envy of superiors. Calmness, stability, poise, have not been attained, and energy leaks, and strength wastes. Still others are un- fitted for what they are doing square pegs in round holes and are unwilling to acknowledge their incompetence and to accept simpler positions which they could fill with efficiency, and from which they might gain real development. Enthu- WORK 105 siasm, interest and force and energy are all demanded by life's duties and responsibilities; but enervating intensity and high pressure lead to failure in the mastery of life. And so an early lesson for those possessing the splendid possi- bilities of the highly organised nervous type is to associate the wholesome emotions with effort, and to daily strive for that underintensity which is manifested through a calm, genial, kindly spirit. Many discount efficiency and bring upon them- selves merited nervous instability because they have never risen superior to the sense of discom- fort. Few have attained that attitude which takes away from work and daily duties those weakening influences growing out of the multiplied irrita- tions of small discomforts. Sensitive, weak na- tures ever surrender to the constantly recurring but insignificant irritations coincident with all effort. Things are perverse ; men and women are obstinate; the weather obdurate; the market fickle ; the taxes inevitable ; noise and activity and turmoil inseparable from progress. Moodiness, misunderstanding, selfishness, even injustice, are human, and will be brought to the surface by the knocks and jolts of life's contacts. But for him who wishes to make every day count for ultimate success, who considers his work, humble though it may be, his divinely directed duty, these are all but incidents, and in rising above them he is discovering one of life's great secrets of success. Oversensitiveness is an almost universal leak- age defect among nervous workers. All effort is accompanied by either a sense of pleasure or dis- 106 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS comfort. It is instinctive for the nervous to avoid the uncomfortable, but most nervous families keep the attention of their members focussed upon that which is unpleasant through constant refer- ence to life's ever-recurring discomforts. Such habits merely increase the capacity for sensitive- ness and multiply the objects which harm. In reorganising one's nervous habits few forms of effort are more profitable than those directed toward the overcoming of petty annoyances. To repress the irritability at interruptions was at first difficult, for instance, and yet that very irrit- ability was more of an energy leak and loss to productiveness than was the interruption. Inter- ruptions are inevitable, but a little training will make it possible for the busiest worker to meet the apparently unreasonable with poise and patience. Work's Contribution to Mastery. From the principles which have been developed in earlier chapters, it seems that, keen as are man's wits, shrewd, penetrating and masterful as he has been in his contentions with Nature, he has not altered one jot the power of her fundamental laws over his own health and well-being. To outgeneral Nature, by avoiding the duty of physical effort, has been the ground upon which man has met defeat generation after generation. The fulness of wisdom has not come to any man until he has realised the futility of trying to dodge his duty to his physical self, and of cheerfully accepting his share of the world's work. In the individual and in the race, no single factor can contribute WORK 107 so resistlessly to mastery as work. When the nervous sufferer places himself in the hands of the specialist to-day, suffering, as he says, from " overwork, " he is quite disconcerted to be shown that it was not his work but his poor methods of work that did the harm ; that his prospects of recovery must be based largely upon his ability to learn to work without friction and worry ; and that he must find strength through the influence of a simple, wholesome routine of active physical effort, containing logically some of the element of drudgery. Under the influence of patient indus- try, a wise adjustment of diet, and the stopping of all drugs which soothe and relieve under this simple, natural, almost primitive routine, strength returns, confidence grows, nerves again become servants and no longer masters, and calm replaces the riot of intensity. There is an ignorant aristocracy ashamed to work, ashamed to blunt the pointed nails, to har- den the palms and with them the muscles, to darken cheek, neck and arms by mixing Nature's iron in the blood; who protect their soft bodies as they would the family jewels, but who are not ashamed to dope, whine and complain, and drug and loaf and laze. Slipping along the paths of least resistance, many of these weaklings can be rescued only by resolute intervention of family or friends, with authority to compel them to profit by the therapy of work. Many hysterics and neurasthenics, the nervous of various types and classes and degrees, are to-day finding through the education of simple work ah adjustment to 108 THE MASTEBY OF NERVOUSNESS life's demands, which means for them comfort first, then increasing strength, and later happy productiveness. All except the hopelessly maimed, deformed or seriously diseased, organi- cally, can improve health and profitably add to strength through regular daily exercise. All who would have their lives enriched may find development of strength, reserve and an augmentation of efficiency, with a definite and sat- isfying sense of well-being, growing out of earnest, special, daily homage to their muscles. Man's health is closely related to the strength of his vital organs, many of which depend upon the action of involuntary muscles for their perfect function. There is no direct method of adding power to these muscles, but it is significant that deficient voluntary muscles are usually associated with weak involuntary muscles. In consistent, regulated, voluntary effort alone may the involun- tary muscles be definitely strengthened. A gen- eration ago weak hearts were protected as the rare tropical plant from the frost of winter. To-day through graduated, intelligent muscular exercise, organically disordered hearts may be invigorated and enabled to approximate the work of the normal heart through many years. Weak hearts can now be so certainly strengthened that even the joys of mountain climbing may be under- taken without damage. Eelaxed stomachs and other prolapsed organs may in many cases be slowly but surely restored to a vigour and tone, which would almost belie their former abnormal condition, through the exercise that builds, the WORK 109 work that strengthens and the effort that con- structs. Something is the matter physically or nervously with the average man and woman. Few have not some aches or pains or complaints. The minority speak comfortably of their health; and the man or woman who knows that buoyancy of health and strength which makes effort a joy, which places a premium upon activity the health which is fairly contagious is so rare as to be noteworthy. Yet that health is not impossible, through rational living, for the majority of those who to-day complain of their inefficiency. One of the unfortunate tendencies of the mod- ern medical and nursing care, and one which meets with ready acceptance by the average pa- tient, is that of overproduction and under-exercise. Such care has too commonly become the rule for those who are suffering physical or nervous dis- orders. For many of them, the price of health, and for most, the price of unusual health or spe- cial strength, is found only in unusual effort. Many leading sedentary lives find much weariness in their work, and are quick to state that in the walking they do about the house, at the store or going to and from the office, they have reached the physical limit. These are again common examples of the weariness of under-development, of the tired feeling which is the result of weak- ness; and few of these weary ones but would respond rapidly to the uplift and rejuvenation always waiting such underused bodies by aggres- sive, muscle-building effort. Most higher type men and women have a high 110 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS regard for their wills, indeed are proud of their wills. There is but one true witness of the will, one witness whose testimony cannot be discredited the witness of action. It is not what one deter- mines, what one resolves, but what one produces, that testifies to the will's strength and integrity. From the nervous and often from those who do not belong to this type is heard a constant wail of weariness. "Oh, I don't want to; I am too tired, " is the reiterated, deadening reply to the request for extra effort. The majority of the nervous feel close to their fatigue limit at the end of each day's work. But the nervously weak find valuable help in the realisation that all not organically diseased, or upon whose arteries the hardening hand of age has not been laid, may increase their strength-reserve and raise their fatigue-limit manyfold. No part of the body is so quickly responsive to helpful effort as the voluntary muscular system. Within a few weeks the emaciated typhoid patient is often the picture of health, his wasted muscles restored, and his weight as good as, or better than, before his severe illness. If with confidence and deter- mination the undernourished, feeble-muscled vic- tim of quick fatigue will undertake a course of training demanding gradually increasing daily muscular effort, despite the acute weariness and the discouragingly sore muscles of the first few days, before the weeks have multiplied, a sense of increasing strength will come as a reward of effort. A year of such effort will change weak- WORK 111 ness into effectiveness; ten years of rational muscular living means robustness ; and a genera- tion lived a conscientious daily muscular doing insures a physique of iron and a constitution inured to most human ills. In attaining mastery through work, one of the blessings which increases hand in hand with hon- est industry, is the disappearance of introspection, that common enemy to the peace and tranquillity of a sensitive nature. Devotion to duty leads the mind away from itself and its tenement. Through work the power of externalisation grows, and in this, man finds one of the most certain forms of mental and spiritual mastery. It is a profound misfortune for any young per- son to enter the serious years of life without hav- ing been earnestly impressed with the dignity of work, or taught to feel that ever within reach are divinely-appointed duties. Only in seeking and finding and doing the daily task, will we pay the price for health, the price so frequently resented or denied. Here will we find as well the nucleus of contentment, the heart of truth and the laugh of happiness. Let not the artistic, the exalted, the brilliant and the aristocratic forget the call of drudgery. A touch of it regularly for us all is the touch that keeps our hearts and minds akin to the great working mass of mankind and woman- kind. In our bit of drudgery, or in our life of drudgery, let us not make the fatal mistake of discrediting what we do, but develop the delight in doing and persistently dodge the lazing. So 112 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS with pride and the spirit of competition, even though self be the sole opponent, the most menial tasks may be exalted. CHAPTER X PLAY The Fine Art of Play. Work may be defined as consistent, productive action, and play as pleasur- able action. Mother Nature plays with us patiently and beautifully as children. Unless we have been spoiled by our purse-proud or fright- ened elders, we early learn the beauties inherent in sticks and mud and stones, and pieces of broken china, and chicken feathers and unbathable rag dolls, and romping and running and tumbling, and disobeying and switchings, and lusty howling and shouts of glee, because we are living in the play-day of life, and our tears serve but to make the rainbows; for nothing serious or tragic or impending exists. But all this fulness of health and lustiness and normality and joy are apt to slip away as the realities of life crowd in. The unfortunate early abandons all play; the dignity of maturity, the dictates of our neighbour's set, the inertia of indolence, the love of ease, gradually descend upon us. Most wholesome physical ac- tivity which can be called play is lost to the average young person by twenty-one ; but we play cards or perchance checkers, or, if a bit mentally ambitious, chess; and we dance ourselves dizzy in overheated rooms, oft playing with fire; or 113 * 114 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS twist up our nervous tension several notches and rush ourselves through the country with our precious necks depending upon the life of a rubber tire. Society at play has had little that is wholesome beyond these limited activities, until quite recent years. To-day in our private schools and colleges, and even in some public schools and through municipal playgrounds, consistent effort is being made to teach our young people the art of play. But too many men and women have never learned this art since it slipped with the ebbing of child- hood ; and with the need of play not second to that of work, are unable to enter into this God-given ability with any semblance of success. Awkward, self-conscious, uninterested, the average grown-up to-day makes work of his play. He finds in the weather, and his cold, and the extra hour's work at the office, in unnecessary and unimportant engagements, ample opportunity and excuse for avoiding his hours in the open. He was not made for indoor life. Pneumonia and tuberculosis and dyspepsia and nervousness combine to send him afoot and afield. Most emphatically do they urge him to "up and out and go." But there is so little for him to do when he leaves his work-bench or his library. To be nervously efficient, to be nervously self -mastered and dependable, one must learn to make play of play. While ten thousand forms of effort have been called work, it is signi- ficant how few of man's activities he calls play. But there is always the out-of-doors, and even a walk through the monotonous city street is PLAY 115 better than the sluggish sleepy-hollow chair. Walking, to be worth while as a sport, should take us afield, and if it is the only exercise de- pended upon for extra health and endurance, it must be pushed in activity and distance to be effective. At least six miles in an hour and a half for the normal man, and four miles in eighty minutes for the average woman, is a mild minimum. Our ruddy-cheeked English cousins consider double this amount a fair daily average. Tramping is splendid. Eoughly clad, independent of rain and snow, with a light pack, a tramping tour lasting five or six days and covering a hun- dred miles, sleeping in the open if at all practical, is a contribution to health, strength and robust- ness not found in a month's motoring. Hill- climbing is one of the very best forms of condensed exercise. It develops the heavy thigh and calf muscles, tissues which become literal secreters of vitality. And while it may be monotonous, and certainly does look a bit foolish to hike up and down the same path repeatedly, a thousand feet of hill-climbing a day, kept up month after month, will add famously to strength, breathing capacity and total vitality. Water sports, including swimming, rowing, canoeing and yachting, with motor-boating a badly distanced substitute, are unfortunately not commonly available. Swimming and canoeing are particularly productive of stamina. Few ex- periences so promptly strip off the veneer of over- sensitiveness as camp life not the silk-stocking kind, with a motor-car at your elbow and generous 116 THE MASTEBY OF NERVOUSNESS hampers of rich delicacies, and inexhaustible flasks of icy-hot, with tents and air-mattresses and all the comforts of home; but a genuine spell of roughing it, doing your own cooking, dish- washing and laundering, rolling up in your blanket with a few fresh boughs for a bed, and learning to sleep with the heavens as your canopy and the slowly-trooping stars as your watchers. How quickly the slavery of comfort can thus be eliminated. The scratches and temporary ab- sences of skin become insignificant, and we forget to jump and exclaim at contact with the harmless things that creep and crawl. How soon we find ourselves akin to Nature, who would love us into worthy manhood and womanhood, who ever calls us to snuggle close to her ample bosom and renew our strength, as did the giant of old! How promptly our good Mother Nature fulfils her promises and shares with us her own imperturb- able serenity, if we but answer her call ! But the flowers, the grasses, the trees and the birds, the beauty of hill and vale, the thrill of mountain- side, the wild, picturesque song of its dashing stream, are insufficient to satisfy the needs of many who would seek the open for restoration. So hunting and fishing give an added interest of chase and contest to the call of the open, and have proven restorative forces for many who have felt the frazzle of misuse. Our out-of-door games are limited. Golf is helping much. A set of aggressive tennis each week day will furnish all the special needs of the average man or woman. Tennis requires skill PLAY 117 and many months of practice before a satisfactory game can be played. Baseball is one of the most perfect games from the spectators' standpoint, but as it requires a large field and but few players, the number who can derive direct benefit from this excellent exercise is limited. Basket-ball in the open is practicable but a few months of the year. It is a strenuous, active, helpful game for those who are physically fit. This short list practically comprises the wholesome forms of out-of-door play available to-day, and where one can profit by some of these, ten cannot. When it comes to suggesting play for the average man and woman whose physical strength and nervous comfort are hanging in the balance, the inade- quacy of our generation's play-life for grown-ups is made pitiably evident. But the insistence upon daily exercise has been reiterated with an em- phasis which cannot be denied, if the principles upon which the arguments are based are accepted. To plan home exercise is very simple. To plan home exercise which can be considered as play is extremely difficult. For all who would maintain health, the day should begin with three or four minutes of active breathing exercises, the soldier's position of attention being assumed, with chin and shoulders drawn back, and the lungs repeatedly filled to capacity with the freshest and purest air obtainable. If this becomes a life's habit, the greatest possible benefit to lungs and circulation will result. A harmless feeling of dizziness from oxygen intoxication is quite common when this exercise is first being attempted. Eaising the 118 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS body repeatedly to full height on the toes until the calves feel the stab of acute tire, and following this with the spread-eagle that excellent inten- sive exercise of the army setting-up drill pushed to comparative breathlessness, with active and thorough bending of the trunk, will provide in ten minutes of vigorous work a daily home exer- cise which in the course of years will prove an irrefutable contribution to health. He who is truly in earnest and has no hill to climb will find in the stairs a prosaic but efficient substitute. For the reasonably strong, a few trips up daily, two steps at a time, and later possibly three steps at a jump, so increased as to insure thorough deep breathing and a sense of acute tire, is an energetic and developing method of exercise open to all not organically diseased. When a com- panion is available, fifteen minutes 9 use of a f our- or six-pound medicine-ball is probably the most simply useful of all home exercises. Best taken out-of-doors, if possible, otherwise in a well- ventilated room, this exercise is very useful for the development of the important chest and back muscles, when the ball is actively thrown. When four or five can exercise together, a simple real sport, with rapid education of muscle and delicacy of movement, is possible in the passing of a medi- cine-ball, basket-ball, baseball and tennis-ball in rapid succession. Not a little skill is required in keeping these spheres of various sizes and weights in rapid rotation, and much sport is possible. Many other useful forms of ten or fifteen minute home exercises have been devised. Also many PLAY 119 fake systems of physical culture are available for those who would part with their dollars. But it is not the high-priced system, not the elaborate appliances, but the faithful following of a simple routine, systematically and persistently, which brings the desired health and the strength and vitality which are the basis of physical vivacity, productiveness and resistance. Exercises spe- cially planned for health are so lacking in the play element that many of the above suggestions are given with full recognition of the large amount of moral courage necessary to successfully carry them out. The gymnasium always offers the incentive of class work under the skilled director. Two or three years of earnest gymnasium training is a splendid addition to the education of boys and girls of twelve to fifteen. Boxing and wrestling are more violent exercises, which develop strength rapidly, and are capable of producing a large return in benefit for those sufficiently strong to make use of them. There is a form of hand- wrestling which can be carried out by any two of reasonably balanced strength, capable of bene- ficially utilising all the muscles of the body, and developing agility and poise as well as strength. For all who are seeking nervous restoration through the efficiency of diet and exercise, the question comes as to how much exercise should be taken. The average nervous sufferer will begin his restitution in poor physical condition. If at all possible, several weeks should be devoted to a camping or tramping trip, or to some course of 120 THE MASTERY OP NERVOUSNESS systematic physical culture, or several hours a day spent in gradually increasing miles of walk- ing, with any form of work with the hands which will strengthen the muscles. Wood-chopping, gardening, spading, transplanting, work on the farm, or other physical work, can be gradually and steadily increased until the fatigue limit has been pushed far beyond that of the past. After one has truly conditioned himself through such means, one-half hour of the more active indoor exercises in addition to energetic daily walking pushed to the point of perspiration, will usually suffice to maintain a high degree of health and strength through many years. The fine art of play does not require the com- petition of contest, the rivalry of athletic conflict or the stimulus of applause, but is an art which lends itself to all action. We have seen that both work and play are forms of activity. The world has for many generations spoken of its work with more or less anguish and resentment, and is ever looking away from work to the days of play. But the world does not know the fine art of play. We have not realised that the great difference between work and play is but a difference of atti- tude. Those actions which we choose, and in which there is no compulsion save the desires of our own sweet wills, and which are performed purely from the love of the action therein, are called play. The same action instantly becomes work when done under coercion. The most en- thusiastic football half-back would soon loathe his plunging line-bucking were he opposed by PLAY 121 wooden dummies, were he compelled to bruise and strain to overcome mere mechanical resistance, were his sport robbed of the keen spirit of com- petition and the thrill of the personal encounter. The fine art of play recognises in all activity the opportunity for pleasure. The weakling makes work of his play, and is joyless in the very pursuit of his sport. The great mass of the world's workers think of work as work. A small com- pany of grown-ups have retained their ability to play, and to look on play as play. He has ad- justed self to life, he has applied a wholesome philosophy to his earthly span of existence, who enters into all the activities of so-called work with the fine spirit of play; who, finding joy in the doing, puts the enthusiasm and the spirit into his work that makes him an inspiration to all who feel his mastery of the great secret which life gives us all to solve. For him idealism finds expression in what his hands and his mind find to do. He is above all the true sportsman who recog- nises within himself a power which transmutes the weariness of drudgery. To him consistent and productive activities of mind and body are part of that great game of life in which Destiny deals the cards and man names the trump. The master-man is a true sportsman, and is as sensi- tive to the moral element of his play-work or his work-play as to any duty to his neighbour or his God; and in work and play, in the game of life or in his game of golf, he keeps spite and selfish- ness out of the competition, and puts pride and 122 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS honour in. To him who will earnestly study the rules of life's game and play it fair fair to him- self and fair to those who need his strength the mastery will come when work is no longer drudgery but has taken on the spirit of play ; and when the ideals of sincerity, honour and integrity, inherent in sportsmanship, come, he then is able to play the game as a victor, and none of the enemies of life's happiness or of joy will over- take him in the race for the goal, in the race for the great goal of self-mastery, for the attainment of which the game of life is played. CHAPTER XI TANGLED THOUGHTS The Mind's Omnipotence. From the foregoing discussion of the physical causes producing nerv- ousness it appears that the physical habits of the majority to-day invite nervous disorder. It is true that examination of many of the nervous seeking professional counsel reveals bodily dis- turbances, chiefly disorders which spring from errors in eating or neglect of exercise. We have learned moreover, that practically all the nervous are distinctly benefited by a wise attention to nutritional harmony. But nervousness can exist in the apparently sound body, the body in which the skilled examiner fails to find organic or chem- ical defect. Indeed, most victims of nerves re- quire a mental readjustment, as earnest and far- reaching as the physical. In fact, the commonest of the mental causes of nervousness are so obvi- ous that certain schools of healers ignore the physical basis entirely, and depend only upon the mental readjustment to effect cure. Such form of treatment is scientifically termed psychother- apy, meaning simply mental healing. Through the centuries numberless cures have been effected through mental influence, which has also afforded more or less permanent relief from distressing 123 124 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS symptoms to many more. When we recall our conception of nervousness, as the undue response of the sensitive nervous mechanism to stimuli, such a possibility becomes at once obvious; for, while we must whisper it gently so as not to offend these same sensitive ones, nervousness is, in truth, a mental disorder. The condition of the body normally contributes strongly to our mental poise, but the brain may become so slug- gish under the influence of a powerful drug that the mind will fail to note even the most intense physical pain. On the other hand, under the whip and spur of its own poisons, the brain may become a true sensitive-plant, and mental respon- siveness to all forms of stimuli be increased many times. It becomes clear, therefore, that the mental basis of nervousness is a consciousness ill at ease, if not acutely suffering. And what a superb instrument is man's mind! We have already noted its almost limitless capacity for adjustment and adaptation. The accumulated writings of the sensualists, philoso- phic, ethic and esthetic, have failed to tell the whole story of the possibilities and varieties inherent in human sensation. From one point of view, the entire surface of the body is an elaborate mechanism for acquainting the mind with a great world of things, and for bringing it, year after year, into closer touch with our universe. Words have never yet adequately described the fulness of seeing and feeling and hearing. Philosophy has it that our morning paper and far Polaris, the south wind against my brow, the TANGLED THOUGHTS 125 cricket's friendly chirp, the anguish of pain and the mother's lullaby, exist only in individual per- ceptions; and when we consider how quickly the few drops of potent drug instilled into our veins extinguish these and all other conscious relations, we feel the force of the philosopher's insistence. But while we accept this conception for the moment, we go on thinking and feeling and doing and living as though what we saw and touched existed outside of our minds; as when, through the mental faculty termed apperception, we recog- nise the blotch of moving colour on the hillside as our child, the floating brown speck on the dis- tant water as our neighbour's motor-boat, or the dim hum in the distance as the auto of a distinct make, our mind grasps these symbols as unques- tioned reality, and we know what we have seen and heard to be so. How acutely, shrewdly, how ingeniously does the mind travel to the full limit of the senses and return with satisfied knowledge ! With closed eyes and all the curtains of the senses drawn, how truly may Memory select one from the million threads which Experience has spun, and follow it unerringly through its varie- gated course in the intricate pattern of the past. And how truly does she reveal, and how clearly does she again disclose each sober tone of trouble or each golden glint of gladness ! How carefully she keeps each strand in place ! At any hour the prosaic or poetic pattern may be reproduced, as she flashes the light of the present over the fabric of the past, that the worker may mistake not where he is in his weaving. 126 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS Ideation gives the future to man with its beau- ties, its warnings, its friends and its duties. In the mind of childhood it converts the simple and the commonplace, for the time, into all that heart can desire; the imagination of youth builds its castles towering to the sky castles which will never know the reality of stone and mortar, but castles in which great hopes, great desires, and now and again, great resolutions, are born. Imagination throws the halo of beauty over each mother's girl-child and drapes the mantle of great- ness over the helpless shoulders of her man-child. Ideation fills our libraries, paints our canvases and delves into the very mind of Nature, trans- muting her powers into the clicking looms and the tireless wheels of industry. Upon the throne of this mind sits Judgment deliberate, calm, masterful, regal the mind's ruler, whom Memory serves with the faithfulness and readiness of Mercury of old, before whom Ideation lays all his plans and dreams, in whose presence Emotion's children of mirth and joy may sing and dance and revel, while her daugh- ters of mourning wipe away the tears that blind and ask for the duty which leads to content. Even imperious Will bows in homage to reason and pledges the allegiance of his forces those forces which do the mind's great work, and are ever ready to protect it from enemies which would destroy. The decisions of reason are called judg- ments, and, as the decisions of the good king, should be the law of the land. We have indulged in a fanciful review of the TANGLED THOUGHTS 127 elements into which the psychologist divides the mind, that our memory might be refreshed and our more prosaic and serious consideration of those disorders which discount the mind's serenity and cause it to suffer, might be clear. As we have seen, the mind's various qualities put us in touch with not only the happenings of the present moment, but with the vast store-houses of the past and the unlimited, presumptuous future; of all this each man is a king indeed in his unlimited freedom in selecting that upon which his mind will dwell. In the mind in which reason has de- veloped and has assumed its intended mastery, overruling the demands and impulses of emotion, and in which will is responsive and responsible, the ability to select, to elect those objects to which it will give attention, is practically absolute. In the selection of its objects of attention, the normal mind is omnipotent. The construction of such a mind is not unlike that of a vast telephone ex- change, with switchboards, into which run myriad wires, any one of which the mind of the operator can select, and, oblivious to the insistence of all other lines, hold communion with the individual of his choice. At any moment, switching upon another line, he can be instantly in touch with a new and remote interest. "Within a hand's touch of a babel of voices, he selects and attends to one and spurns all others. And so the normal mind, through attention, concentrates its forces along one line of interest, oblivious to the clam- ouring, calling, crowding, insisting world of other interests. And so we can be a thousand Ps as 128 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS we turn attention from one thrilling and com- pelling interest to another and again another, for the normal mind can select well its world. The fearsome law of the mind is, that consciously or unconsciously, joyously or miserably, it lives its own choice, it follows the path of its own selection. Education in its various aspects is intended to place before the mind in proper order and truth- ful form a gradually increasing number of objects from which the mind may choose and multiply its ideas, the while it is supposed to be increasing the keenness and the accuracy of the critical sense, that specialised function which makes possible a high quality of selection. Advanced development of this critical sense presupposes the possession of a large variety of facts from which comparisons are possible, and a breadth of judgment which withholds decision until all available facts have been considered. Education is no insurance, however, of perfection, or even of a high degree of selective skill. Common sense, Nature's gift, intuitively chooses from the mass of the mind's possibilities the helpful thought, the practical and the appropriate thought, and attends thereto. Tangled Thoughts. Few minds are naturally or through cultivation so poised and adjusted as to adapt themselves faultlessly to the business in hand. Even as the physical habits of indolence are acquired in childhood, so damaging mental habits are early formed. In the midst of the infinite variety of the world's beauties and needs and interests, many permit attention to lie dor- mant. As the child of laziness remains abed till TANGLED THOUGHTS 129 a late hour of the day, so, many minds fail to leave their couch of narrow interests, and neglect year after year earnest thought or serious mental endeavour. A very common defect with certain types of the nervous is this one of limited inter- ests, and limited interests are usually self-in- terests. Others through lack of mental effort or from overcrowding in their school work, or as a result of imperfect teaching, develop haziness of thought, with a resulting uncertainty which is in itself a weakness, and a basis for much of the indecision so common to the nervous. Mental habits form early, and before twenty the average mind has worn its pathways of thought path- ways which are ever afterward ways of least resistance. These thought habits formed uncon- sciously in childhood and youth are replaced in adult life only by painstaking and consistent conscious effort. Most nervous suffering growing out of defective thinking is the result of error. Ignorance is com- mon, and false ideas, errors in interpretation, and false judgments, afford constant opportunity to select objects of thought and attention which are unwholesome and harmful. Until reason has been trained to control the activities of the mind, feelings assert the mastery, and wants and desires fly into the foreground, insistent and demanding. The mastery of reason and the control of the will must protect us from the errors which grow out of thoughtless, impulsive action. Childhood is a period largely ruled by emotions. Youth's tem- perament has strong desire, and reason seems for 130 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS the time hopeless, while emotion holds the ascend- ency. Many of the nervous have failed to develop beyond this stage, having never systematically and resolutely harkened to the voice of Eeason. They have not willed, and willed again, that impulse be set aside, and that counsel and reason be followed. Many at thirty or forty yes, at fifty or sixty still maintain the emotional minds of youth, and continue to suffer through false judgment. Many physically mature and scholas- tically well-trained men and women confuse feel- ing and reason. They believe that they are deliberately contemplating a situation from all points of view, when they are merely brooding; and far from earnest, forceful, logical thinking, they are but emotionally dreaming of greater ills or brighter pleasures. Deceiving themselves into the belief that they are reasoning the question out, they but drift from one feeling to another, and the conclusions they reach are little better than the choice of chance. Many seek nervous help in the belief that through some unusual physical effort in the past a hard year in the store, or the care of an invalid parent or that from the remnants of some acci- dent of long ago, a permanent physical hurt has resulted, and ascribe to such supposed injuries an impossible list of aches and pains. The real damage has been far more often one of hurtful mental selection, or worry and anxieties, of appre- hension, of the reiteration of harmful memories memories which obscure the firmament of hope and happiness with their grey pall of depression. TANGLED THOUGHTS 131 How many minds hang with fateful tenacity upon a loss the mother for her child, the husband for the sainted wife! How frequently the recurring consciousness of a sin, or of injustice suffered, drapes the stage of life's action with the black- ness of mourning, shutting out the voices of happiness, blinding the eye to the beckoning of hope, and fairly smothering the heart's impulses for good. Such memories are but premature winding sheets, imprisoning the nature which should still find loves and friendships and inspira- tion in this big, teeming, needy world. Superficial knowledge, accepted as final, definite and positive, is a soil in which many weeds of nervousness grow luxuriantly. In our study of dietary errors we have seen how little the average man knows of the relatively simple processes of digestion, and he knows even less of the more intricate action of organs more vital. But the superficial thinker is satisfied with quarter- or half -knowledge. So when, after an unwonted bit of exercise, he notes the active pulsations of his heart and finds that organ dutifully registering a hundred and twenty or thirty beats a minute, he is seized with a panic he has "palpitation of the heart." From that day, seriously or fear- somely, he avoids undue exercise, and probably falls into the pulse-feeling habit, which may grow until the action of his heart divides his attention with all the possibilities of world-wide interests, a poor victim of superficial knowledge. Yet he represents a common class of the nervous. Men and women of this type discount their usefulness 132 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS many per cent, through periods of years, simply because they do not know that every normal heart should beat a hundred and twenty or thirty times a minute following an unusual furlong's run for the train, or any other active and unaccustomed exercise. Thousands refuse to know the moun- tain's beatitudes at first hand, because of the nervous sensation of air-hunger common to many who are anxious and depressed, believing that the moderately rare air of the mountain elevation is pregnant with impending disaster. Superficial knowledge and a persistence of emo- tional supremacy over reason is a basis for sug- gestibility a nervous defect fundamental in that large class of the nervous, styled " hysterics. " In suggestibility the mind is influenced by feeling, even in the face of the protests of reason, but too frequently reason is not there to protest. Many lives are practically crazy patch-works, knowing neither persistence nor stability, truly children of occasion, impelled by suggestions introduced by emotions, often not even challenged by reason. Suggestibility is an essential asset of the child mind. It leads the young mind before knowledge comes and reason is evolved. Abnormally it Is often seen in the oversuggestible mind, persisting in the adult life, an evidence of unsymmetrical mental development. Eeason did not come to its own, and the avenue through which childhood's mind was influenced remains an insufficient chan- nel for the grown-up mind. Most suggestions come from influences appeal- ing to the imagination. The graphic and thrill- TANGLED THOUGHTS 133 ing patent medicine advertisements are written for the suggestible mind. These detailed and vivid accounts of symptoms, often not really indicative of disease, but labelled with some fear- some name and followed by accounts of marvellous cures, have for many years drawn streams of dollars from the pockets of penury streams fairly overflowing the coffers of wealth. In re- turn useless, sometimes even harmful, compounds have been given, sufficiently potent, however, to produce imaginary cures of imaginary diseases. Much nervous invalidism is the result of self- suggestion. In the suggestible the idea of frailty, of defect of sight, inadequacy of digestion, of inability to sleep these and a hundred other deficiencies or disabilities the mind may suggest to itself, and a resulting partial or complete invalidism may continue for years until a stronger suggestion, some more powerful ideational in- fluence, replaces the defective, weakening one ; and perchance the miracle of restoration is performed ! Error and Illness. Through suggestibility every known organic disease may be imitated, simulated through expectation, self-centredness and self- study ; every known set of symptoms may appear, reproducing organic disturbances so accurately as to deceive the elect. Were it not for the neurolo- gist's habit of keen investigation of his patient's mentality and ready detection of suggestibility, with his knowledge that in a mind so constituted the symptoms of organic disease can be repro- duced through the interrelation of mind and body, many of these sufferers would remain beyond 134 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS the helpful influence of medical skill. From this large class of the suggestible many are rescued from tuberculosis, from cancer, from various forms of paralysis and languishing beds of many years' illness, from the diseases which all the doctors in the neighbourhood failed to cure or understand! none of which existed outside the patient 's mind and that of the sympathetic family and credible friends. Thus thousands are an- nually cured by this or that patent medicine, religious influence, or special forms of joint- stretching or nerve-rubbing manipulations. Unfortunately, the over-solicitous physician and nurse, not recognising the suggestibility of their patient and the undue influence which their warnings are going to exercise, may, in their desire to afford a protective helpfulness, do unin- tentional but lasting damage to the patient's self-confidence, and thereby augment his tendency to nervous invalidism. Many a patient has pro- ceeded to suffer all the symptoms of inflammation of the stomach following the physician's appre- hensive, "I fear you are threatened with gastri- tis." The writer has met numerous cases in which the patient two, three, even six and seven years after surgical operations, was still avoiding strengthening, developing and health-giving exer- cise because of the fateful warning of the physician or nurse to avoid any strain. They neglected to neutralise this temporarily helpful injunction by careful and explicit directions as to when, and how, to resume the exercise which would strengthen, and make perfect the cure for which TANGLED THOUGHTS 135 the operation was done. There are, unfortun- ately, poorly prepared physicians and ignorant nurses whose lack of knowledge makes them a serious menace to the suggestible patient, who, accepting their word as authority, may suffer long and uselessly, because of the incapacitating idea of disease, which has been a professional contri- bution to their minds. The sum of human knowledge is such that no mind can span its entirety. It is only since Science has come to her own, that even the best trained have had knowledge, at all adequate, of the nature of bodily and mental ills. The com- plexities of medical science are such that to-day no physician pretends to keep fully abreast with all its various branches. It is obviously impos- sible, therefore, for the lay or untrained mind to know the body, its needs, the mind and its intricate relations; to understand the processes of disease and the complicated effects it produces on mind and body. Our study of the influence of error upon nervous health has thus far considered it a result of igno- rance or a defect of development. Few minds are perfectly poised. Many overemphasise, over- stress, overfeel, overwill; more, probably, fail to duly emphasise, and live years of depression and undervaluation. There is a group of the nerv- ously ill who, consciously or unconsciously, find in their nervousness a defence. They are thereby relieved of home responsibilities; the burdens of family support are readjusted so as to fall more lightly on their shoulders. The nervous child 136 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS often finds herself excused from school and home duties. Many a career is cut short, education lost and future blighted because of nervousness. Nervousness may result as a protective defence, with selfish grief, shallow disappointment or the cowardly fear idea as a basis. Now and again there are those, not unconscious of their surren- der, who are willing to live vampire-like upon the very strength and blood of loving sacrifice. So in the mental manifestations of this protein dis- order, defence reactions may end in surrenders, not only of duty, but of character. Our thoughts concerning our bodies sometimes become morbidly domineering and demanding, and so controlling that we frequently surrender to their persistent repetition, even when we more or less clearly realise the damage which will follow. The insistent idea of bodily disability or disturbance then so largely occupies the field of consciousness as to limit the mind's activities in other directions. Hypochondriasis is the name given this form of tangled thoughts, and when allowed to progress unresisted and uncombated it may finally make hopeless wreckage of life. When judgment fails to definitely and clearly assert its demands for truth, the imaginative thought life, an outgrowth of the normal ideation of the child, may persist as an unwholesome habit into adult life, and the vividness of what is truly fantastic blur reality. There is no known limit that can curtail the intensity and immensity of our imaginings; but in a mind of activity, the less the accurate knowledge, the less truth, the TANGLED THOUGHTS 137 fewer acquired facts the less one really knows, the more he will imagine. And so, many minds, which, properly trained, might have developed a high degree of productive capacity, through lack of training and proper discipline, and failure to hold hard by truth, have developed morbid imaginings. Day-dreams and longings for that which is not probable, perchance not possible, usually not deserved and never honestly earned, separate further and further the real from the so-called ideal, and out of the fantastic life the wish-habit grows. The day-dream is the con- scious expression of the elaborate, usually im- possible, and not infrequently unwise wish. Analysis of many of our night-dreams will show that they are distorted, disguised expressions of our wish-life ofttimes wishes buried from con- sciousness and rising from the primitive instincts dreams created by unthought cravings. There is a certain type whose idealism is closely allied to sentimentalism, who turn from life's realities as being too crude, too far from the truth as they would have it, and bury themselves in the unreal, and ultimately unprofitable, fantastic. Gradually imagination more and more supplants reality, the ability to recognise truth becomes weakened and defective ; and herein is developed a basis of much unconscious simulation and deceit. Much serious hysteria follows accidents, espe- cially accidents in which responsibility can be laid upon some wealthy corporation, hysteria manifesting itself in continued pain or paralysis, or even in forms of blindness or mutism or joint 138 THE MASTEEY OF NERVOUSNESS contractures, but the resultant deformities may be cured as by magic by the settlement of the damage suit. The influence of the wish in lives so divorced from reason or control is powerful. In some the surrender in the life discounted by day-dreaming may grow out of the mind's inability to accept the truism that reality never fulfils the ideal. Man can ever plan more than body, mind or even life can realise. To the thoughtful there exists herein a suggestion that there are possibilities of realisation unknown in our present sphere of existence. In the errors into which the mind falls, so damaging in their effects upon progress and development, errors which allow multitudes to grope along into old age, never having known mental mastery we recognise that the fault has been in our selection of the thoughts and feelings which we permitted to occupy the centre of our stage of consciousness. In our choice of actors in our drama of life we have too often turned over the serious business to mere amateurs, or allowed the villain to play the hero 's part, or the comedian to cheapen that which should have been sacred. Again, in the development of mind it becomes necessary during the early years for the child to be the object of much attention. In being directed physically and mentally, in discipline, in the teaching of courtesy, at school and in the home, the child receives much individual attention. As intelligence wakens, knowledge broadens and interests multiply, the normal mind finds outside of self that which attracts, diverts, distracts and TANGLED THOUGHTS 139 fascinates. Habits form rapidly in youth, habits which relieve the mind of much of effort by devel- oping the automatic, and thereby making it easy for the mind to externalise its interests, while it depends on the subconscious, the automatic, to care for many of the body needs, and for much of the further development of the mind. And in life 's duties and legitimate pleasures, in the great interrelations of society, in the call to responsi- bility, and in the satisfying of effort, the mature mind is busy from morning to night, and self- forgetfulness becomes a wholesome, saving habit of life. But through overattention in childhood, through repeated and unwise references in the child's presence to his attractiveness and naive brightness and precocious originality, conceit grows, an excess of individualism develops, and self-centredness may persist to contract, and later to deform, or even to distort character. Self- attention is largely unprofitable attention. The habit of introspection may produce the " shut-in " nature which, when surrendered to, may be the basis of mental disturbances. To the mind centred on self, adjustments to surroundings must be inadequate, oversolicitude concerning our con- dition, well-being, present and future, becomes distorted and inexact, and self-observation be- comes a disease. Many of the pains of the nervous are scienti- fically termed "attention-pains." If we concen- trate the mind, especially with any degree of apprehension, upon a part of the body, that part becomes rapidly more sensitive. All active per- 140 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS sons at some time wrench the back muscles at the waist-line. This simple accident may develop into an incapacitating weakness when the mind anxiously dwells upon these sore muscles, fre- quently with intensified apprehension through foolish association of this simple hurt with kidney damage. The normal individual would laughingly grunt for a few days about his condition, whereas in the neurotic, a permanent weakness may supervene, and years later the patient be slouch- ing in an easy chair, protecting himself from the attention-pains born of a physically harmless injury. Pains galore and depressions unspeak- able are the constant outgrowth of the damage of self-attention. So again we have been con- sidering examples of hurt growing out of unwise selection, of unwise thought choice. With the exception of self-attention necessary for the formation of wholesome habits in child- hood, a small amount of self-thought, of self-study and self -analysis, ^dth an infinitesimal amount of self -commiseration, should be the law of all who would avoid the insidious development of nervous hurt, the certain penalty of habitual self-centred- ness. Power of physique, strength of constitu- tion, perfect digestion and unquestioned circula- tion in fact, robust health are ineffective when ruled by a mind led by morbid questionings based upon false ideas, accepting the testimony of fear- some emotions, and sensitively and irrationally suggestible. A mind looking for excuses to avoid life's duties; a mentality that watches the body's every movement, that studies its heart-throbs, and TANGLED THOUGHTS 141 takes undue account of those pains and temporary disabilities inherent in all normal living, will create nervousness in even the physically perfect. No physique, regardless of its innate strength, can resist the insidious, damaging influence of the disease-accepting mind. The healthy body is ultimately helpless when a victim of tangled thought-control. CHAPTER XII EMOTIONAL TYRANNY Nature of the Emotions. In the mind's efforts at adjustment three channels are open. In the properly developed mind, intelligence, with its accurate array of facts, its careful selection and definite decision, makes the most perfect mental adjustments possible. The universally respected judicial mind is of this type ; true leaders in prog- ress and constructive organisers are thus mentally constituted. But while one leads, many follow. The average person unconsciously depends upon imitation, the second possibility of adjustment; and thus the majority do as their elders did, and, following the paths already worn across life's meads and fens, seldom risk losing their way by venturesome excursions. Imitation solves the cut of most coats, lengthens and shortens skirts, attires serving maids, popularises the year's novels, chooses the new auto, and even selects subjects for and decides the style of many minis- ters' sermons. Cultivated reason presupposes long training, and intelligent imitation is only possible when observation has been cultivated, and some critical sense developed. Undeveloped, untrained, uneducated man through all time has required his channel of adjustment, also. Primi- tive and simple leadings his may be, perchance, 142 EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 143 but whether protective or aggressive or meagrely j productive, the instinctive ever-present emotional (life has ever been mankind's inherent directing force. Simply stated, our emotions embrace all experi- jences which we include under the terms pleasant j and unpleasant. It is easy to see the instinctive {influence of pleasure in attracting us toward that ? which is pleasure-producing, and the equally primitive nature of the repelling influence of the unpleasant. Each mental act is associated with some emotional reaction, and the restless ebb and flow of the ocean's tide is sluggishness indeed, I when compared with the constant attraction and repulsion accompanying every conscious thought. Emotional life knows no neutral states. Our : feelings have no dead centre. The animal king- dom is dominated by emotions. The stranger approaches, curiosity impels the dog to run f or- jward to investigate; there is a threatening ges- ture, in anger an attack is made, and following I the well-directed blow, the yelping retreat of fear. i Curiosity, anger, fear how large a span of human activities has its origin in these three primal ! channels of emotional adjustment ! The emotions are our inherited counsellors. They appear early, I and are the sole guide to action until superseded 'by slowly acquired intellect. In the nervous, ! emotional intensity is overemphasised ; in the true ; neurotic an excessive tendency to emotional re- i sponse is a fundamental weakness, which can only |be displaced by serious and tedious years of ra- tional training, which many of the presumably 144 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS educated have failed to -undertake. To-day the anomaly of high intellectual attainments with defective emotional mastery is commonly ob- served. In everyday language we speak of the emotions as the "feelings," and both words suggest pos- sible sensation. In our experience, all pleasur- able thoughts do produce a sense of physical comfort and well-being or relief, while the un- pleasant are associated with painful feelings, discomfort or weariness. There is a reason for these associated sensations. The l ' sympathetic, ' ' an important division of the nervous system which cannot be directly influenced through the conscious mind, has control of all the muscular movements upon which many of the activities of the vital organs depend. Here mind and body clasp hands. The fear thought, through the sympathetic nerves which control the heart's activities, causes that organ, even in the face of determination to the contrary, to double the force and number of its beats. The many thousand nerve endings con- trolling the involuntary muscles in the walls of minute blood vessels influence these muscles to contract, and the face turns ashy white. Other branches of this same sensitive nervous mechan- ism supplying the saliva-producing glands check their activity, and suddenly the mouth is dry; while still other nerves influencing certain invol- untary muscles of the eye dilate the pupil, pro- ducing the wild, staring look of extreme fear. The stream of sensation then overflows into the voluntary muscles ; the brow of the blanched face EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 145 ; is contracted, the jaw drops, the fingers stiffen, i and the whole body is transfixed in terror. It i may be but a stray sheet from the neighbour's wash flapping out suddenly in the darkness from I between the rails of the fence and no ghost at all! With every sensation which we call feeling : there is relaxation or contraction of some of the i innumerable involuntary muscle fibres which are I interwoven with the structure of our vital organs. | Through the ever-responsive, never-resting sym- I pathetic nervous system, the desires of the mind I are translated into the pulsations of the heart; | the anguish of fear breaks out in beads of chill- : ing sweat ; anticipation fairly causes the mouth to water. All such reactions, absolutely beyond the influence of will, are accompanied with sensations, indistinct, indefinite, generalised, yet marking the temporal unity of mind and body. But, as already ; indicated, in the more intense expressions of our j emotions, the voluntary muscles frequently take part, as illustrated in the clenched fist of defiance, the gnashing teeth of anguish, the stamping foot of impatience, the vehemently shaking head of denial, or the resolute, erect carriage of deter- mination. Our thoughts may cause our bodies to fairly vibrate from finger-tip to heart 's-co re. But other influences produce relaxation and con- 1 traction of these involuntary muscle threads which are so intimate a part of our vital organs. A drop of atropin solution in the eye, and the pupil widely dilates and stares hopelessly for days ; while in the other eye a solution of eserin reduces the pupil to pin-point size. Through the chronic 146 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS self -poisoning of dietary ignorance and indul- gence, involuntary muscle fibres in vessel and gland walls remain for days and months in con- stant spasm. A stiff toddy flushes the face for hours and affords a temporary relaxation to this condition of unnatural vessel spasm a relaxation which stands for an evanescent comfort. On the other hand, the inveterate alcoholic lives in a state of continuous overrelaxation of vital tissues, due to the toxic, paralysing influence of his drug. But few have not experienced acute emotional depression, with accompanying disturbances in circulation, the result of self -poisoning from their own decomposed foods. Multitudes live autotoxic years of emotional misery and subconscious un- rest because of the intimate, relentless action of body on mind through this same toxically dis- turbed sympathetic nervous system. Victims of periodic attacks of the blues really acute ex- pressions of modified melancholia are emotion- ally depressed from food poisons. Such self- produced irritants stimulate overcontraction of the involuntary muscles. Tobacco and alcohol produce the opposite condition, and tend to paralyse, and thus relax, these same muscles. Hence the explanation of the periodic alcoholic, who will risk his soul for drink, as he feels the murderous black pall of his toxic depression settling upon him. Hence also the common habit of alcohol-using with overeating, the blind ef- fort of unreason to anticipate food-produced dis- turbances, to create a right out of two wrongs. Chronic emotional depression, the legitimate re- EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 147 suit of the broken balance between food and ex- ercise, caused though it may be by the chemical toxins, reflects its damage not only on the body, but upon the mind itself, which it holds a prisoner without hope. Shallow breathing, slug- gish circulation, defective elimination of excre- tions, inadequate glandular activity in fact, a chronic lowered vital tone are constant results of food and drug intoxication, while the identical conditions may be the constant accompaniments of low-grade emotional states. Three sets of emotions are associated with every a'ct. Emotions of anticipation precede all doing. When we look forward with pleasure to what is to happen, we enjoy the wholesome emo- tion of hope ; if we plan with dread and fear, our anticipations are weighted down with the emotion of worry. In the midst of action we experience the emotions of participation, and if all is going as we would have it, we feel pleasure ; but if things are wrong, if hurt or injury is occurring, we ex- perience pain. After the act, when our antici- pations have been fulfilled, we experience the pleasurable emotion of realisation called satisfac- tion; but if the experience has been hurtful or damaging, we look back upon the occurrence with a realisation of regret. And so the light and shadow, the tint and tone of emotion anticipates, accompanies, and follows our every act, and our feeling life is as restless as the ocean's tide. There are refinements of the emotional life asso- ciated with the higher activities of our critical sense and our moral nature which we term senti- 148 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS ments, but no possible refinement can separate feeling from its relation to the physical. The most highly refined of our sensibilities lay hold upon circulation or secretion, or touch the magical eye, which ever responds to the feeling within. The sensations of ecstasy are as truly based on the physical as the cramps of stomach-ache. Power of the Emotions. There are emotions that invigorate, stimulate and elevate; there are those that wilt and crush and deaden. We have seen that the interrelation of mind and body, like all good rules, works both ways, and as hurtful toxic conditions can produce distressing emotional reactions, so active or prolonged mental states may call forth definite physical reactions. Who as a child has not felt the choking, aching lump in his throat that distressing physical accom- paniment of the yearning for home and mother too deep for tears? And who again, when caught red-handed in some childish depredation, has not found vocal chords paralysed, and been able to re- spond to the stern questionings of the unexpected parent only with painful efforts at swallowing! And who has not, a few years later, felt his cheeks fairly flame with livid and burning embarrass- ment, when, helpless in his awkwardness, he commits a faux pas in the presence of the Only One! And in later years the pain of our great sorrow has rested as a weight over the heart, pressing down as a leaden heel. Sweating, chill- ing, flushing and paling, tearful or dry eyes, clammy or burning skins, choking throats, uncom- fortable, cramping stomachs, and numerous other EMOTIONAL TYEANNY 149 forms of bodily distress, may be but the physical reactions to disturbing emotions. Such discom- forts, possibly prolonged through days or months, may be interpreted by the mind as painful sensa- tions, the result of genuine physical disease. The more sensitive the nervous organisation, the more acute it is to the sensations of involuntary muscular movement which accompany feeling. In the untutored mind which is studying the body's sensations, there exists in such physical discom- fort, in the numerous alterations in secretion or activity of vital parts, ample reason to confound the feelings normal to emotional change with the sensations common to disease. Here is found the explanation for that almost endless list of symp- toms which, like the clouds of a stormy day, troop, one after another, across the horizon of the over- sensitive, self -observant neurotic's life. Like poor, distraught, terror-tense Eoderick Usher, who heard the beatings of his supposedly dead sister's buried heart for days before her tragic resurrection, many of the overwrought nervous live terror-tense, listening to each internal throb as though an avenging spirit threatened. Emo- tions may be as powerful for good as for damage. We shall learn later of the superbly beneficent influence of wholesome emotions as preserving, blessing and reconstructing forces in life. The power of the emotions to influence the body, to produce disturbing and even distressing sen- sations, to discount physical strength and occa- sionally to curtail life itself, is of secondary importance to their power over the mind. In- 150 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS tellect, feeling and will are the interwoven, interrelated trinity which constitutes the mind, and in the mind's development the emotional life has the earliest chance and the most constant chance to influence and influence it does, even the most stolid. Child of instinct, small wonder that it is the accepted directing force for the majority, and a suggesting, begging, nagging, appealing, demanding influence in all lives. "I feel" and ' ' I don 't feel, ' ' what portentous decrees abide in these simple words! How rare is the one with whom a day's association fails to elicit one or the other of these expressions ! How extremely rare the man who rigorously ignores their wooing and beckoning insistence ! How superb the character who knows not surrender to their dominating or insinuating authority, and whose "I believe" or "I will" is their potent master! The feelings produce the lighting effects on life's canvas. The real substance of the mind's action, the truth and problems of intellectual activity, the realities of experience, are only seen in their true value by the clear eye of reason. The high lights and the depths of shadow in the picture are the result of emotional influence. But in many minds the substance is obscured by the colouring, is blurred by the lights and shadows^; and reality, the actuality of conditions, the clear outlines of truth, are lost in the emotional haze. In the mind in which emotional domination is persistent, the ability to estimate events at their true value fails to develop. The habit of basing opinions upon the evidence of feeling EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 151 practically obstructs the. development of reason, and when the testimony of feeling continues so much stronger than the judicial voice of intellect, lives of impulse result, lives in which decisions are based on morbid judgment, not on the counsel of reason. The logic of such lives is the logic of feeling, pure logic being crippled by false valuations, daily and hourly accepted as legal tender. And in the lives of the nervous, with temptation ever strong to false valuations and overreaction to surroundings, emotional domin- ance becomes a quick-sand in which the children of reason and will and happiness are engulfed. It is rare for the emotional temperament to profit by an hour of earnest contemplation. The brown- study habit has not been acquired, except in the perverted form of blue-black moods. Calm, ac- curate, logical, constructive thinking and reason- ing are never possible in the face of unmastered, aggressive emotions. The nervous temperament is remarkable for its sensitive emotional balance. But in nervousness, this margin is so narrow as to render the expendi- ture of force necessary to maintain nervous stability an energy-exhausting effort. Emotional exaltation is daily observed in unnecessary excite- ment, shallow enthusiasm, hysterical efferves- cence ; but far more frequently emotional depres- sion is the defect depression varying from the momentary questioning of self to the intense and unreasoning desperation of the feeling of suicidal unworthiness. One of the truly difficult problems in the reeducation of the neurotic is found in the 152 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS attainment of emotional poise, of such stability of feelings as to conserve the disintegrating waste of constant emotional wear and tear. Such minds are prone to repudiate the dictates of reason in matters of spiritual teaching. Much of religious insistence is directed toward feeling and not toward reason; indeed, there are many who feel that in reasoning over matters spiritual they indulge in sacrilege. Therefore many, even of those who depend upon rational guidance and the leadings of common sense in their secular life, are easily led to exaggeration and fanaticism in religion. Church history teems with lives of emotional exaltations and depressions encompass- ing the extremes of sainthood and demon-posses- sion. Emotional Tyranny. Emotional supremacy stands for an instability as pronounced as the restless waveline on the fretful ocean's beach. And as the unstable sea itself, in many the emo- tions rise in damaging destructiveness and find ^expression in murderous fury. Man in the grip of primeval passions may become a frightful being. Anger may develop as suddenly as the tropical* hurricane, and wrench and wreck and dash into pieces its victim. Anger springs full- fledged from man's fight-instinct, and is one of his most primitive adjustments to opposition. From its most intense expression in which its victim fairly sees red, anger may be manifested in many forms of lesser intensity. Sullenness and sulkiness indicate partial repression, but im- patience and irritability are much more common EMOTIONAL TYBANNY 153 to the nervous; few of this class do not almost habitually surrender to this hurtful strength- leakage, and the habit of irritability grows apace, and many lives, even in their early strength, have been mastered thereby. So weak has their self- control become, that few hours are spent at work, or even in the seeking of pleasure, not dishonoured by eruptions of selfish irritability. Like the chronic alcoholic, they can only keep themselves decently comfortable by repeated sprees. This emotional weakness may become so ingrained as to quickly exhaust the will in its effort to resist these outbreaks, so in surrender relief is found from exhausting control. Hate is another of the destructive passions which, when it fastens itself upon the heart, with or without reason, curdles therein the very milk of human kindness that essential food for happiness. Hate can fairly distort the body and dwarf its soul ; it can poison the mind until reason is dead. But in the nervous it is not the excessive expressions of this passion that are commonly met, but its host of deformed children. The ever-reiterated dislikes, the antag- onistic habit and the unfair judgments based upon such influences, explain a large part of the unhap- pily unsocial histories of many of the nervous. But the emotional arch-enemy of human peace is fear. It plays a tremendous role in human life, and many, very many imperfect human adjust- ments are the result of its demoralising influ- ences. It is the father of deception, the influence which forces dishonourable surrender or disas- trous and unworthy retreat, or shameful headlong 154 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS flight from the post of honour or duties ' demands. Fear paralyses effort and causes many to turn from the strife of life and subsist on the husks of indolence. Fear may produce unreasoning frenzy of action, with prodigal wasting of strength, fight- ing hopelessly, because irrationally. Fear ap- pears in acute expressions of terror, follows the hunted soul through the years with the persistence of a shadow; fear enters the council chamber in the form of anticipatory dread, robbing many de- cisions of the zest and confidence which would bring success ; fear in the form of wretched worry vitiates every plan and project. In their more violent expressions, anger, hate and fear may in- stantly lash the unrestrained neurotic into a froth of frenzy, in which mere brute instincts, with their appeal to coarse, crude force, have sway, and for the time being the whole kingdom of reason is in lawless chaos. But the total harm of these cataclysmic emotional convulsions is small when compared with the accumulation of unrelenting, insidious manifestations of the milder, habitual expressions of these same damage emotions. Ir- ritability, the habit of dislikes, hourly dreads and worries, associate themselves with and discount, discolour and deform the thoughts before they find expression through the will. The total dam- age of harmful emotional habits can only be re- alised through an intimate knowledge of the world's nervous suffering. Such habits may not only injure each thought and impulse and desire, but may find more permanent expression in the form of moods which are chronic emotional states. EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 155 In depressed individuals moods create an atmos- phere which fairly poisons the thought-life. In a rather serious form of nervousness termed psychasthenia, the patient is possessed with fear ideas, technically called ' l phobias. ' ' The psychas- thenic's reason may tell him how absurd are his fears, but they are so much stronger in their insistence than the will is in its persistence, that surrender follows surrender. The psychasthenic may at times sadly laugh at his own foolish fears but it is a sad laugh and a rare laugh, for he is a miserable sufferer of the disease of fear. He retreats, pale and agitated, from crowds, discon- tinues church and later the theatre, because of his unreasoning dread of crowded places; is unable to cross an open field because of the equally un- reasoning dread of being where he cannot put his hands on something for support, or feel the pres- ence of shelter, and so follows the fence from corner to corner rather than trust himself alone in the midst of space. He circles around the edge of the park, for he is miserable in the midst of its spacious beauties. Again, he is in a panic of terror in a room with closed doors and windows, and assures you that he would "die of f right " were he accidentally locked in a cramped closet. There is a fear of dirt and fear of filth which is unholy the fear of contamination, of infection, or of germs, which causes its poor victim to wash and wash and wash, often until hands and arms are raw and even ulcerated. No dish is fit for use which he has not seen painstakingly and thor- oughly washed and rewashecj. The laundry is. 156 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS returned the second and third time for fear it is still contaminated. Modern psychology dips rather deeply into man's primitive instincts to find a satisfactory explanation for these unreasonable fears fears which, unchecked by rigid and resolute self-con- trol, or if this is impossible, by the force of wise counsel, may lead from a condition of physical ridiculousness to the tragedy of mental eruption. The writer was recently thrown with such a fear victim for twenty-four hours on a sleeper. Dur- ing that time he gargled and rinsed his throat at least twenty times with repeated cups of ice- water, into which, on each occasion, was poured a teaspoonful of reasonably strong antiseptic; and after each gargling process, from ten to twenty minutes would be spent in vociferous coughing and hawking and spitting, to the legiti- mate disgust of all the passengers. Between times he made frequent attempts to see into his throat in the smoking-room mirrors, making re- peated explanations that he had just spent a night in a city having a national reputation as a tuber- culosis resort, and 'that he knew he had a germ in his throat, because he could feel it ! ' Fear was so strong, reason so helpless, and will so weak in this poor man, so sane on general subjects as to have made a comfortable fortune in lumber in- terests, as to allow him to thus make himself a public nuisance, an object of ridicule and revul- sion. Even the serious professional statement that the throat of the healthy child harbours mil- lions of germs, and that if perchance he did have EMOTIONAL TYRANNY 157 a temporary extra tubercular supply, there was no danger unless he injured the mucous membrane of his throat and made it possible for them to gain admission into the tissues, had no influence. Fear was gripping his throat muscles, throwing them into a state of continuous contraction, which he interpreted as the presence of germs, and with might and main he made all possible effort to damage the protective coverings of his throat, and to invite danger from the germ-laden dust of travel infinitely more real than the germs of the sanitary but dreaded health-resort from which he was flee- ing. The Western mind looks with aversion and pity upon the poor, mutilated, deformed victims of re- ligious zeal, the mendicant votaries of India, self- tortured for conscience' sake; and yet could we but have revealed the twisted, mutilated, deformed souls of many of the victims of the self-torture of fear, we would stand aghast at the damning in- fluence of this brutal emotional tyrant. Life is strewn with unhappy nervous wrecks, the hapless victims of fear of disease, fear of contamination, fear of infection, fear of failure, fear of poverty, fear of ridicule, fear of discovery, fear of enemies, fear of dishonour, fear of to-morrow, fear of the now, fear of death and fear of eternity fear- some, f lightsome, fearful fear! We have thus rapidly reviewed the nature of our mind's emotions, the intimate interrelation between physical and feeling conditions; we have seen how interactive each is upon the other, how common is the presence of defective and damaging 158 THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS emotional habits in the nervous, how prone in- deed is the nervous temperament to become a vic- tim of its feeling life. Worthy invalidism pre- sents many reasons for patience and gentleness and love and devotion, and offers one of life's most perfect objects for wholesome service; but some invalids