iti Cii cli Cobb SE * p ¥ Ft FH » 3 2 “3, KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Sl Sn Keeping |! Mentally Fit A Guide to Everyday ‘Psychology ‘By Joseph Jastrow Ph.D., LL.D. Suiits | % ] V S & =, 4 Q New LEY York, ‘GREENBERG : PUBLISHER df CF ALS NT - Sealing CopyricHT, 1928 pe GREENBERG, PUBLISHER, INC. at 3YCH. A [drs First printing November, 1928 Second printing November, 1928 Third printing March, 1929 Fourth printing March, 1929 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y. TO EDWARD A. FILENE The project embodied in this venture in popularis- ing and humanizing psychology, is due largely to your encouragement. Much of it was written under your hospitable roof. It is mo less in appreciation of your personal achievements and public-minded ca- reer that I inscribe the volume to you. HSA gp or my ¢ ids ( A PREFACE FOR THE CRITICAL READER Tus book is based on the belief that there are many ways of meeting the demand for knowledge of the mind’s behavior, and one of them is to follow the popular habit of mind. This browses more readily than it studies, wants to be stimulated as well as informed, absorbs willingly what ties up with established interests, and that means practical ones. There are all sorts and conditions of readers; and the psychology of the average reader is considered in the present undertaking. “Readers for the day” form by far the largest group; and journalism (jour being French for day) must be suited to an easy mass comprehension. To infer that psychology has come to journalism would be quite a false rendering of this enter- prise; rather has journalism come to psychology. In these days many of our age-old interests, in older periods of social management referred to such institutions as the Church, the courts, the traditional moralities generally, and again to medi- cine and the ills and sins of the flesh too strong for the spirit, are recognized as flesh and bone of our mental tissue. We are fearfully and wonderfully made because in each stage and mechanism of our making the complications of psychology enter. Psychology speaks to-day with the authority of an emancipated science—no longer a dependency of philosophy nor a protectorate of physiology—and speaks also in intelli- gible terms with an appeal to the common interests of com- mon men. The laboratory and the clinic are the sources of information; but the distribution of it is another matter. Class-room psychology has one function and method, and popular enlightenment must follow another. Diluting a text- book or making the language sprightly are false bids for pop- ularity ; the student should not need them, and they do not vii viii PREFACE meet the needs of the popular mind which catches its quarry on the wing, and reads as it runs or rides. The entire approach, the selection, the treatment, the lan- guage, the appeal, must be present in the mind of the writer who has a sense of his invisible audience to whom he is ad- dressing a message, a principle, an incident, a lesson, that lies quite otherwise in his own mind; and which if he were facing a group of selected minds at whatever level, he would shape to a definite period of impression, making the most of his hour and sure of the next opportunity. All this he must forego and the systematic advance and convenient arrange- ment and parcelling of points in graded difficulty, and testing and repeating. Yet he gains as much as he loses. He knows that he must get somewhere and score on each shot, whatever the range of the target; the reader must get the point and carry away an impression. Through all appears the dominance of application. Men will absorb what they can apply. This applies most directly to the hygienic interest from which the volume takes its title. The ways of the mind, like so much else, are good and bad,— credits or debits in the art of living. Mental fitness is a worthy ideal and must be made a practical reality for most of us to retain our jobs and our content. The relief of ills and handicaps may prove a more urgent motive than the search for understanding. But fortunately the removal of misunderstanding is an instrument of “mental hygiene, and thus justifies the psychologist’s excursions into the field-work of unfitness and its many varieties. To the same purpose is the survey of mental training, which makes the child the father of the man. The present generation enjoys an insight not previously entering into the common heritage of understanding: that we owe our children not merely an education but a consideration in our total scheme of living. The triumph of each generation is its better provisioning for the next. At closer range the psychologist for the day accepts the task of the survey of human interests. We must have our PREFACE ix world with us, but not too much so if we wish to see it clearly and sanely and see it whole. The human nature that persists is deeper and more significant than the passing show. But the many-sidedness of mental behavior as it appears in the psychology of sport and recreation and fashion and be- lief and growth and vagary itself adds many an illustration of the principles and mechanisms which are the psychologist’s concern. The reason why there is need for psychology is that meaning does not always lie at the surface; the analytic habit of mind is what makes the psychologist and attracts minds of similar bent to his findings. The danger of psychology to try to be all things to all men and claiming under the warrant of that title dominion and authoritative advice which goes far beyond present knowledge and is often based on past errors, has frequently been pointed out and rightly. This abuse is sadly apparent in the many pretenders who have taken the name of applied psychology in vain and gathered in audiences and shekels with the same pre- sumption. Practical demands must not encroach upon the scientific aims of any science; yet the urge toward the control of natural resources, including the resources of human nature, and the bending them to our uses is equally an urge toward understanding; the pure and the applied go hand in hand. Without the vision of pure science practice is blind. Once granted the method of illustration and selection, the slightness of the present project becomes its own justification. It is but an attempt to enlist and guide the interest of the casual reader to the principles and mechanisms of his own mind, to suggest to him in ways suited to his preferred modes of approach some of the illumination that is reflected upon his own problems by way of excursions into a humanized psy- chology. The arrangement in the present form is due to the collab- oration of Herbert Askwith. ; Josep JASTROW New York, September 1928 143 East 49a St. CONTENTS PAGE I. Keeping Happy 19 The Art of Being Happy 19 What Does “Mind-Health” Mean? 21 Normalcy 23 What Are You Afraid of? 25 The Fear Bogy 27 Expression vs. Repression 29 High-Powered Emotions 31 Shall We Suppress—or Let Go? 33 Do You Carry an Energy Spare? 36 Patching Your Mind Windows 38 Putting the Brakes on Anger 40 Complexes That May Lead to Tragedies 42 How to Be Strong-Willed 44 Do You Know How to Sleep? 46 “Bottled Lightning” 48 Curing the Blues 51 Getting a Strangle-hold on Worry 53 The Hard-boiled Club 55 “Thou Shalt Not Be too Fussy!” 56 The Lost Paradise of Solitude 59 A Quiet Center of Life 61 “Be Good, Sweet Maid, and Let Who Will Be Clever!” 63 II. Starting Early—With the Child 66 Your Mind Before You Grew Up 66 x1 pit CONTENTS PAGE Born So—or Made So? 68 The Minds of Boys and Girls 70 How Boys Choose Their Chums 72 Have Your Children Whims? 75 How to Keep Children Happy 76 What Is an I. Q.? 78 The Value of an “I. Q.” 81 What Goes Into Your Child’s Head? 83 The Red Signal of the Tired Child 85 Are Bright Children Weaklings? 27 Do School Leaders Make Good? 89 The Truth About Prodigies 91 Are City Children Brighter? 93 A Mental Code for Every Child 95 To Spank or Not to Spank 97 Running Wild 99 Do Intelligence and Practical Sense Go To- gether? 101 III. Delicate Questions 103 Suppose You Were a Criminal? 103 Do You “Thob”? 105 Why Do You Pose? 107 Why Do You Swear? 110 “Why Don’t I Make Good?” 112 Are You a Bore? 115 Are You a Tightwad? 117 Why Do You Drink Coffee? 119 Are You Aggressive? 121 Is Your Memory Poor? 124 Are You Easily “Taken In”? 126 Do You Like to Feel “Important”? 128 Should Cousins Marry? 131 CONTENTS Have You an Inferiority Sense? Are We Regulated by Our Glands? Are You Worried by Your Dreams? Is There a Cure for Clinging Vines? What is Wrong with the “Almosts”? Do You Need Safeguards Against Tempta- tion? How Can Stealing Be Cured? “Why Crooks?” Are You Fool-proof ? Would You Make a Good Witness? Do You Belong to the Great Army of Hyster- icals? IV. Tricks of The Mind The Jazz of Exaggeration Are You More Curious Than Afraid? When Our Actions Give Us Away! The Fun of Being Tricked What is Absent-Mindedness? Can You Tell When Somebody is Staring at You? Mood and Performance When Do We Work Best? V. How Queer We Are What is a Complex? When You are Hungry When You Feel Tired— What Happens When You Lose Sleep Under the Weather Cultivated Stupidity Lx PAGE 133 135 138 140 143 145 147 149 152 154 156 160 160 162 164 166 170 71 173 175 178 178 180 183 185 187 189 xiv VI. VII. VIII. IX. CONTENTS The Mania for Collecting Mind-Cankers and Mind-Cures Friday the 13th Why Turn to the Right? Why Do You Veer in a Circle? Can You Do Two Things at Once? The Cult of Beauty Beauty, Behavior or Brains? What Price Beauty? Your Clothes As Self-Expression The Psychology of the Lipstick The Cleverness of the Powder-Patch The Psychology of Sport What is the Sporting Instinct? Why You Are a Fan Why You Are a Good Mixer Tennis and Temperament Take a Relaxative! Reading and Judging Character Telling Character by Appearance Are You a Poor Judge of Yourself? How Friends and Strangers Judge You What You Can't Tell from Handwriting Can You Judge from Photographs? What Do You Talk About? Choosing and Holding Your Job Are You Social or Mechanical? Head Work or Muscle Work? PAGE 192 194 196 198 200 203 206 206 208 211 213 216 219 219 221 223 225 227 231 231 233 235 237 240 242 245 245 247 X. Index CONTENTS Are You Too Bright for Your Job? Overcoming Handicaps Ups and Downs of the Day’s Work Cutting Down the Leaks The Secret Nobody Knows Hindrances to Concentration Bigger Men and Bigger Jobs Do You Make Things Hard by Thinking They Are? The Urge of Incentives “Personal”: A Few Typical Cases Puzzling Failures A Tragedy of Complexes A Difficult Daughter Sex-Consciousness ~ When Youth Breaks Down An Inferiority Complex A Family Conflict A Tragedy of False Accusation Mental Injections “Domestic” Psychology Subconscious Habits Social Timidity The Conquest of Fear The Tyranny of Nerves Illness on the Mind XV PAGH 249 251 253 256 258 261 264 266 267 271 271 278 275 278 280 284 286 288 291 294 296 299 302 305 307 313 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT See": A A KEEPING MENTALLY FIT I KEEPING HAPPY The Art of Being Happy Is there such an art?—you are tempted to ask. Well, no! if you mean a definite art, like the art of painting a pic- ture or building an automobile, or even a general art like writing or advertising. The answer is a little nearer to Yes, if you mean so general an art as the art of making money, or the art of teaching or of organizing men;— and definitely Yes! if you mean a wide open art like the art of getting on with people, or the art of right reason- ing, or the supreme art of living. We think of an artist as a man who makes a living out of art; the real artist is the one who makes of his life a fine example of the art of living. That is open to all. The art of being happy is the center of it. The great teacher of the great future is the man who can teach people to be happy in the worthiest way. That is the problem in the big and the rough. You are happy when your mental or emotional going 1s with the grain of your make-up; when the mind ma- chine is running free. There are some common cross-grain disturbers of daily happiness. There is fatigue, which puts you out of gas, and makes slow, jolty going to the next 19 : 3 20, , Las dary : : KEEPING MENTALLY FIT LR Fe Tateat There is obstruction, which is the other “fellow: getting. in your way. There is worry, which is one of a hundred kinds of engine trouble. Little troubles are clues to big ones. When tired, little John and big Jane are fretful and fussy, and mother snappy and fault-finding, and father grumbling and grouchy—and the whole family barometer squally. After dinner, refreshed in mind and body, Johnny is cuddled on mother’s lap listening to his favorite story which both enjoy; and Jane, now that father has his pipe, can get him talking eagerly about summer outings. But it would be a badly crippled art of happiness that limited it to time off. Johnny was happy playing hard and working hard building a clubhouse for his gang, until some big boy poked fun at him and took his nails. Jane was happily at work on her studies, with just enough con- cern for the examinations to keep her at it, until her col- lege chums came in and gossiped too long. Father was happy at the office until he worried about a telegram that didn’t come, and how, with all these loose ends, he was going to get north before the fish stopped biting. Mother was happy shopping until she dallied too long over the bargain counters, got caught in the traffic jam, and that nasty Mrs. Angell passed her without offering to take her home in her car. : The art of happiness in little things gives pointers for the big ones. It is not so much difficulties that make for mental friction and the wear and tear of the mind machine. It is indulgence in the wrong kind of emotion. Working fussily is one habit; working with poise is another. You can’t get rid of worry with a knockout blow. Get on good terms with poise and your job, and they will show worry the back door. There is no map of happiness except as you make one KEEPING HAPPY 21 for your path in life; not signposts but habit-reminders show the way. It is an elusive art, which gets away from you every time you seem to get your finger on it. And you can’t go by success. Many of the biggest “successes” are dead failures at the art of happiness. The full-size pictures and the stories in the magazines rarely tell the real tale. If you knew it, you might not want te change places with them. : Happiness is a by-product; often you hit it when you aim at something else. You are sure to miss it if you worry that you won’t be happy. Happiness is the reward of right adjustment to your many jobs,—your wage job, your family job, your friendship job, your citizen job. Nature may have built you so that the art of happiness is easy for you—or far from easy. That is your per- sonality job—to adapt the general art of happiness to your special case. | What Does “Mind-Health” Mean? A man may be strong because he has big, powerful muscles, or because he knows how to get every ounce of power out of what muscles he has; usually something of both. The big muscle is a gift of nature; the well- controlled muscle the result of training. Both make up physique. A man may have a good mind and do little with it, or a fair mind and do much with it. What he accomplishes with his mind is also the result of the kind of mind he is born with, and how he trains it. Minds are far more complex than muscles. But the wonderful things muscle can do make muscle work pretty complex also. In muscle work there is strength; there is endurance; there is accuracy; there is skill; and there are all sorts 22 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT of combinations. A jeweler and a blacksmith, a surgeon and a butcher, work with their muscles. But they do dif- ferent types of work because they are controlled by dif- ferent types of nervous systems. A carpenter and a cabinetmaker work with wood and with much the same tools. The one is good at coarse, heavy, strong work; the other at fine accurate joining and shaping. A house painter and a portrait painter are miles apart in their mind-work. Minds are far more complexly different than muscles. Physical training helps you to make the most of your muscle skill ; mind-training teaches you how to make the most of your mental skill. Efficiency is the common aim of both. Mind training is part of Mind-Health, which is known as mental hygiene. The practical purpose of it all is to keep you mentally fit. Mind-Health results from applying the mental side of human nature to right living. Your mind means a good deal more than your intelligence, more than being bright or stupid. Your mind means more than the machine which does your headwork, meets your situations, solves your problems, frames your plans, makes your decisions, and carries them out. Mind-Health is concerned with the pep, the go, the enthusiasm, the love you put into your work, its output in quantity and quality. It includes the frame of mind in which you commonly do your work, your dis- position, your good cheer or your grouch, the part of you that makes yourself and others happy or miserable. Mind- Health tells you how to use your energy, how to stop the leaks, how to keep mentally and emotionally fit, how to avoid fatigue, how to develop what powers you have, how to meet your fellowman and get on with him. Mind-Health depends on a knowledge of human nature. Every phase of our common nature, and of your special KEEPING HAPPY 23 nature, has a bearing on your Mind-Health. In general we all have the same kind of digestion; yet what is one man’s food is another’s poison. Mind-Health must take close account of human differences. Men differ from women, children differ from adults. There are differences of race and differences of types within the same race. Training does much to bring out these differences or repress them, to set free or to clog their powers. But we must under- stand before we apply. Mind-Health has a message for you. To know how to make and mend your mind, you must know your mind. Since most of us must work, and all of us should do so in order to have a serious purpose and a steady oc- cupation in life, a most important part of mental fitness is fitness for the job. When the job goes well, we go well and get on. Getting on is commonly called success. But your bank account is not the only measure of success. Your happiness account should show a fair balance also— and your service account as well. What good have you been to others, to your family and to your community? Successful men are mentally fit. / | Normalcy President Harding put a word on the map, or rather on the tongue, that the dictionary calls rare; it isn’t so now. Normalcy has replaced normality. When you are out of health you are abnormal; when you recover you are nor- mal, provided you are so by nature. The clinical thermometer tells when your temperature is normal; there is no simple mental thermometer to register your permanent mentality or temporary state of mind. Your energy, your mood, your joy in life, your general appetite for living may serve, 4 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT But normalcy of mind is hard to determine because what is normal for me may not be for you. Since we vary a little in almost everything, and a good deal in many things, normalcy depends upon the range of variation. Our pulse and breathing vary both as between you and me and according to what I do and how I feel. In all things most of us are near the average. We can allow for variation. But in addition a good working notion of normalcy must consider the many ways of varying. You and I, and Tom, Dick and Harry, and the rest, vary in height, energy, intelligence, sociability, tem- perament, in our pleasures, our interests, our patience, our ambitions, our outlook and in so many things that all have to be taken into account (in case any of us gets into trouble) before the court, with the aid of expert examiners, pronounces us normal. Our normalcy might be questioned if any of us indulged in irregular behavior that the rest of us did not approve or understand. One must be normal or sound all the way through—not per- fect, but balanced. If ninety-nine out of a hundred of us were all exactly alike, we should all be both average and normal, with only a few freaks. Normalcy refers first to constitution and second to con- dition. The best way to be normal is to be born so, of nor- mal parents and grandparents also. Those normal by constitution will be normal in behavior. One of the best signs of normalcy in a child is the power to keep on grow- ing according to the normal rate. The net result seems to be that if you can be treated on the whole in most of the relations of life like everybody else, without too many special allowances for difference of constitution or condition, you are normal. Normalcy of mind means sanity of mind, mind in health. But condition implies more than this. Normal be- KEEPING HAPPY 25 havior is judged in terms of age, of race, of education and social station, of the customs of the time. A man who believed today what was believed by normal men two cen- turies ago would be as abnormal as though he kept the beliefs and interests of his childhood. What is normal in China may not be so in America. Normalcy is a complicated indication of your total mental make-up. That is why you cannot read it on a chart. No one is completely normal throughout, and un- doubtedly would not be as valuable or as interesting if he were. But the large work of the world must be done by normal men in normal condition, responding in a normal way to the normal situations of life. What dre Tou Afraid OF Fear is so important in human behavior that it de- serves close study. It makes an admirable lesson in the complex concerns of the mind. Fear is a jumble name for a variety of states of mind. It applies, first, to an ill-at-ease feeling which has a threat about it,—for example, the loss of a sense of support. Loosening your hold or dropping an infant evokes an original fear, if you can call it such. The nightmare fright when you dream of falling, and wake up with your heart racing, may be of the same order. Let us call it a sense of alarm. It happens whenever you are startled out of an at-ease condition into a disturbed one. A sudden, loud sound will do it; an unexpected touch or push will do it; being aroused from sleep will do it. We think of the typical fear behavior as shunning, avoiding, hiding, running away. But in these primitive alarms there is and can be little of that. You come to fear and avoid situations that threaten your safety, disturb the sense of security and produce alarm. You are in a 26 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT constant state of fear when walking at the edge of a precipice, when looking down from a height, when skating on thin ice. You come to say that you are afraid of fall- ing. You have the same palpitation when you look at workmen on roof tops and flagpoles; you avoid thinking about such things. The fear has traveled far from the original alarm of the infant, yet in the direction first set. As the mind element enters, you are readier to call it fear. The fear of the dark and of being alone is an ill-at- ease situation, relieved in the young child by the presence of the night light and of the mother. When we are ill or nervous, our timidity increases. Some persons have an ex- treme tendency to these safety fears or alarms. They have a hard fight to keep them down. For others it takes heroic courage to cross a railway trestle, when you can see the road or the water below. The next order of so-called fear is an avoidance of un- pleasant sensations. Some persons would be heroes if they let a caterpillar walk up their arms. No one is really afraid of that harmless creature. The very sight of bugs or roaches disturbs, or as some say, makes you sick. That shows something of its source in disgust. You are not afraid of a rotten apple; you avoid it as you do the cater- pillar or the roach with the added “fear” of the moving things. You have the same avoidance of cold clammy things, and handling snakes would in many cause a spasm. The disgust avoidances and the touch avoidances offer another clue to fears. The fear of mice is perhaps mixed with a touch of possible harm. The true fears are dreads. They hark back to actual situations. The child is afraid of the caged lion at the zoo as a big, fierce attacking beast, and more so when it roars. Fear of injury and pain are present in the threat. The fear of going to the dentist’s is a true dread; you KEEPING HAPPY 7 fear the pain, often worse in anticipation than in reality. Once started on the road of imagination fears know no end. You fear robbers, you fear contagion, you fear ghosts, you fear the loss of your investment, you fear anything, even bad weather (which is not dangerous) which you would rather not have happen, as it interferes with your comfort or your plans. Your whole life proceeds in a balance of fears and hopes. But your major fears remain to be noted. You fear for your reputation, for your showing at an examination, for your success in love or in war, in making friends or mak- ing money. Life is a venture from the first step of the infant to the last move. The fear thread runs through it, and makes the tangle of our psychology. The Fear Bogy Man is fearfully and wonderfully made. The complica- tions of our make-up arouse a sense of awe and reverence. But we are also fearful; literally, full of fears. Fear goes deep down into human nature; it protects life by avoiding danger. The danger emotion induces a violent upset. Morbid or abnormal fears are called phobias. They must not be confused with equally strong avoidances that are more like exaggerated disgusts, when one is made sick or uneasy in the presence of certain sights or odors, though the two come together in the fear and disgust (horror) of snakes, and in the abnormal phobias that some persons have of cats or dogs. Just why so harmless a creature as a mouse should be a cause of alarm (to women only, according to the cartoonist), or why bats have a hor- rible reputation, extending to the myth of the vampire, is not altogether clear. Typical as are these fears of ani- mals, and typical also such fears as fear of thunder and 28 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT lightning, fear of dark, perhaps echoes of situations most terrifying to our remote ancestors—they are not as typical phobias as those associated with bodily posture, of which the most typical is fear of falling. This equilibrium or loss-of-balance fear we all know, in walking on a trestle, or on a plank crossing a stream, or at the edge of the precipice. The greater the height, the greater the panic. But the fixation of the mind on the “danger makes it a true phobia, or a dread. The thought becomes the start of an impulse, the fear of throwing yourself off the height or on the tracks. The other common type of phobia divides into two: (1) the fear of being shut in and no escape, and (2) the fear of being adrift, lost and no shelter. To some it is a tunnel, to others a seat under a gallery, or too far away from an exit. Others walk around two sides of a public square near the buildings and won’t cross diagonally. So the first in the nervously disposed becomes the phobia of closed spaces, and the second of open spaces. Phobias, imaginatively elaborated fears, are natural to all, yet workmen in perilous positions on modern bridges and skyscrapers are by nature or training fearless, and retain a nonchalant composure. It should help all this army of fear victims to know that they are not peculiarly afflicted—just like other folks, only much more so. Some have a feeling of faintness or being sick at the stomach; but it is predominantly mental. The training out of it must be mental also. It is all a mat- ter of well-arranged discipline, a gradual getting used to a little more calm, a little less “minding” of these awful feelings, a stronger and stronger conviction that you can and will pull through. Only in the extremely neurotic are these phobias serious, because they combine with other KEEPING HAPPY 29 nervous tendencies to prevent their victims from behaving like free human beings. Expression vs. Repression Life is expression; but life is equally repression. The question is not “To be or not to be,” but “To let go or hold back.” There is nothing more fundamental in life than this conflict. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness all converge to this point, and most of all liberty, the free- dom to live your own life. Yet unrestrained liberty is license, and instincts if let go would run wild, get off the track and wreck things. No one beyond the first months of infancy follows im- pulse without let or hindrance. All training is restraint. Then soon appears the conflict between two opposed im- pulses. The child needs sleep, but wants to stay up and play. There is the conflict between fear and curiosity. The child is attracted to the new, but fears the strange. Soon it is a set battle. The child wants the other child’s toy, but doesn’t quite dare to take possession. The biggest “no” is that of society, which issues a con- stant volley of “Thou shalt nots.” And the varieties of re- straint grow with our growth as socially minded creatures. We cannot stand ridicule; we do not like to be scolded; we get to be ashamed of doing things we much like to do; everywhere there is hindrance. If we are too constantly thwarted, we are unhappy, sullen, rebellious. If we always have our own way, we become general nuisances or incon- siderate tyrants. It is when the conflict is set on a bigger stage with more complicated characters and situations that we realize that 30 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT there is little gained without let or hindrance. And then we meet the problem of repression on the grand scale. Freud has made it the great psychological plot of the psychic life. Dreams express repressed desires; complexes arise from overrepression, and unresolved conflicts make for nervous troubles. Freud finds in the plots of most human dramas the play of that most strongly repressed and naturally strongest of all urges, that of sex. You can neither starve the sex life nor indulge it without let or hindrance, without paying the cost. Moral and national ideals meet with the same inter- pretation. Puritanism overdoes repression and may, when the leash breaks, lead to excesses in the other direction. - We cannot travel without friction of the wheels on the tracks; but we cannot go freely with brakes set. If we con- form too much we become conventional nobodies, lose our individuality ; if we rebel too much, are a law to ourselves, we are at outs with the rest of our fellow men and get no- where. Yet what is clear above all things is that we cannot run wholly free without running wild. The only people who do as they please are infants and the mentally irresponsible, both victims of their impulses. Anybody who, under all circumstances, did what he felt like, said whatever came into his head, would be impossible. ! So everything becomes a matter of wise restraint, and people divide roughly into two classes, the underinhibited (inconsiderate, quarrelsome, bullying, or impulsive, fool- ish, extravagant, indulgent, letting themselves go too freely), and the overinhibited (timid, silent, shy, submis- sive, cowed, overcautious, hesitant, holding themselves in too much). It is often the underinhibited salesman who talks the overinhibited customer into buying what he or she doesn’t want; the glib, talkative, underinhibited per- KEEPING HAPPY 31 suade and impose upon the overinhibited who lack resist- ance to match such aggressiveness. : But not always is it quite so direct and simple. You often want to say a kind word or do a kind deed, but you let the impulse go, because you don’t want to risk being foolish, or forward, or misunderstood. The impulse is there, but it meets with resistance; and that becomes a mental habit. So important and universal is this distinction between people that we should have a simpler, shorter name for it, like “underhib” and “overhib.” Which are you, undef or over? High-Powered Emotions What keeps the world going? It isn’t money, as some believe, nor the love of money, nor even love in general. It is the whole range of emotion. We live so far as we care, and we live most for what we care for most. We have emotions that help and emotions that hinder the joy of living. We need them both, each to offset the other. Naturally we care most for life itself; when that is threatened we are most upset. Then comes fear—the fear for all we cherish. We fear sickness, and we fear pain, for both threaten life and happiness, comfort and security. In ordinary times of peace when things are going in the usual way, we get along on a small scale of emotions, never running very high up in joy nor very deep down in sorrow. But when the extraordinary happens, the high- powered emotions are drawn upon. Such is the excitement of war. Then we live dangerously, either actually or by sharing the lives of those who are in danger. That is the biggest of the high-powered emo- 32 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT tions—the danger emotion. Hence the so-called shell- shock of war, really the danger shock. And we have not forgotten what that will do to the mind. In all such upsets there is conflict—severe and un- nerving conflict. Duty and the desire to serve country, to bear oneself well, is set against the horror of killing and the danger of being killed. That inner conflict is a more decisive one than the conflict of arms. It is the mind divided against itself that falls. Let any of the great vital emotions rise to high-powered tension and the mind tends to give way under them. There is likewise profound, paralyzing grief over the loss by death of those closest to our lives. The shock is too great to bear; the conflict between the intense longing for what was and the emptiness of what is left. Romantic love and yearning rise to the high-powered stature; the ecstasy of love found and then denied breaks ~ the resources of the mind to accept its fate. Remorse and shame and the religious emotions, the feelings of sin and guilt, are in susceptible natures high-powered emotions. In all cases there is the conflict of what we must face and what we have lost. The most intense of the high-powered emotions is anger. That is passion in its wildest form, dethroning reason in a sweep of madness. It is a personal and exhausting emotion, feeding on hatred and intense bitterness, plotting revenge and taking the law into its own desperate hands. Yet we must be able to get “good and mad” and to command righteous indignation when cruelty and injustice try to get away with their misdeeds. We are then in dead earnest and mean business. Some high-powered emotions come forward in mass con- tagion. In older days there were crusades and persecutions and trials for witchcraft. These wrenched men’s minds KEEPING HAPPY 33 away from their steady moorings, and gave way to a reign of terror. But the great enthusiasms are of like origin, when waves of patriotism, of triumph and rejoic- ing, take hold of men. No one who lived through the armistice in 1918 will ever forget the wild outbursts of pent-up high-powered emotions when the war was over and the issue on our side. There are high-powered emo- tions of sympathy and hero-worship, such as those which welcomed Lindbergh back from his flight across seas. In all this there is thrill, the thrill of danger, the thrill of triumph, the thrill of love, the thrill of worship. Without experience of high-powered emotions, life would become too tame, and the romantic and the adven- turous and the heroic seem out of reach. No matter how naturally we accept the safety-first even tenor of our daily way, we need the stir of great enthusiasms and must at times work ourselves up to a high pitch of emo- tion to get the feel of the thrills of life. And what we cannot experience directly we get by proxy, by reading about and seeing the exploits of stage and screen. The craving for sensation is real; to satisfy it wisely without jazzing it into a morbid appetite is a lesson in mental hygiene. We must keep our sympathies alive and yet in hand, ready for service in the daily run and equal to the emergencies that punctuate life, making it vital and vibrant. Shall We Suppress—or Let Go? “I read one Psychology and learn that, unless I curb my impulses, I can’t lead a decent life. I read another and learn that, if I suppress my emotions, I am headed for nervous trouble. Which is right? I don’t believe either. “INDIGNANT READER.” 34 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT This indignant reader is in a safe and sane frame of mind. The truth lies in between or with both positions within reason. The struggle between letting go and holding back be- gins in the nursery. Nature puts impulses first, and puts back of them a driving force that is all too strong for useful service later on. The infant is a bundle of impulses, as the grown-up is a bundle of habits. The special need is to keep down the impulses that are overstrong by nature. Suppress early and often. The tend- ency of children is all for giving way to fears and angers as well as to joys; to smash things and be boisterous, tease smaller children, “sass back” when spoken to, and so on. All of which must be suppressed. But the program of suppression must be reasonable. An oversuppressed child, cowed with fear of punishment and deprived of natural joys, loses all spirit, becomes a piti- able object. We must provide abundant and wholesome outlets for the animal spirits of children. It isn’t wise to expect them to suppress beyond their capacity, even in such simple things as not requiring them to sit still too long. There must be times for shouting and rough play and some indulgence, and times when they can do as they like, all within reason. Just as important is it to protect them from their weakness in giving way to fears and an- gers and selfishness by reducing the temptations. The rule for adults is no different. Only what they have to suppress is more complicated and their powers of con- trol are greater. If you have a quick temper, easily get excited and lose your head, you have the job of suppress- ing these and cultivating calm and poise. If you have a strong tendency to bully, or to be spiteful, or to insult people, or to elbow your way in disregard of others, or to sulk or complain or brood or run away from anything KEEPING HAPPY 35 serious, you have your program of suppression marked out for you. What most people have in mind when they ask the ques- tion is suppression of the powerful urges of sex. The same principles apply there. As the child is entitled to its play life into which it throws all of its energy, youth is en- titled to its love-life, both under wise regulation. From childhood to old age all normal persons crave affection, somebody to love them and somebody to love—child- love, parent-love, friendship-love, lover-love. A starved emotional life is bad ; few can or should live to themselves. It invites mental unfitness, restlessness, nervous disorder, unwholesome relations, even perversions. Oversuppression is bad whether the suppression is exercised by society, which it usually is, or by yourself because you have too strict and harsh a program, or whether your circum- stances deprive you of satisfying outlets for your emo- tions. The habit of keeping pets is both a pleasant and at times a pitiable picture of the need of outlets for emotion. “Petting” is a great human need, and dogs and cats and even canaries and goldfish relieve human loneliness. One might say that perfectly happy people would find so rich an outlet for their affections among humankind that they wouldn’t need pets, were it not that a richly loving nature wants all sorts of outlets for all sorts of affection. Chil- dren adore pet animals. Because youth is the period of powerful emotions there is then great danger of unwise indulgence and excess. The stronger the drive the harder the suppression, the keeping within bounds. There is danger in either extreme, in unchecked indulgence and in complete denial. The happy mean implies proper outlets for natural emotions at all stages of life, day in and day out. Pent-up feeling of all 36 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT ‘kinds cumulates like a geyser and then breaks loose with disaster. We need outlets for our emotions; whether we choose wise ones depends upon our wisdom. You cannot prescribe minutely what should be your emotional diet ; some should reduce and some should expand. It is in the management of the deeper emotions close to the mainsprings of life, the emotions that men mainly live by, that the problem arises. Control is suppression and release, holding back and letting go; it’s up to you to say when. Do You Carry An Energy Spare? Do you carry a spare? Probably you do on your auto; but how about the other factors that carry you on your rounds through life? How about your spare energy? Reserves are all-important. No army goes into the field without them. We have to prepare not only for or- dinary demands, by keeping in good trim with good food and good sleep and good work, but for extraordinary ones when we need spare energy. Nature supplies such reserves. There is a “second wind.” When apparently you have come to the end of your going, you grit your teeth and keep on, and pres- ently you get a fresh start. You have tapped your reserve energies. You can prove it in the laboratory on a machine that registers fatigue. Our nervous system is equipped by nature with a spare. A spare is an emergency-meeting device; and that’s what an emotion is. Emotion calls out the reserves. A careful man, always on the alert, looks where he is going; yet we need signs on elevators and subway platforms: “Watch your step.” Let there be a real danger and your fear sends out an alarm. Fear may release your reserves. KEEPING HAPPY 37 People escaping from a burning building have carried loads and scaled walls which would have been beyond their powers under ordinary calm conditions. Joy-excitement will do the same; the rooters and the band help the players to tap their reserves. So does a tie score. It’s often the runner with best control of his spare energy who wins the race on the final spurt. Ordinarily we make no use of our spares, but merely carry them. An enterprising manufacturer of silk stock- ings advertises—“Girls, carry a spare: Three to the pair!” Nature provides a margin of safety that we insist upon in our buildings. We don’t load a bridge near to the actual burden it will carry. The wise man stops before the breakdown comes, before he uses his last spare to the limit. If you could tell ahead of time you would not wait for a puncture or a flat: you would certainly use your spare. Carry a spare for your working powers before the break- down comes. A vacation is a way of putting a spare on your energy wagon. So is riding a hobby and taking time off and getting together and forgetting your job. For the most part, we want to play safe and keep well within the speed limit, and watch the gauge on the gas tank of our energy. But when an emergency arises we break the routine of our habits and let our emotions go. If we have cultivated the habit of carrying a “spare,” we are equal to the occasion. There are times when we must be able to push the machine to the limit, make a special effort, get a new idea, play our best when the test comes and the tournament or the deal is on. There are moments when you cannot stop and reflect and go easy. Everything depends on having the spare all ready and set; for the kind of mind that acts wisely in an emergency carries spare ideas. If there weren’t such people, we shouldn’t move ahead very fast. 38 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The same is true of the emotions. There are crises, like wartime, when people have to be aroused. That is what the spare energy of anger is for: to call the reserves of moral indignation and make a mighty people rise with the reserve strength of a nation. In case of a great earthquake or fire, both fear and the energy of aroused purpose and fighting trim call out the human reserves. Persons and nations respect others that carry a spare and know when to use it wisely. Patching Y our Mind Windows Wandering in a section of the city where tumble-down houses are still standing among the new skyscrapers that are replacing them, I noticed that a broken window-pane in a carpenter’s shop was patched with a shingle, in a tin- smith’s with a piece of tin, in a shoemaker’s with a bit of old leather. Quite in the same way we repair our mind-breaks with the material we have at hand. The need is the same, in this case to keep out wind and weather. But we meet the need according to our habits. Like the old-fashioned water-mills along the river, they all use the same power, dip their paddles in the same stream, but the one grinds out flour, the other weaves cloth, and the next makes paper. Yet these mills not only receive different raw material and turn out different prod- ucts, but they are differently constructed. And our mental mills are far more complicated than any machinery; yet we are millers all, going through our daily grind. The point comes out more clearly if we imagine half a dozen men looking at the same scene—say, a bit of land- scape. The one looks at it as a building site for a town and asks how much the land costs per acre, for he is a KEEPING HAPPY 39 dealer in real estate; the second looks at it as a picture, for he is a lover of natural beauty or an artist; the third explores it for evidence of the ice-age or of fossils, for he is a geologist; the fourth surveys the hills and valleys and notes the grades, for he is a road-builder or a railway engineer ; the fifth examines the nature of the soil to see what may best grow there, for he is a farmer; the sixth speculates whether it would make a good country estate, for he is a tired business man looking for a quiet retreat, and hoping that there may be good fishing in the streams. Yet they are all looking at the same scene, each with the same kind of bodily eyes, but with very different mental ones. They bring to the scene their dominant interests; and that is what they really see. What you get out of an experience depends upon what you put in, and you could not change these men’s outlooks without first changing their insights. And so if you looked at these six men from the out- side you would have observed them tramping over the ground, stopping to look at things near and far, doing much the same thing. But it is only when you question them that you would find out what they are really doing with their minds, while their legs are tramping, and their eyes are seeing. And what a different report they would give of the day’s outing, and the mind’s inning! And so the city, no less than the country, is all things to all men. Out of that bewildering turmoil of many occupa- tions each must select his world and neglect the rest. Mil- lions of people may be there, perched like rooks in their nests in skyscrapers, and yet you may be alone and lonely in the city, while content and in good company with nature alone. Living is building up interests, making your mind good company for yourself. What do you do when work is done? 40 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT What are your resources within yourself? And if you cannot go about your daily rounds and find amusement or occupation, if you have to spend a week in bed, what have you laid up for a rainy day of the mind; and how would you patch the windows through which you look out upon the world? For that, too, is an important part of mental fitness, to gather a well-rounded lot of wholesome interests and content in satisfying them. Putting the Brakes on Anger Professor Stratton has studied “anger” as another psy- chologist might study genius or crime, as an expression of human nature. In the matter of advice, as he gives it, one may select this code: First. Be sparing of your anger. It’s your reserve power for emergencies. Your resort to anger means that the oc- casion is too big for your ordinary powers. Anger frit- tered on trifles is wasted. Second. Expect and prepare against hair-trigger anger when you are tired, hungry, coming down with something, getting old; and remember the same weakness in others, and in children especially. That is how family quarrels start. Keep a sharp eye out for it. We need anger ar- resters as well as lightning arresters. A soothing manner and calm atmosphere helps. Get used to storm signals in yourself and others. It is to avoid this type of anger that one was advised to count ten before speaking. The harsh word that escapes without reflection leads to an anger habit. Profanity is sometimes a safety valve, like the bark that’s worse than the bite. Third. Just be angry or stern enough to cover the case and stop there. When you show some one else where to get off, get off yourself. Don’t use buckshot for sparrows or KEEPING HAPPY 41 open a tin can with a razor. And when it’s over make a quick recovery to the even tenor of your ways. Don’t ~ brood and excite yourself again and again. Forget it. Don’t make an all-day storm of a squall. Fourth. Your most justifiable anger is disinterested, when you get angry over wrongs to others. But the others may well include yourself, for you count as well as the rest. That is not the common temptation of anger; in- deed, such indignation must be kept alive for all worthy occasions. It may be summoned for private as well as public causes, and gives zest to life and pep to effort, be- cause it makes a partner of reason in a worthy interest, including self-interest. Yet your anger must be right and just, as well as well-intentioned. Fifth. Remember that your anger arouses anger in others. Anger takes risks; anger estranges; its tragic out- come is the breaking of friendships and the sympathy which tempers and offsets it. Anger is the ally of prejudice, which means unfair judgment. The habit of justice and sympathy promotes calm and reason and an atmosphere discouraging to anger. This code of anger concerns private anger, which is for most of us the largest and most practical problem. Larger clashes and organized conflicts follow the same psychol- ogy. How you feel and behave in a public or business rela- tion depends on how you control yourself in personal af- fairs. Anger is a private nuisance and a public menace. It has its uses when kept within bounds. To keep it so, we need the combined aids of good will, reason, and the eter- nal vigilance that is the price of safety. Professor Strat- ton suggests that if you kept a notebook, a sort of anger diary, and put down each anger outbreak, you would be so much ashamed or amused at these tempests in a tea- pot that in time you would have fewer entries and worthier 42 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT ones. But there will always be a large use for a code for the suppression of anger. Anger is a consuming emotion. In contrast to fear, which comes on slowly and grows the longer you are ex- posed to danger, anger comes on like a flash in a pan and often subsides quickly. Short-lived emotions are kept go- ing by converting them into sentiments, which we can keep in mind. Thus arises hate. Hatred is the enduring source of anger conflict. Hate is kept alive, like a feud, by tra- dition. Prejudice is another variety of it. When that kind of feeling rises it may break out in riots or mob rule. Men must learn to tolerate differences without arousing anger. Men schooled in the control of private anger do not lose their heads and join a mob. The riot act may be read to the unruly. Complexes That May Lead to Tragedies “Complex” is a useful word as the common name for a variety of deep-seated mental failings that may harbor the makings of a tragedy. In a complex there is evidence of an emotional type or tendency, whether it takes a serious form or not. Even the milder varieties interfere with mental fitness. Severe complexes affecting relations on which normal behavior depends may wreck a life. We all have a streak of timidity. If we fear some situa- tions quite out of proportion to their real danger, and if that fear distorts our behavior, colors our thoughts, upsets us emotionally, it is on the way to becoming a fear- complex. There is no line between an extreme unreasonable fear and a fear-complex. If I am in a panic of fear when crossing a trestle but instantly recover when the trestle is crossed and don’t worry about trestles otherwise, that fear hardly constitutes a complex. If I fear shut-in places KEEPING HAPPY 43 or open spaces, and I plan my life to avoid them, it affects my conduct more; and if I am afraid of wandering far from home, I lose more of my freedom of behavior and am approaching a complex. The hypochondriac may be only needlessly cautious; but if he is constantly fearing in- fection, inspecting every article of his diet, taking all sorts of tablets, taking to his bed under the least symp- tom, he is not behaving quite normally, and has more or less of a health complex. These are for the most part private complexes; the conflict is inside myself between what I should like to do, or know I should do, and what my fears or concerns lead me to do; and this conflict restrains my freedom. If I have an inner conflict, and if it is strong and serious enough, it may develop into what to me is a tragedy. But let the complex take a social turn and affect my behavior to others and lead me into conflict with them, and there arises the possibility of a mental tragedy. It is the social, perhaps better called the anti-social, complexes that form our serious concern. If I have a sus- picion complex and think everybody is against me, and detect signs of this animosity in every look and word and attitude, I am living in a distorted world. That hostility complex may take different expression according to my dominant nervous disposition. If it tends towards sus- picion and withdrawal, it may make a recluse of me, or if it is especially fixed on my relations to women, I may become a woman-hater. If it is aggressive, it may make me quarrelsome and difficult to get along with, and I may have a rebellious, resentful grouch or grievance complex. Or it may take the form of domination and insistence and a conviction of my own worth and importance. There is no more fertile ground for the development of tragedies than the social complexes, especially of those 44 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT that distort the most intimate relations in which we live inwardly as well as outwardly. The relations of parent and child, of husband and wife, of the individual to his career in terms of success and failure or of his social setting, are the breeding-ground of complexes for the same reason that they are the decisive setting of a nor- mal adjustment. The same warped emotional response may affect them all. Conflicts of one personality with others set the stage for tragedies of the mind. The com- plex provides the temperamental basis of conflict and tragedy ; the setting provides the incidents and plot. When there are no complexes, the more serious conflicts within oneself and with others are avoided, and there is peace of mind and well-balanced adjustment to the dom- inant relations wherein we live and move and have our being. The temperamental conflict is more important than the setting. The tragedy appears as a falling out of husband and wife; or as a rebellion of child against parent; or of a failure in career; or of a bitter with- drawal and the solitude of a recluse. But the real tragedy, the trué explanation of why men fail in this relation or that, lies in the conflict of a temperament with a situation, of a warped emotional relation affecting the vital streams of behavior. They are tragedies of the mind. How to Be Strong-Willed Three things go into the making of a strong will: vigor, steadiness, direction. Mere energy isn’t enough, for there is plenty of that in violent children and angry adults. Steadiness outweighs force. Steadiness leads to persist- ence, which again is more than insistence upon your own way. The latter is wilfulness, not strength of will. ~ KEEPING HAPPY 45 A steady purpose keeps on despite difficulties. It is not obstinacy, though the obstinate show a certain measure of persistence. Persistence implies that a worthy decision is held to, not mechanically but reasonably. A person too insistent in opinion becomes dogmatic. Steadiness is the power to come back to the same job, bit by bit, despite interruptions or disappointments, ever ready to try again. It is effective and well directed to its end. Each blow counts, with no drifting, no scattering, no wasting. Such a will must have back of it the support of a well-organized set of habits, ready to be called upon to do and think and feel correctly and promptly, like a company drilled to the command of its captain. Direction is definiteness and rightness of aim. Not that these cannot as well be enlisted in the service of evil; for they can. Power can be used to destroy or to construct, for unworthy or for noble aims. Will is not the whole of personality; it must wait on good intention, which is otherwise established. The strength of impulse is supplied by the emotion, how strongly you feel, how much you care; but what you care for is a joint product of deep emotion, and wise and worthy choice of ends. Working with a will means not only the will to work, but a knowledge of how to direct effort. Effort properly includes something that is hard. Always choosing the easier way weakens the will and leaves the mental and moral tissues soft. Will always proceeds upon choice. There is ever the question of what to do and deciding upon lines of con- duct. You can be decisive without being obstinate. People who hesitate morally are lost; those who hesitate too much intellectually are prone to waste, deciding and re- 46 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT calling, changing their minds like a weathervane with every new puff of impulse. Doubt that reflects is good; doubt that lowers confidence is bad. Decisions of will meet opposition of other wills and there find their mettle. When to yield, when to compromise, when to hold to purpose unflinchingly ; that is the ques- tion. Last comes endurance, training to longer spans of effort, to greater tasks; climbing a higher mountain, carrying through a far-reaching enterprise, realizing a lifelong purpose. This can be accomplished only by a well- trained will set to a high ideal. A program of will like a program of emotion loses much when reduced to words, which are better suited to convey ideas. The essence of will is action. These directions for vigor, steadiness, and direction, must be vigorously trans- lated into action and made a steady habit. They must be lived rather than learned. Do You Know How to Sleep? If we all shared the complaint of the Scotch plowboy who said that he didn’t know what it was to enjoy a good night’s sleep, that the first thing he knew after putting his head to the pillow was that it was time to get up— there would be no need of a code for sleep. While you know nothing about sleep while you are in it, you know when you come out of it, whether you have slept, and how. The best sign of a good sleep is that you awake rested. Your fatigue, your headache, if you had one, is gone. During sleep little repairs of your motor have automat- ically been made, and you awake in running trim. But if you belong to the great army of the nervous, you may not. Though sleep spreads over the entire body, its central concern is to rest the nervous system, which KEEPING HAPPY 47 the daily work tires. An extra cup of coffee may keep you awake; joy and excitement no less than grief will do so; and Macbeth’s guilt had murdered sleep. A code of sleep must be shaped to nervous disposition, habit of life, age, ~ and circumstances. Whatever the course of life, the con- trolling fundamental rhythm of sleep and waking must be maintained. Here is a code for sleep which may help: Article 1. Sleep is an elemental condition; don’t trifle with it. Don’t awaken children. If they sleep, they prob- ably need it. If the use of alarm clocks means that many sleep so soundly that they have to resort to alarms to help nature wake them up, they are innocent devices. If used to cut slumbers short, they are a curse. Article 2. Anticipate exhaustion by rest. There is such a thing as being too tired to sleep and too hungry to eat. One may fall asleep from exhaustion in pain or ill- ness, as a child does from crying. Prepare for a heavy strain of work by getting reserves of sleep first. Sleep to avoid excessive fatigue rather than to recover from it. It is cheaper. If you cannot sleep, rest. Article 3. Make the total range of sleep habits as regu- lar as you can, fitting in with your régime of work; but keep your sleep, like your work habits, plastic, so that a break in habit will not upset you. For young children regularity is indispensable. Unwise parents who drag tired kids on evening rounds of pleasure should be hauled into court. \ Article 4. Let the habits be such as you can control. Children should be trained to put themselves to sleep, not be put to sleep. But broken sleep is so serious a risk and makes habit-forming so difficult, that there must be exceptions. Darkness, correct position, eyes closed, re- laxing, getting cares off the mind as clothes off the body, 48 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT and no thought of not sleeping—thus sleep may be wooed and welcomed. It cannot be commanded. Concern about it postpones it. Article 5. Rules for sleep cover average, normal cases. There is no code so variable, so much to be fitted to the individual, as that of sleep. But as most of us can wear ready-made clothing, sleep rules hold for the majority. The minority should aim to approach the normal. It would be easy to extend the code. For children we can speak more positively: twelve to fourteen hours of sleep to age 4; eleven to twelve hours to age 9; eight to ten hours thereafter. Some make up for lost sleep in hours ; others do it in depth. For the sleepless, it is safe to say: Don’t worry about not sleeping. Substitute calm, wakeful rest for sleep. It is easier to bring back the sleep habit from rest than from mild activity, like reading. When that helps, it justifies itself. There may be true insomnia without worry. In so com- plex a matter opinions differ. Some even regard sleep as a bad habit and urge that we should cultivate as short sleep hours as we can. Others speak of oversleeping as of overeating. But the sleep-adjustment mechanism is so original a part of our nature that in health it is self- adjusting. Night life and much else in modern life reduces the sleep period below its proper amount. The final test is whether the day’s work is done with zest and with energy to spare. “Bottled Lightning” William James was one of the world’s great psychol- ogists. In the language of a later day, he put American psychology on the map. Twenty-five years ago, he wrote: “I remember reading a story in which, after describing KEEPING HAPPY 49 the beauty and interest of the heroine’s personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to all who looked upon her an impression as of ‘bottled lightning’ was irresistibly conveyed. Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a young girl’s char- acter’ He cites the comment of a still earlier day made by a distinguished mind-doctor from Scotland: “You Ameri- cans wear too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the British population be- token a better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon. This inex- citability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take too in- tensely the trivial moments of life.” There are two sides to this matter of American ex- citability, which is much more marked today than when these comments were made, and James is fair to both. “All Americans who stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native shores. They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots’ faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: ‘What in- telligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles! Intensity, rapidity, vi- 50 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT vacity of appearance are, indeed, with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of irritable weakness is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind.” Here is a vital issue in mental fitness, as well as a contrast in national ideals. We speak of our British cousins, but in mental make-up they seem to be cousins once removed, if not more distant. Traced back to funda- mental psychology, there can be no question that poise is a sound ideal, and that effervescent spurts of sputter- ing energy and constant restless fussiness, absorption in the bare feeling of activity, and behaving like a live wire carrying a highly charged circuit, is more waste of energy than profitable discharge. For it is a falling back to the childish pattern of excitable behavior. Not only haste, but too much push and drive and fuss make waste. Poise is not stolidity, but reserve power; it is not dull weight, hard to move, but bottled energy carefully con- trolled. The most recent indications of mental habit are sug- gestive. The auto, ever ready to dash madly anywhere, has come to express this agitated desire of America to be on the go. As the saying goes, “we don’t know where we're going, but we're on our way.” The satisfaction of moving obscures the supreme importance of choosing the right road to get anywhere. The men show it in wanting to be known as hustlers, go-getters, live wires—again a confusion of mere activity with well-directed energy. The women show it in their ready adoption of the smoking habit as another relief of tension. Men tend, like the native American Indian, to smoke the pipe of peace; women puff the cigarette of agitation. There should be nothing in excess. One may go too far in either direction. Too much control is as bad as too KEEPING HAPPY 51 little. But back of all stand certain definite laws of mental energy. Big tasks require poise and vital reserves; dis- sipation is wasting good energy in agitation and fritter- ing pursuits. But being alive and alert makes life worth living. Nations may profit by studying one another’s mental habits as well as by exchanging goods and making treaties. Curing the Blues Depression is a symptom, a symptom of a nervous deficit of some sort. It is an overdrawn account on the debit side, while usually we have a small or a large bal- ance of hope and content and pleasant outlook in the bank of vitality. But a deficit may be just a temporary overdraft soon made up by a fresh deposit of energy, or it may be a more or less chronic state of affairs. What-_ ever its cause, it must result from an upset of something deep and fundamental in the mental emotional econ- omy. “And because it may thus enter into very serious and prolonged forms of mental disorder, those who suffer from its variable attacks are often unduly alarmed and fear the worst—the loss of mind. A man under alcohol may drag his feet like a paralytic, or reel like an epileptic; but he recovers after a good rest. The “blues,” though serious enough, have a different setting and a different meaning from the genuine melan- cholia. As they come and go—the coming more noticed than the going—the darker blue of despair yields to the lighter blue of hope, like night to dawn. The setting of depression is fatigue. Your barometer of mood—Ilow on overcast, dull, dreary days—goes down when you are very tired or very hungry. It goes up when you are rested, 52 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT refreshed by nourishment through sleep and food. “Fate cannot harm me; I have dined.” The after-dinner mood is jovial and optimistic. Subscription papers are never served before a banquet, and crape-hangers are not in- vited. Neurasthenics—and remember that this term includes thousands of normal, well-enough people, often among the most valuable citizens of the community—differ in their susceptibility to the several symptoms of their trouble. In some the nervous trouble affects sleep mostly; in others digestion; in others energy; in others mood. The typical neurasthenic in the slump of his condition, when he is low down, sleeps badly, digests badly, tires easily, and is depressed. Of all the symptoms the blues are the most variable and unaccountable, and if you belong to the blue brigade you know it. There is a physical side undoubtedly, a complex affair of getting rid of the body’s poisons by elimination; a phase which is summarized in the saying that whether life is worth living depends on the liver. It is really an obscure mechanism, and despondency is a terrible affliction with only the consolation that it seems worse than it is. The man with the blues is keep- ing up the fight; his helpful instincts are working against obstacles. He wants to get out of that slough of despond, and he summons his waning courage. Often with a heavy heart and tearful eyes he plows through mud to a bit of terra firma. Then suddenly the cloud lifts, he has a brief respite, then a longer one, and gradually his days take on a bit of cheer. So don’t be too blue about your blues. As one victim said to me: “It isn’t real melancholy, but it’s a damn good imitation”; and after getting that out of his system, he felt better. Some have suggested starting the day with KEEPING HAPPY 53 a morning smile before your mirror and keeping that up by a daily dozen of smiles when you feel meanest. Others play jazz music at breakfast. But you usually have to develop your own pet recipe for blue-chasing. Getting A Strangle-Hold on Worry Worrying is not a disease but a symptom; and as a symptom it enters into a large number of common mental difficulties that one may call by many names without help- ing the matter much. That they are bad habits one will admit, but that doesn’t go very far. They are handicaps; they are deficits ; they are disqualifications ; they are minor mental disabilities. And there are a good many of them. There are fears, anxieties, compulsions, obsessions, impul- sions, shyness, depressions, broodings, sensibilities, fits of temper, sulks and deviltries, and all of them—Iike the last —apparently the work of some fiend interfering with men- tal fitness and human happiness. The question then is: Into what picture of minor sents] disability does a particular case of “worry” fit? That is a first step in getting below the surface symptom of worry, and digging a bit toward the root-cause. To analyze it one follows one clue after another, fits one block into an- other, and gradually the puzzle becomes a picture. Fatigue is always a good first guess. If one is subject to such symptoms they get a hold—at times a strangle-hold —when you are tired; and fatigue means overdrawing your account, spending a little more energy than you have saved. A rested nervous system, keeping a fair balance in the reserve bank of energy, has a power of resistance to these mental quirks, just as physiologically the fit body resists germs. Your physiological immunity is specialized ; so is your psychological immunity, your susceptibility 54 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT or resistance to one form or another of mental upset. You may be exposed, but you go scot free if you are so dis- posed. Fatigue, the rundown condition, brain-fag, selects the weakest point in your mental armor, and then you com- plain of that symptom and think all would be well if you could only get rid of that. Under similar conditions, one person will worry, another be full of dreads, a third have complicated pains, a fourth fitful sleep and bad dreams, a fifth severe depression, a sixth confusion and lack of con- centration ; and whatever each has, he regards as the worst form. Yet since these symptoms are closely related at the root, most sufferers will have several of them in minor part but find their major trouble in one. That is how the worrier is made. The tendency to worry is the weak spot because it persists even when the patient is well. It is part of his mental habit-system, the correction of which should be started early in life. Still more com- mon is the timidity complex that you observe in well people and in cases of mental unfitness. The habit of worry is a mental leak, and it is exhausting to keep a leaking ship afloat. The program in most cases is to go after the physi- ological regimen first—get plenty of rest, avoid strains, eat under calm conditions, exercise when fit, rest when tired. Nip your fatigue in the bud. Note how frequently a short rest in time will restore. “Forget it” is a good ingredient in a recipe; you don’t want your worry-habit cn your mind any more than your diet. But the worrier may profitably go on a mental diet and get the growing satisfaction of breaking it. Don’t worry about your worry-habit; give it a chance to taper off. KEEPING HAPPY 55 The Hard-Boiled Club One of the strangest bits of psychology is our attitude toward our emotions. Some of it is intelligible enough. We all have fears, but nobody wants to be a coward or to be known as a coward; so we all do what we can to keep our fears down. But when it comes to the emotion of sympathy we have a curious conflict. The masculine ideal is to be stern and severe, not soft and tender, and thus to avoid the show of all emotion, except such as is manly. Somewhere in that general area of the emotions the “hard-boiled” notion enters. Business is business; you must look out for number one; no frills and no nonsense; most men are trying to get the better of you and don’t care a rap about your losses or how you feel about them; so put on your steel armor and be hard as nails yourself. Make it clear that nobody can put anything over on you, and let music and art and all such fussing alone. Stick to business and be hard-boiled. Some of the candidates for the “Hard-Boiled Club” have one code and one shirt-front during office hours and another when off duty. But more often the hard-boiled shell grows over their entire nature, and soon they get so incrusted in their ways that they are permanently hard- boiled and even parboiled. A great financier, who was not hard-boiled, for he was also a great lover of the arts and patron of many good causes, Pierpont Morgan, gave us the phrase that you can’t unscramble an omelet. And you can’t unboil human nature when allowed to set. It gets crusty. The hard-boiled man is the victim of a bad philosophy and a worse psychology, and presumably he will think anybody a little soft or weak who tells him that. But that 56 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT hard-boi’ed shell cuts him off from a lot that is worth while in life. By starving or crippling his emotions he is only half (and the worse half!) of the man he might have been. The really big men in any calling, and that includes big business, are men built on liberal lines. They have large interests, broad outlooks, and a generous sympathy with - the other fellow and the great mass of other fellows. They never allow business to spoil their chances of living a worthwhile life. Very often, too, the hard-boiled man puts on a shell to hide the fact that he is afraid of his own emotions. And when he falls, he falls hard. Some of these hard-boilers, without any foolery about them, have been known to con- sult on the sly some gay fortune-teller for a tip on the stock market or the races, and they will fall for notions that a man on easy terms with both his common sense and his finer emotions would never consider for an instant. Some fall for the coy and keen ways of women who see through them, but never let on. The hard-boiled man isn’t as hard as he thinks he is. But last as first, he has a bad steer and a false tip on how to get the most out of life and out of himself. Shells are all right for turtles that have no other means of pro- tecting themselves. But humans are pretty complex creatures; and to deny any part of your nature makes you just so much less of a man. “Thou Shalt Not Be Too Fussy!” There are two orders of human beings, according to William James,—the tough-minded and the tender-minded. The tough needn’t be very tough, nor the tender very tender ; most persons are presumably medium, neither well KEEPING HAPPY 57 ~ done nor rare. Yet they incline to the one pattern more ~ than to the other. Which class we belong to depends on how we take things and particularly how we react emotionally ; how sensitive we are to the little scratches and bruises that are bound to come in a rough and tumble world, with an uncertain ~ climate. It isn’t the tenderfoot alone who cannot endure physical hardships and is hard to break in; it’s the tender head who is looking for soft spots in life because he feels everything so keenly, is so easily made miserable. Too sheltered an existence makes hot-house plants of human creatures, and that, we all agree, is artificial and should be avoided. It is much better to live in the open with free and friendly democratic contacts with all sorts and condi- tions of men and a good many varieties of circumstances. There is a lot of education in experience, though we do well to select and avoid. Particularly in bringing up children must we have this in mind, for there is much in child-nature that favors the tender and needs to be toughened. We can let children en- joy the tale, and let the moral go, of the ‘real Princess” who, though in beggar’s dress, was tested and found true by the simple expedient of having her sleep in a bed on fourteen feather mattresses, and yet she couldn’t sleep be- cause she felt a pin in the bottom of the pile. But in prac- tice we must lead children out of their babyhood, crying for every hurt, offended at every slight, upset by any little mishap, brooding over every disappointment, and lead them up to the give-and-take of a world that is full of thorns on its roses. Yet we must keep children sensitive to the fine things in life, to the refinements out of which grow standards of liv- ing. Many must live a coarse and poverty-stricken life who are sensitive to the things that make all the difference 58 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT between happiness and misery. So we must teach them that there may be content in a hovel and wretchedness in a palace. The tough-minded hack their way through life, not much regarding the feelings of others, feeling so little themselves. The tender-minded make their way more con- siderately. They pay for their keener joys by deeper sor- TOWS. The side of human interests is as important as that of human feeling. Bothered little by his own feelings, the tough-minded one gets absorbed in the rougher occupa- tions and competitions, finds a life of plain work and no frills satisfying, and inclines to think meanly of those who can’t stand the racket. It is fortunate that so much of the work of the world is of this order, and so many minds are suited to it. But in some callings wholly, and in many more in part, it takes a dash of tender-mindedness to reach any measure of distinction. The world needs both. As it 1s a rough and ready world, it is harder on the tender-minded, who have usually less of a say in shaping it to their needs. The two orders of mind will never fully un- derstand each other, and yet they must live together fre- quently. A wise policy would see that they get acquainted early, and that each gets a taste of the other’s world. Here is a wise statement by a mind-doctor who is ac- quainted with all sorts and conditions of minds: Those who are trained that everything must be just so, and to whom trifles mean much, will pass through life with their grain continually rubbed the wrong way. We need, of course, the fine- grained people, and they will always exist amongst us. They will create beautiful things: they will be our artists, our poets, and our musicians. This is all very good, but even they will be no worse off for a calmer perspective and lesser liability to disgust. And for the average man or woman, working out his life under average circum- stances, continually seeking pleasure, excitement and achievement, it is a great handicap to be built too finely, and to respond too KEEPING HAPPY 59 vigorously to the minor disagreeables of existence. A very good eleventh commandment would be: “Thou shalt not be too fussy!” If the tender-minded learn to be refined but not too fussy, and the tough-minded to be robust but not callous, we shall have a happier and better race of men and women and better mental fitness. The Lost Paradise of Solitude The promised land of mind-health lies between the seclu- sion of too-much-alone and the herding of too-little-alone. The gospel of the middle road is more than a counsel of moderation. It is based upon the balance of two opposed needs, which must both be satisfied, the need of privacy and the need of company. Privacy belongs to the civilized order of living. In primitive life the tribe rather than the family is the unit, and there is little personal property beyond what one wears. The Indian wigwams were clustered in a village, with everything open to everyone. Miss Fletcher, who lived with and studied the Indians as her life work, found the chief hardship of that life to her was the lack of privacy. There was no place to be alone. An Englishman’s home is his castle, a place of retreat to shut out the world. Among us the sign “private” is seen more commonly on an office door than anywhere else. That is psychologically correct. For work you must be alone; for recreation you seek company. Work is concentration, shutting out the world for the time being, your family as well as your neighbors. > If we were all honest, the only purpose of locks would be to secure privacy. About the dearest thing to buy in our market, unless it be cleanliness, is privacy. We live in noisy crowds. How so many people do anything at all in 60 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT our buzzing hives of industry with typewriters clicking and babel escaping over half-way-up partitions is a problem that no one attempts to remedy because it would be be- yond even American wealth to solve. Space rather than time is money. Only the president of the corporation can afford to be alone. There is even a prejudice against privacy as an undemo- cratic suggestion of aloofness, or a moral prejudice that privacy is sought for practices to be hidden from the pub- lic, like the saloon doors of old. Shame as well as work seeks seclusion. As usual, it is the motive that sets the value on a practice. You need privacy not only for concentration, but for development. Men must be alone to commune with them- selves. Primitive people sought the wilderness for solitary inspiration. The problem of our crowded civilization is to regain the lost paradise of solitude. Every normal life should have large periods of being alone, in order to reflect and to grow. Seclusion prepares you to rejoin your fellows. You need them frequently and in many relations. The child is pe- culiarly dependent on others; yet the child needs to be alone to grow on his own resources. Nature postpones the sociable age until the child needs it for its development. We learn much with others and from others. Every normal nature is sociable; men like to get together and be good mixers. Yet we must provide separators as well. The chief danger of being too much alone is for the nervous man who is shy and withdraws within himself. The very best prescription for a -man unsettled by grief or disease or trouble to regain his normal self is to mingle with normal men. The recluse is not normal; he is too much in his own shadow; he needs the sunshine of hu- manity. KEEPING HAPPY 61 We withdraw from grief as well as for concentration and to fight our battles for ourselves. Yet then, most of all, we also need our fellow men. The too-much-alone man if he follows his impulse becomes estranged. The too-little- alone man who cannot live outside the crowd has no inner ~ resources to occupy himself; and that difficulty is met in the training of children. The city-habit so possesses people that workers use their short summer vacation not as one would suppose, to get a change from crowds by escaping to the woods and mountains, but to join the throngs of other city- vacationists on the boardwalks of a crowded seaside re- sort. Telephones and autos are modern conveniences to bring us together and relieve the too-much-aloneness of the country. Some genius should invent devices for pro- tecting privacy. As most of us live, the world and the rest of our fellow men are too much with us. A Quiet Center of Life So much is written about our disturbed ways of living, the excitement of an age of jazz, the shattering of tradi- tions, the weakening of home ties and the revolt of youth, that we are compelled to reflect not only upon what it all means and whither it is leading, but what is threatened or lost in this process of emancipation. There is something precious at stake, something of high value endangered, that seems almost indispensable to a well-regulated, well-balanced program of living. What a normal, complete and satisfying personality needs for its formation is a quiet center of life. In an age when every- body is on the go day and night, there are no home fires to be kept burning, there is no quiet center of life, at least there are not so many of them. 62 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” is more than a sentiment; it expresses a fundamental psy- chological need. It is so easy nowadays, with the world on wheels, to shift and to move, that the population without roots may soon be a majority, and we may degenerate to a nation without homes, certainly without our proper quota of quiet centers of life. Apartment houses seem like temporary storage houses of humanity; leases are short, and localities rapidly change character. We eat at restaurants that put up a feeble plea of home-cooking, and the evenings are spent at movies. It’s a weary complaint when there’s no place to go but home. The menace of it all is not alone in the craving for ex- citement, the over-stimulation and sensationalism’; it strikes much deeper at the foundation of an adjusted, anchored personality, for it deprives life of a peaceful, nourishing center. “Fast or West, hame’s best” was a homely motto that used to be seen on fireplaces; but it would seem out of place on a steam radiator, for the hearth has gone with the home. We may accept or forgive the steam plant gladly, if the home is preserved as a gathering place of friends, and even more importantly as a family center of living. The quiet center of life is threatened—its quiet by noise, its center by distraction. Each member of the family goes his own assertive way. Youth finds the older generation dull, and the older folks find the younger generation frivolous. But the destruction of a center is a serious loss. No social center can replace it, important as outside in- terests are. Coming of a good family means more than be- ing well-born ; it means being brought up under a set of influences that serve as a quiet center of life. That is what KEEPING HAPPY 63 ‘mother means to the young child—just a quiet center of ife where troubles may be soothed and interests formed. And that is what a home becomes to the maturing inter- “ests of the fortunate young people who still have a sense of family loyalty. All this sounds sentimental and more than middle-aged ‘when reduced to cold print. At all events, it is put down ‘here as a principle of mental fitness. Self-made men are few and many of them show the imperfections of their making ; yet all credit to the best of them who have cre- ated for themselves a quiet center of life. For most of those who are growing into life, such a center must be provided ; and the family, however imperfect as an institution, is the best arrangement yet devised for supplying it. Whether a people that lacks this stabilizing influence, that grows no roots and feels not the need of them, will be as mentally fit as one brought up with this aid to char- acter, is a query that is troubling the minds not of reac- tionaries, but progressive and responsible thinkers. “Be Good, Sweet Maid, and Let Who Will Be Clever!” “It is easier to make a bad boy good than a stupid boy clever.” Thus says a distinguished English biologist and philosopher. “Good and stupid” is a common coupling of terms, suggesting the opposite: “Clever and naughty.” One thing is clear; behavior is the test of both. What you do is the important thing. What is it wise and what is it right to do? Each is a check on the other. This ac- tion would be kind and good but foolish; that action would be wise but cruel and vicious. Does innocence mean being poor in mind or pure at heart? Does worldly wisdom mean not letting your con- 64 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT science stand in the way of your interests? Does sophisti- cation mean that you know this game of virtue and ‘wisdom, have no illusions, and play it to win? There are a dozen ways of asking the same question, which would seem to be, after all, one of the riddles of the Sphinx. So training is directed to two ends; to make you good, to make you wise; to make you right-minded, mentally and morally fit. I recently asked a distinguished American writer, equally at home in the lives of men and in the record of their thoughts as embodied in literature, what he regarded as the most serious error of our generation. He replied: “The overemphasis of intelligence to the neglect of right emotions; putting head above heart.” All these opinions converge to a common conclusion with which I cordially agree. It is infinitely more important to have right emotional attitudes, wholesome inclinations, sound morals, than to be learned or well-informed or in- telligent or clever or wise. And I happen to be partic- ularly sensitive to the discomfort and inconvenience of dealing with stupidity in any form. I do not suffer fools gladly, as we are advised to do, especially if we have po- litical ambitions. In this debate between virtue and wisdom, virtue wins every time, hands down. We must all concede this, how- ever dismal is the prospect of living in an even more un- intelligent world than ours. As compared with goodness, wisdom, like beauty, is a luxury. It would be a sad and sorry world without the graces and the muses; but the virtues come first, even though they may be—as indeed they so commonly are—plain and homely. The psychologist finds much consolation in two con- clusions: First, that you can do more in the way of re- forming people’s morals than of reshaping their intelli- gence; second, that by and large, with many exceptions, KEEPING HAPPY : 65 goodness and intelligence go together. It isn’t a choice, like lemon or cream in your tea, for you may have both. And you may be a prig or a prude in either knowledge or mo- rality. Intelligence is the more rigidly determined condition of your mental or your entire psychic life. You cannot by taking thought add a cubit to your mental stature, even though you add college degrees to your name. Exceptions apart, the intelligence tests show a constant rating for the same person through the school years. The tests at 6 and at 16 are quite different, but show the growth of mind. They ignore more than they reveal, especially the student’s change of interests. Yet his major growth-curve would represent his growth in emotional control and his will to do. There you approach the foundations for the moral life; and because these basic traits of behavior can be molded, it is easier to make a boy good than intelligent. Stupidity is more incurable than wickedness. All of which should not discourage, but should direct effort toward making people as right-minded as they can be made. The other consoling fact is that the two shapers of be- havior—good sense and good morals—tend to co-operate. Dr. Woods has made a study of “Heredity in Royalty” —choosing royal families because we know so much about their ancestry and traits—and finds quite convincing evi- dence that those who stood high in intelligence stood high in morals and vice versa. Yet the department of intelli- gence and the bureau of morals may be wholly estranged; and there is as much good intelligence expended in crime and fraud and intrigue as in the worthy arts of life. Unless we can keep the moral standard as high as the intellectual standard, universities might become training schools for crooks instead of institutions for higher edu- cation and nobler mental fitness. II STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD Your Mind Before You Grew Up Tue great gap between the child-mind and the grown-up mind is the biggest fact in human behavior,—the profound change from the behavior you start with to the behavior you take on to live as you do. The infant’s and the adult’s minds are even more differ- ent than their bodies. We expect people to behave as “old” as they are. In a normal person growth in mind keeps pace with years. The seven ages of men are so many stages of behavior, or changes of interest and occupation. Unless child nature could be made over into adult nature, there never would have been any civilization. Child minds can- not do the world’s work. It takes longer for humans to grow up than for any other animal. This long helpless period means a long plastic period for learning before you get set in your ways. A chick pecks its own way out of the shell and starts to walk, a child takes years to learn to walk. An insect is still more perfect at birth than a chick. Beginning with so little makes possible learning so much. Growing up in mind isn’t easy. You don’t remember how hard it was; but your parents realized it at the time. The child mind is the raw material for the adult mind. Growing up is far more than acquiring knowledge. The 66 STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 67 deeper change is in your feelings, how you take things, what interests and satisfies you, what makes you sad or happy, what you work for and hope to be. That determines how childish or how grown up you are. Man, like other animals, starts with a lot of inclinations to certain kinds of behavior. Such instincts are supported by the emotions they excite. If the grown-up is a bundle of habits, the child is a bundle of instincts tied up with strings of emotion. Many child emotions, like anger, are altogether too strong for adult use. They have to be tamed and directed. Growth is also outgrowth. Training in emotion starts earlier and is more fundamental than training in knowl- edge. What the young child learns in its school lessons is less important for its future fitness to get along than the emotional control learned in the family life and con- tinued in school discipline. All of us have been twice made, the first time by the nature we inherited, the second time by the training we received. Your early life story is the story of the gradual making and remaking of your mind. It’s really an achievement to grow up, though we take it for granted. The first years of life are the hardest ; they are also the years when we grow and learn most rapidly. If you could keep up the pace of baby learning, you would be a college graduate at seven. The world is a grown-up world. We haven’t begun to make it a perfect place for the child’s kind of life. We'll do better as we realize in how many ways the child is the father of the man. The foundations of a happy and suc- cessful manhood or womanhood are a happy and well- adjusted boyhood or girlhood. However well born, a child must also be well reared. The mind-health of the child guides its training. We all need body-health for mind-health, but the child 68 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT does especially. Measles and whooping cough are chil- dren’s body liabilities. Tantrums and terrors and selfish- ness and obstinacy and overdependence are childish liabil- ities in mind-health. The problems of grown-ups and of children are the same; to adjust themselves to their situa- tions. But the child’s urges if simpler are stronger; and his power of control weaker. He is doubly handicapped. It takes a different kind of a specialist to handle children. Nursery psychology is all-important. Parents are inter- ested in mind-health for the sake of their children. No one can really know human nature without knowing child nature. Psychology makes a close study of the mind you had before you grew up. Born So—or Made So? Which had more to do in making you what you are, your heredity—what nature gave you to start with,—or your environment—what training and experience have made of you? The two are so closely entangled that you would have to live twice under different surroundings before you could really answer the question; and even then you couldn’t be sure it was the same you. Moreover, it isn’t right to think of the total result—what you are now are—as divided up between heredity and environment, so that what share doesn’t fall to one falls to the other. You must think of how far your heredity favored the effect of environment to develop you toward—well, toward what? That direction is all-important; it completes the question. Suppose, for example, we fill it out by adding: toward making a musician of you. Nature made some persons so naturally musical, made the musical so dominant in their STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 69 nature, that they were headed for a musical career. Nature made others so unmusical that no amount of training would have made passable musicians of them. The major- ity of us find our places in between, some taking naturally to music and becoming pretty good or pretty poor ama- teurs, and the rest only fairly interested. The large ma- jority of concert-goers are people whom nature favored musically, yet whose musical capacities have been de- veloped by more or less training. The non-musical stay away. Substitute poetry for music and the same holds. We say that a poet is born, not made ; quite similarly, though not so definitely, is an engineer born so, or anyone else. He starts out with something favorable to take on the training that makes one an engineer; he is good at that sort of thing. You can’t settle one of the hardest problems that the mind of man ever tackled by a few cases; but you can get a hint of the solution. For a good test case, take a field of expression that ap- pears in early childhood, and stands close to the center of behavior, the emotional disposition—such things as tim- idity or temper. In this case that I have in mind, both father and mother were trained psychologists. Their first child, Jill, proved to be definitely “nervous.” At three Jill wouldn’t eat, was constantly throwing herself on the floor to rest, would play fifteen minutes and be tired ; often had fits of temper and contrariness, and was a constant worry to everybody, especially at the table. The parents said, in forcible lan- guage, that if they ever had another child they wouldn’t put up with all this fussiness. That next child would eat what was put before it, and go to sleep when told, and not 70 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT loll around and be a nuisance generally. When Jill was four Jack was born, and those parents watched anxiously for the first sign of fussiness, determined not to suffer as they had with Jill. Well, they watched in vain; their anxiety was needless. Jack wasn’t that kind. He ate everything and anything; he slept when he was put to bed and waked when you shook him. When Jack was four he had constantly before him the bad example of his older sister eating a bite and then resting. It didn’t bother him one bit; he wasn’t following examples. He was just going ahead according to his nature. His father said that there wasn’t a nerve that he could find in Jack’s body. He was as calm as an oyster, never cried except when hurt, never went off the handle. Jack is now six and Jill ten; and the differences remain. Jack and Jill had the same heredity as far as parents go; they had the same training. It looks as though they were born so. Now that does not mean that Jill’s nervous- ness couldn’t have been reduced by careful management; nor that Jack if sufficiently badly treated could not have acquired some bad nervous habits. But what nature pro- vided in this brother and sister was a favorable and an unfavorable foundation for nervousness. The same is true of the trend toward music; but we cannot say of how much else. Heredity and environment remain a big enigma of life. The Minds of Boys and Girls John and Jane are different. They know it and show it; we know it and take account of it; the entire affairs of the world and the arrangements of life must be adjusted to the differences of Jane and John. When John makes up h i! STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 11 ~ his mind, he has a Johnish way of doing it, and a certain ~ contempt for Jane’s Janish way of going through the same ceremony, and Jane returns the compliment. The school marks and special tests may indicate how a sufficient sample of Johns will compare in mental per- formance with a like sample of Janes. This is what Prof. Thorndike, of Teachers College, Columbia University, found. John does better in rapid movements of finger and arm, in accuracy of movement, in responding to a signal, in physics and chemistry and in ingenuity. But John doesn’t completely outrank Jane; in fact, if you select a group with high records in these special abilities there will be two Janes for three Johns in every five. Jane does better than John in naming colors and sorting cards, in checking selected things in a list, in spelling, English and foreign languages. In these special abilities there will be three Janes and two Johns in each group of five. While in all the rest of their performances, including mathematics and the average marks in studies, in general information, in memory and sense-powers, there is very little difference, and in other things just a little more. So that is about how different a picture of John’s school-and-intelligence mind would look from a picture of Jane’s. If you selected a record at random, you would be taking a long chance in guessing whether it was the record of a John or a Jane. You would have no doubt, despite a boyish bob and the fact that in college plays some Johns make up as superb Janes, which was John and which was Jane by photographs of their faces or bodies. If you turn to the emotional John and the emotional Jane, and go by tests supplemented by the judgments of teachers, relatives and friends, you have as Johnish traits, first, independence, and second, a sense of humor; also, "2 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT though less so, self-consciousness and temper ; while Jane’s most distinctive trait is her interest in persons rather than things; and trailing after at some distance, her emotion- ality, temperance, impulsiveness, religiousness, sympathy and patience, in all of which she moderately outclasses John. Again, Prof. Terman has shown that among very superior (in mental ability) children (and the same is true of the inferior, including the feeble-minded) there are more Johns than Janes. Now in drawing conclusions we must be careful or we shall draw a blank, or a totally misleading conclusion which, if followed in practice, might lead to bad advice. So far as capacity to follow a large range of mental pur- suits in and out of school is concerned, and in general equipment for the work of life, John and Jane are com- parable, though the differences between them are not negligible. And remember that in many paths in life small differ- ences count, and count heavily in degree and manner of success. Even though John and Jane do equally well, they get the same comparable scores by support of a fairly different grouping of traits. John’s and Jane’s emotions present more fundamental differences than do their minds. There is much of the work of the world that can be better done by John and much that can be better done by Jane, perhaps still more than can be done as well by either, yet differently. The world’s work will always need Johns and ‘Janes. How Boys Choose Their Chums “When a feller needs a friend” and doesn’t have one of the right kind, he may go wrong. When the boys in a school for delinquents—boys who had gotten into trouble—were asked how they chose their \ STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 73 chums their answers showed a close-up of the boyish mind. For these boys are like other boys, except that they have come up rather hard against the temptations of life, and had a bump that made them stop and think. What they want in their chum is a boy full of fun, fair and square, friendly, who does things for you. They want a good time, and they want loyalty, partly of the gang spirit, but not very different from what is wanted wherever good fellows get together. Birds of a feather flock to- gether, and these boys mostly got into trouble together by reason of their chums. Just plain stealing is the commonest crime. So these boys were asked: “If your chum cheated or stole things, would you stick by him?” Two to one they would. “Would you tell on him?” Nine to one they wouldn’t. Next: “If he should show the white feather, would you stick to a coward?” On this they split about even. Isn’t that about what you would find in any sample of boys, or the over- grown boys we call men? There are two kinds of education; the one that goes on in the school and the home where the grown-ups are in charge; and the other in the street and the playground where the kids are doing the educating. Which do you think counts most? Both of these worlds set up standards of right and wrong. And the question is this: Will boys’ actions be shaped by what they learn from books and talks, or from their gangs and their chums? So there are your two codes, and boys are making terms with both of them. The gang code is all for fun and self-interest ; and these delinquent boys have run up against the public code and the policemen. We all have the same conflict between get- ting pennies or dollars any old way, or earning honest pennies. T4 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Then you ask these same boys for their reasons. Mostly they would stick by a chum because he is a friend. But there are quite a number of moralists among them, who add that they would tell him or make him promise not to steal again. A few are frank: “I like crooked friends”; “I’m no angel myself.” Those who would desert a thieving chum are afraid of a bad example, and some hate thieves. And as for telling on a friend—that is against the gang spirit. It’s either none of your business, or if you tell, you'll be told on. Cowardice is different. Some know the temptations and have a fellow feeling with it; others, and the majority, think they could teach the coward to be spunky, and treat ’em rough when it’s coming to them. Anyone who wants to handle boys has to be enough of a boy to get inside the boy’s mind. He must be the bigger and better kind of boy himself. He mustn’t be on the side of the police alone, but a sort of friend and judge. You cannot preach to boys, even bad boys, as though they were lost souls. There is something in every boy on the law and order side that must be appealed to, to help him fight the unruly impulses that have a bigger hold than we can well recall, because we have outgrown them. Boys will be boys; but what kind of boys? How they are to be directed into being the right kind of men is the problem that faces parents and teachers, especially at that changeable age when childish ways must be left be- hind and the boy is already partly a man. It is a hard job at best. Parents and teachers cannot do all of it, perhaps not even most of it. A boy’s chums are on the job all the time and have the inside track, because they know the boy as only another boy can know him. Choosing the right chum or big brother is about the big- gest thing in a boy’s life. STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 95 Have Your Children W hims? Most children have whims, though not as many as one father counted in his small boy at the age of 1, 2, and 3 years, which is the age of whims. There were more than fifty-seven varieties. At one stage John wouldn’t eat his cereal from the dish but only from the pan; or when refusing to eat would do so only if you first put the spoon through the back of the chair; would eat crackers when left for him to get, not when handed to him; or he must have two crackers just alike; wouldn’t get dressed except in a certain chair; cried when you put a new hat on him because he wanted the old one; wouldn’t eat his orange when cut in small pieces, but must have large ones. At one time mother must bathe or feed him or put him to bed; at another time father. The sugar must go on the oatmeal before, not after, the milk. In short, every- thing must be done just so, or there is rebellion. Another child won’t eat the biscuit unless the butter is put on the patterned side; and a third won’t eat unless the plate is first handed around the table. A fourth must have the dark blue, not the light blue plate. The list is endless. What does it all mean? It means that children are creatures of habit, not like their elders, but because they are so impressionable that doing a thing two or three times forms a habit. Whims are passing habits in the making, but made on the childish pattern. A child with many food- whims is groping for some way to make it easier to eat. But there is more to it than that. The young child is learning to use its will. It is no more expert at that than at anything else. It is learning to get control of muscles, and it is likewise learning how to use its will. It can show will most easily by protesting until it has its own way. 76 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Along with that comes a sense of power. It is fun to make other people do things your way. Nor is it an accident that so many whims have to do with food. If a child has a good, steady appetite, it will not develop so many food-whims. For many children eat- ing isn’t altogether easy. Appetite is capricious. There is danger that children, if humored, will enjoy being the center of attention, and having others fuss and worry over them. But if the appetite is strong, whims are weak. Certainly whims should never be encouraged, but they may have to be tolerated, especially if they are innocent. You cannot expect a child to form all the right habits at once. It has to learn and unlearn, to grow and outgrow. One may be indulgent to some whims and yet guard against the whim habit. The child with many stubborn whims is likely to have other nervous traits. Such a child must be gradually and skillfully weaned away from its whims, humored some- times, distracted and disregarded at other times. It must be led to the same end by another route. In diplomatic discipline it is wise to save the pounds and let the pen- nies go. How to Keep Children Happy There is much more taught in the schools than appears in the school books. Of prime importance is the emotional atmosphere of the schoolroom, which is what the teacher makes it. Here are ten pointers taken from a little book with great wisdom. Its author is Prof. Stratton of Cali- fornia. 1. There are two kinds of emotions—those that add to your strength, like cheer, confidence, good will,—and those that are needed to check and direct the go-ahead emo- STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 77 tions by keeping them on the right track, like fear, shame, . sorrow. This second group of emotions, though for the . moment they make you quiet and lower your energy, are good for a short time and to offset the others. They give balance to your personality. The strength-giving emo- tions are for long and steady use. These the child should cultivate, and they will be naturally strong in childhood. 2. Good emotions wait upon good conditions of health, proper food, vigorous exercise, some real work, much real play and abundant sleep. The natural cheer of chil- dren will flourish when given this soil to grow in. 3. A happy teacher makes happy pupils; an irritable teacher makes restless and troubled ones. Children catch the emotions of those about them. They feel the good will and interest of the teacher, or the lack of it. 4. Besides example, children respond to admiration, confidence, affection. Praise whenever you can. The child’s pride in the teacher is good for both. Trust children as far as you can, and make it plain to them that you do so. 5. The surroundings help the emotions,—for example, bright, cheerful walls, pictures, flowers and a pleasant outlook. Let children feel that their surroundings are worth caring about. 6. Much should be done for the mere joy of doing it, with little thought of profit,—such as songs, stories, plays. Right pleasures and right appreciations are worth as much as right knowledge. 7. Keep the imagination alive. Fairy tales that show how the hunchback or the beggar may be a prince, and that true character counts more than appearance, tell a story besides the main plot. These are lessons in human values. Manners and courtesies carry a meaning beyond the form; that is another lesson in human values. 78 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT 8. Let every child do something in the way of art; sing, draw, design, build, take a part, however poorly, to get the feel of that side of expression. In a play give the gay part to the shy child, and the serious part to the merry one to let them get new experiences of emotion. All this leads to appreciation. 9. Make a habit of free emotions so that the emotional nature grows strong and ready to respond. Restraints and shyness and going off by one’s self are sure to be too readily used unless the child’s emotions are trained the other way. There must be frequent times to unbend to the joy of school life. 10. In dealing with children consider the temperament of the child. In friendship let each associate with another who has what he lacks. Supplement the play comrade- ship with that of the school. Such hints make clear that school means more than lessons, and the teacher teaches as much by personality as by instruction. Too often the home life affords little for the growth of wholesome emotions. For the best re- sults, school and home must work together. Whatever else the ends of education, happiness is one of its goals. Nothing helps so much in any enterprise as a happy state of mind. The strength-giving emotions do not ap- pear in the course of studies or on the report card; their presence marks the silent records of the child’s growth. Happy school children make happy and worthy citizens. What is an I. Q.? The initials “I. Q.” stand for “Intelligence Quotient,” and that stands for your place in the scale of intelligence, but especially while young. For it all started with the idea of mental age. If a boy of 8 is up to the average of STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 79 intelligence of other boys of 8, his I. Q. is called 100; for he is as old in years as in mind, neither tall for his years in mental height nor short. But if mentally he is only as far along as an average boy of 7, he is one year behind ; and his I. Q. is 7/8, or 87; he is slightly retarded or backward. If at 8 he is as far along as an average boy of 9, then his I. Q. is 9/8, or 112, and he is ahead a year. The first boy is duller, the second brighter than the average; but both fall just about within the range of the normal. But if the 8-year boy is so seriously backward as to know and do only what is within reach of the 5-year-old, then his I. Q. is 5/8, or 62, and he is very low-grade men- tally, in fact, feeble-minded, though not the lowest in that group. If he were so superior at age 8 as to pass the tests of an 11-year-old, his I. Q. would be 11/8, or 137; and you would find only one boy in 200 as gifted as that. When all thi; was explained to a judge, who was a bit of a sport, he s1id, “Oh! You mean the boy’s mental bat- ting average” ; and we’ll let it go at that. But how do we know that this 8-year-old boy is only at the 7-year level, or is up to the 9-year level? It took a great deal of work to determine that. It meant that psychologists had first to devise tests and a way of scor- ing them for all the chief elements that go into the make-up of intelligence. They devised a psychological “ask-me-another” suited to each year. Then they tried out the tests on thousands of children, until they were able to say that a question as hard as this, “What is the difference between a fly and a butterfly, between a stone and an egg, between wood and glass?” is one that most 7-year-olds will answer properly; but only the brighter 6-year-olds will do so and only the duller 8-year- olds will fail to answer. 80 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The questions get harder with each year, which means that you have to be a little older to answer them. They are really mental development or mind-growth tests. They include things to do, directions to follow, questions to answer. An 8-year-old would be regarded as being up to his age even if he doesn’t answer all the questions of the 8-year group; he may even fail on a question in the 7-year group; and he may answer correctly one in the 9-year or even the 10-year group. So he is first meas- ured with a suit of mental clothes a little too small, then with another the next size, and then with a larger one that proves a little too large. Thus you get his mental size, and can tell whether he is mentally tall or short for his age. This mental yardstick has proved very useful in care- ful hands. It takes account of parts of a year and of variations; just as a boy may be large in body but short in the legs. It takes an expert to use it, just as it takes an expert to fit your glasses. And it is not very easy to apply to adults, who have so long reached their mental height. In fact, when it was applied to 5,000,000 men in the army and their mental age proved to be only 13 or 14, most persons were shocked to think that these grown-up men had only the intelligence of 13- or 14- year-old boys. But that is quite understandable, for the I. Q. measures mainly how quickly you grow in mind. A man of 21 seems physically so far ahead of a boy of 14 that we consider him just as different in intelligence; and in one sense he is. This 14-year limit doesn’t mean that most of us do not learn a lot after that age; we do, and grow in other important ways, too. It means that in our ability to tackle the kind of problem set in these tests the average man is no better when older than at the age of 13 or 14. And that should not disturb us. STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 81 The Value of an “I. Q.” Intelligence testing is not a game like “ask me an- other.” It is a scientific attempt to measure native ability. It provides a practical yardstick to measure mental height. Its greatest value is in measuring the growing intelligence of children. It has made clear a big impor- tant fact: that intelligence is shown in how rapidly a child learns and in its limit of learning. Stupid people, and everybody knows a good many of them, are in many ways slow. They travel slowly on the road of intelligence. Intelligence tests show that a stupid child of 7 does only as well as an average child of 6, or a very stupid one as an average child of 5. It takes the stupid child seven years to travel in intelligence as far as the average child goes in six years or the very bright child in five years. The other half of this fact is even more important. The stupid child not only travels more slowly on this up- grade road of knowledge and capacity, but will sooner reach its limit. The dull child stops and remains at a lower mental level. Every boy or girl who can keep up with the procession and make the grade up to 14 years has normal intelligence. The big bulk of the work of the world must be adjusted to this vast army of average intelligence. With that grade of intelligence one can keep on learning what the average useful life demands. The first use of the I. Q., or intelligence quotient, is to sift out those of lower intelligence. The very low grade are feeble-minded, and below them are the imbeciles and idiots who are easily recognized and need special care. But the feeble-minded whose minds are arrested at the point which the average child reaches at age 8 to 10 are common, and the common schools and common occupa- 82 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT tions must take account of this army of adults in years and children in mind. Still more numerous are those of 11- or 12-year grade of intelligence, who are called morons. Prof. Hollingworth speaks of this period as the “moron hurdle”; those who just pass it form the dull. Places for all of these must be found in school and in life. Equally important is the fact that the tests indicate who are the superior or gifted children. They can travel more rapidly and their education can go much farther. Schools recognize this fact and provide special classes for gifted children. They are not geniuses or prodigies, some- times with a suspicion of the abnormal, but superior in intelligence and often in build also. The directive work of the world will be placed in their hands. General intel- ligence is one thing, special abilities another. Both are to be considered in choosing a vocation. The largest use ever made of intelligence tests was in the United States Army during the Great War to find out who would make the best officers or trench diggers, the best clerks or mechanics or dishwashers. And it worked. Intelligence tests may be applied to race. The negro soldier did not measure up to the white standard. The I. Q. is also extremely valuable as a clue to de- linquency or minor crime. A very considerable propor- tion of criminals of the Juvenile Court cases prove to be mentally deficient. While about three in a hundred of public school children may be feeble-minded, the propor- tion among offenders is nearly five times as large. But all these differences must be cautiously applied. The I. Q. does not measure all kinds of intelligence, nor does the intelligence thus measured determine one’s total value as a worker or citizen. Personality is too com- plicated and life is too varied in its demands for that. by STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 83 Rightly used, the I. Q. is a valuable instrument in direct- ing education and industrial occupation. What Goes Into Your Child's Head? A picture of the average child’s mind as it enters school would make an interesting exhibit. Such an investi- gation was made nearly fifty years ago in the schools of Boston and of Kansas City. It is safe to predict that the ignorance that was found then would not apply now, but it might be well to make sure. We might even find that the active city child—not to say slum child—of today knows too much. But in 1880 half of the Boston children had never seen a bee or a sheep or a sparrow or a robin or a snail or a squirrel or an ant or a bluebird or a crow; that is, not to know it by name. More than half had never seen growing grapes, roses, buttercups, potatoes, corn, black- berries, blueberries, moss, maple, pine, oak, willow, poplar or elm trees—again, not to know them. More than half couldn’t tell where was the waist, ankle, wrist, heart, lungs, ribs; had never seen a sunrise or sunset, rainbow, hail, dew or knew what season it was; didn’t know what woods, beach or island meant; didn’t know a hoe, spade, plow or file; didn’t know how butter was made; that wood comes from trees; had never been in bathing; didn’t know where woolen things come from; that the world was round ; what bricks were made of ; what cotton was, or that leather came from animals. In all of these lists the ignorance increases as you read on, so that toward the end as many as eighty or ninety in each one hundred children are ignorant. Perhaps many of these questions were not fair to city children. In the children of Kansas City, which was 84 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT then in touch with the country, the ignorance is not half as general in most things. There is little difference be- tween boys and girls, though the advantage is with the boys. Girls have a closer knowledge of the more intimate and homelike, while boys have more outside information. In Boston the Irish children did not know as much as those of American birth, and in Kansas City the colored children were more ignorant than the white. From Boston to Kansas City and beyond we do much better now. We have come to realize how much the child’s mind needs actual contacts with things in nature as well as with the machinery of modern life. Children’s interests have been richly fed, perhaps overfed. Pictures are plenti- ful, and the comic strips that are supposed to amuse their elders are seized upon by the children, perhaps be- cause they are so childish. Then the movies have made knowledge real, often to good advantage, yet more com- monly mixing unwise excitement with interesting informa- tion. Good motion pictures for children are scarce when they ought to be common. The revolution in books for chil- dren is of all the best showing of how we have advanced in the knowledge of children’s minds. Outings for city children; kindergartens not as luxuries but as part of the public schools; put it all together, and it makes a rich diet. But it still remains true that knowledge of nature by direct contact is the best and most real edu- cation. The child’s mind remains the same. It has its natural interests and will follow that bent. Boys, for instance, do not have to be taught the makes of autos. Their native observation seizes upon every detail of everything on wheels. A toy shop is a pretty good reflection of the STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 85 contents of children’s minds. But outdoor and camp life is the real thing for which toys are a substitute. We are too apt to think of psychology as a remote subject studied in college and leading to theories that have no effect on daily practice. On the contrary, there is a constant give and take between how we live and how we should attain a regulation of life. There is no better example than the course we follow in directing the contents of our children’s minds through their ac- tivities. The Red Signal of the Tired Child Fatigue is one of man’s chief enemies. It is literally true that some people are born tired, and have a hard time getting over it. As is true of greatness, some are born tired, some achieve tiredness, and some have tired- ness thrust upon them. The last group, so far as chil- dren are concerned, we now protect by child-labor laws. Mind-health cordially indorses them. It is as important to protect children from fatigue as from autos. Regulation of work and sleep habits, or emotional and living habits, is as indispensable as traffic regulation. Dr. and Mrs. Seham, of Minneapolis, indicate in their book on “The Tired Child” when nature shows a red signal of danger, when a yellow one of caution, and when a green one of safety. ; Good physical condition is the first concern. The healthy child or man will have only a healthy fatigue, leading to sound sleep and a busy day. All work or play, all spending of energy, is a drain on brain and muscle; they are connected by nerves, and together form one bit of working apparatus. Brain tires before muscle. After 8 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT a long hike, or the first day’s canoeing or horseback riding, you know how a tired muscle feels and behaves. As to nerves, those slender threads that connect all your sense organs and muscles and glands and the rest of your “works” with the central exchange in the brain, they suffer from wear and tear no more than the tele- graph or telephone wires. We just speak of “nerves” as a convenient way of referring to brain-tire, which when severe enough is brain fag. When birds fly over long stretches they arrive exhausted, seem dazed and unsteady, cannot protect themselves, and are just “all in” in mind and body. Under the microscope you can get a picture of the tired brain-cells of a carrier pigeon after a jour- ney of several hundred miles, and they show the ex- haustion. For the human brain we must read the earlier signs of fatigue in changes in behavior. Some of us have far more energy than others; we can put up a greater resistance to fatigue. The feats of endurance of some men with hardy brain and muscle systems are amazing; they are the marathon runners, the mountain climbers, and polar explorers, but also the long-time brain workers with no set records to break. The poor in energy are severely handicapped. It is far more a weakness of brain than of muscle. All these relations are simpler in childhood, and are magnified in the child. Everyone gets tired; at times of stress everyone gets acutely tired, overtired, exhausted, but the tired child is chronically tired, tired all the time, never completely rested. How to recognize the tired child and what to do about it, is one of the big problems of mental hygiene. Labor unrest is often labor fatigue. The first and important matter is to recognize that there is a “tired child” and tired people. If we fail to have this in mind, we are apt to call people lazy—(and there is lots STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 87 of laziness in the world)—when they are really tired by nature and cannot help it. But we can help the tired child if we know how to go about it. And no less can we avoid the menace of fatigue throughout life. It is true enough that hard work never hurt anyone in good condition for it. But work imposed on a tired brain does serious harm. Fatigue is a warning that must be heeded. Are Bright Children W eaklings? That juvenile highbrow, undersized, slim-shanked, with the big head and the near-sighted spectacled eyes, is a creation of the comic strips. In real life, he is as rare as a stage Irishman. In the common notion, as you grow, you either grow brains or muscles; the college student has to choose between studies and football. As in other common beliefs, for each ounce of truth, there is a pound or error. Mrs. Hollingworth, of Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a book on “Gifted Children.” She tells of a group of forty-five boys and girls, selected by men- tal tests as ranking champions in intelligence. She com- pared them in physique with a group of average intelli- gence, and in turn with a group of low intelligence. The view that gifted children are physical weaklings is knocked into a cocked hat. On the contrary, they are 1.7 inches taller than the average; and the average is again 1.6 taller than the stupid group; and the same relation holds for weight. The gifted show the same advantage in build when both height and weight are considered. Gifted children are plump and well-nourished. The typi- cal gifted child has no resemblance to his caricature in the “funnies.” It is true, however, that among the very 88 ' KEEPING MENTALLY FIT thin children are a few of superior intelligence. In a photo- graph of eleven gifted 11-year-old boys, only one is below height, one of average height, and the rest are taller; and of nine girls of the same unusual intelligence, one is of average height, and eight are taller than the average. The body in action shows the same superiority of the gifted children. They can squeeze as hard with the left hand and harder with the right than those of average intelligence, and “beat” the dull children with both hands. They can tap faster, can jump as well, and for their weight pull themselves up as well on the bar, and their health record is at least as good as the rest. Of course, many healthy children are dull, and some sickly ones are bright. Very bright children seem less capable in physical performance because they are the youngest in their school grade, and thus you are tempted to compare them with older children. They are small for their grade, but large for their age. So there is some ground for the impression that bright children are small, awkward, and inferior in skill, because they really “know more than they can do.” It has been shown, too, that physically they mature earlier; they are precocious in body and mind. A prize baby who at 11 months could hold one ball with his hands and another with his feet, proved to be a genius at age 5. But how about that large head? The heads of gifted children are larger, but only in proportion to their body height and weight. The big head on a slight frame is a cartoonist’s myth, or the striking exception which at- tracts parents who are right in thinking that they would rather have healthy children than bright ones. Why not both? Careful examination often explodes common belief. The bright child seems dwarfed in body, because we are IE STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 89 1 ‘ ‘ : impressed with the contrast in exceptional cases, and be- cause he seems out of his class among the bigger children who have had time to grow in body before they caught up to the gifted in knowledge; they never reach him in intelligence. Or looking at the matter backward, Sir Francis Galton, after studying the physique of English “Men of Genius,” says that he could pick an “eleven” among them that could hold their own in athletics with any team selected from a much larger group of well-fed classes. Apart from exceptional cases, the superior in mind, far from being weaklings, are either on a par with the rest, or are superior in physique also. Do School Leaders Make Good? One often hears it said that boys who lead their class at school are not heard from later in life. This impression may arise from the interest in exceptional cases who make good despite early failure, or who strike their pace later in life when they find their career. School work and life work demand different abilities, and they make a different appeal. When you deal with a group who have early in life selected one career, and have a definite way of measuring their later success, you can test the point. Here is the result at West Point. Take all the men who have reached the grade of brigadier-general or higher, and look up their records while they were in training at West Point, and what do you find? Of every hundred of these future generals, thirty-three stood in the first quarter of their class, twenty-seven in the second quarter, twenty-three in the third quarter, and seventeen in the last quarter. A man graduating in the first quarter of his class has just double the chance of becoming a 90 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT general that one in the lowest quarter has. Take the men who were at the head of their class, the No. 1 men. More than half of them make the “general” grade; and of the No. 2 men, nearly 40 per cent. Now take the lowest man in each class: only one in twenty became a general, but of the next to the lowest, one in eight. Clearly the early promise is fulfilled. Once in a while, often on moral grounds, it becomes necessary to dismiss an officer from the army. How did these men who failed stand in their classes? Just the re- verse. There were two dismissals from men in the lowest quarter for one of men in the highest quarter. That there is no element of chance about this result appears when you check up on the men who made the “A” as best in athletics, among a group of young men already selected for physique. How many athletes became generals? Just the same proportion as the rest of the class. Rank in class studies counts; in athletics it doesn’t. What can be so clearly shown of army men, because their records are so well kept in college and by promo- tions later in life, is probably just as true where we have no such easily applied standards. The common no- tion is not correct. We now know that superior children show their ability early, because we have means of test- ing them. They are precocious in that they start early; they advance faster; and they keep their lead. Their ability sets the pace, they keep on longer, and so reach the highest places. Yet the difference is not so striking as would be the case if there were not other qualities that make for success, and which count more heavily later on. The West Point men are already a selected lot. But even in that group are a considerable number who just hold their own—who, during college, are lost in the crowd of their fellows, but who later come to the front STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 91 and reach the highest grades. And even a handful of those who lag behind catch up to the head of the proces- sion. School and college work tests something, and makes the best showing of future distinction that we have. But obviously it doesn’t tell the whole story. The only complete test is life itself. The Truth About Prodigies The world’s chess champion, Seflor Capablanca, after holding the title longer than anyone else, has retired in favor of a younger rival. What is the psychology of these special gifts? Capablanca, true to form, was a boy prodigy at chess. An expert at 9, he was in the rank of world-players at 16. Music has a long list of prodigies, from Mozart, the boy wonder of the piano who became the famous composer, to Joseph Hoffman, who in childhood was the musical sen- sation of his day and is now one of our finest pianists. Lightning-calculators show their gifts early, though only one of these calculating prodigies became a distin- guished mathematician. There is far more to mathematics than calculation, as there is far more to musical composi- tion than skill in performance. There is one thing in common to these youthful won- ders; their gift is one that matures early in all of us. All children are good in sense endowment ; a gifted child has a keen eye, an exact ear. In childhood our images are bright and rich, almost like mental photographs that replace the scene itself. The typical chess-prodigy can play blindfolded, even managing several games at a time without seeing the board. If two such chess experts meet, they can play as they take a walk. Each in turn announces his move; and 92 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT instantly each sees the whole board, with as many as thirty-two pieces, in the changed position. They need no board or pieces, so complete are their mental images. Lightning-calculators see the results as they calculate on an imaginary blackboard. Some whist players can recall all the hands of a game from the memory-images that they obtained while playing it. Closely connected with this great power of vivid sense- imagery is memory. Children learn languages more easily than older persons, and they acquire a foreign tongue without accent, which the grown-ups cannot do. Yet chil- dren differ strikingly in their power to acquire words; some children of 3 or 4 know ten times as many words as their playmates. Prodigies of all classes are more com- mon among boys than girls; so is feecble-mindedness. The male shows more extreme variations than the female. It isn’t at all clear how these special abilities arise; but there is no miracle about them. It is an example of the same order of ability that we all possess and all develop early in life, but which in prodigies far exceeds the usual range. We naturally consider these gifts in terms of their use. Chess-playing seems a mere accomplishment without relation to what most of us have to do in life. It cer- tainly involves high intelligence, but of a very special kind. We shouldn’t like to have our intelligence rated nor our income determined by our ability at chess; yet it is no more specialized than many forms of skill or ability with which we earn a living. The abilities that develop later go beyond sense and memory to judgment and handling of general relations. The elder Pierpont Morgan was an excellent mathema- tician and hesitated between a career in mathematics or business. He applied his talents to finance, which is also a special sort of ability. STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 93 How general and special abilities are related is a prob- lem that many of the best psychologists are trying to solve; in time we may know more about it. Anyone who can do anything far better than anyone else becomes famous. In chess we can arrange matches and determine the win- ner; in most matters we can only admire exceptional per- formance. We admire it as much when it has no relation to the various occupations of life. Prodigies are interesting, as are all special gifts. Champions in any field receive front-page attention. Each of us lives partly on his gen- eral ability, partly on what he camdo better, perhaps far better, than the average man. Are City Children Brighter? A yardstick would decide whether city children are tal- ler than country children. We have a measuring-stick for brightness, though we cannot be sure that it is the right “ne. Several hundred children from two rural districts in Indiana, the one poor agriculturally and the other fairly good, were tested by the same tests as were city children of the same ages, the majority from 10 to 13 years old. The city children clearly lead in brightness by several lengths. Out of a hundred bright country children you could select only fifty as bright as the brighter city children. Fewer country children would be very bright ; proportion- ately more would be very dull. There are more bright country children where the land is good; intelligence follows the crops. A city boy of 10 seems to rank as well as a country boy of 1114 years. The tests included mental work such as memorizing, arithmetic, telling the opposites of simple words, filling 94 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT out missing words in sentences, making comparisons, re- porting the details of a story and catching on to the main points, and other things that country children who go to school have just as good a chance of learning and finding out for themselves as have city children. The city children do better in every single one of the ten tests. City life offers larger occasions for learning things. Eyes and ears are constantly stimulated; things are talked about, and there is a general air of things going on. There is so much of this that many regard city life as bad for children. Children grow up better in the simpler and quieter surroundings. It may be that city children are overstimulated and the result shows to their favor in the tests. Or it may be that the city attracts the brighter as well as the more energetic and ambitious members of the country. Those who stay in the country may be of poorer stock, because the abler ones have been selected out. Many forces are at work in distributing the brains of the country. New York City has more men of unusual ability than the city itself would supply, because so many of that type are attracted to New York. At the same time a great city attracts as well the hangers on and the refuse of an underworld. In course of time we shall know enough of the shift and drift of the population in terms of their mental and social fitness, to know how to give the better men a better chance in city or country. The notion that men who make their mark come from the country is not borne out by the facts. It may be that the brighter boys from the country leave it and make their way in the cities. One must not judge by a few special cases. Whatever may be true of health or morals, in intelli- gence the city leads the rural districts, though there STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 95 are many still to be heard from. The returns are not all in. A Mental Code for Every Child Here is a rule for each day of the week as laid down by a wise man who has spent his life in studying child-nature as a guide to child-training: First. Every child should act out its impulses as freely as possible, be active in play and work, express its feel- ings, assert itself, explore, handle, investigate, satisfy its proper cravings, which include abundant rest in sound sleep. Second. Every child should also be trained to control its impulses, to co-operate with others, to serve others as well as be served. Control should come by direction, not by repression; not by blocking energy, but by organ- izing it. Third. Every child should concentrate on what it is doing. Short periods with good attention and no dawd- ling. Live one day at a time. Don’t hold a grudge over- night. Start each day with a clean slate. Don’t carry troubles over or borrow them ahead. Fourth. Every child should have tasks that are simple and definite ; decisions should be clear and prompt, carried out whole-heartedly; no worry or conflict. Just a well- ordered daily program. Fifth. Every child should be prepared to meet the little emergencies. Accidents and difficulties and disap- pointments will arise. Nature has provided resources to meet them and children should be ready with first aids. Pain, fear, sorrow, anger—they will all come both when “a feller needs a friend” and when he must get himself out of trouble. Training for emergencies is indispensable. 96 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Sixth. Every child should be with other children. Every activity benefits by a social setting; working, playing, eating, even squabbling, as well as clubbing in gangs and teams, chumming with friends and battling with foes, giving and taking and growing in social training in home and school and playground. Seventh. Every child should recognize and respond to its dependence on others; should have somebody to love and be loved by, somebody to look to for protection, some faith in the world about it, and reverence for the powers that rule, not on Sunday alone but all through the week. Such is Prof. Burnham’s code of mind-health for children; and he admits that it is easier to frame the rules than to practice them. To bring all this into a child’s life is to prepare the way for health and happi- ness in right relations. These rules suggest the spirit of the undertaking, the right-minded attitude toward the job, and the joy of guiding the child to its rightful share in life. They suggest the road as well as the goal. First, train by example. The child takes its cues from those about it, is calm when they are calm, is content when they are content, is fussy when they are fussy. Next, train by sympathy rather than by reproof. Guide rather than blame ; praise whenever possible. Finally, train by actions rather than by words. Teach by doing, learn by doing, for action is the child’s own world. Then there is the inner world of childhood, a world of imagination and of gropings for right and rights. That is a harder world to reach than the outer world of action and behavior. The two grow favorably together. To enter it you must preserve or regain your childhood. Such is the joy as well as the problem of sharing child STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 97 life. This is what every parent should know; what every child should do. To Spank or Not to Spank To spank or not to spank—that is the question; and it isn’t easy to give a “yes” or “no” answer, because there is no easy way to judge the effect. Lots of children who were brought up on frequent spanking became well- behaved, desirable citizens; and the unspanked do the same. It used to be a teacher’s problem. In older days the rod or birch was rarely out of the teacher’s hand. He or she ruled with a foot-rule. We still say “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” but we don’t altogether believe it. Many parents would be indignant if they found that their chil- dren (even if they spanked them at home) were spanked at school. Is this quite consistent? Without a doubt there is altogether too much spanking going on; and most of it is done without rhyme or reason. It’s wholly bad. Go to the park or the zoo or wherever mothers and children come in large numbers, and you will hear a constant battery of slaps and squeals and harsh words and noisy quarreling, until you begin to feel that the animals are better behaved than the human be- ings. It is done hastily and in bad temper, and, of course, is not discipline at all. It is just an expression of annoy- ance and giving way to anger and seizing the easiest way to impose by pain and fear. Then there is the other kind just as bad,—the licking that awaits the bad boy when he gets home and makes him afraid to go home. When you read “Tom Sawyer” to young boys, they seem so much interested in the ad- venture of the story that they never bother about all the lickings that Tom gets, whether they do or don’t 98 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT get any themselves. But Tom was hardened and didn’t seem to mind it. He took it and went his own way. A licking was just the price of going swimming or playing hookey. Since the temptation for parents to spank is strong, as it is so easy, and children are so annoying in inter- fering with the convenience of their elders, all our ef- forts should go to reducing the occasions for a spank- ing. We should find ways of substituting punishments that do not carry the threat of anger and fear, and seem only the natural consequences of disobedience and neglect. Spanking is an upsetting experience, as bad, if not worse, for the parent as for the child. Perhaps it isn’t so bad if you save the spanking for unusually bad behavior. But if you spank on any and every occasion you lose that chance, and you are sure to set the child a bad example. Children are so given to anger outbreaks that any example of the same loss of control on the part of their elders is bad. If they are bullied, they will be ready to bully other children when they get a chance. The precious thing is the right rela- tion of parent to child and child to parent, and that can- not be built up on the spanking basis. If not spanking, what? Depriving a child of a treat or an expected favor is one way. Showing your displeasure and bringing the child back to a favorable mood and talk- ing things over calmly until reform is promised, is an- other. It is trying and slow, and requires great patience; but it is all part of the responsibility of being a parent. The question of a spanking parent is as much worth considering as that of a spanked child. What teachers can do, mothers can do, if they set out to do it. We have done away with the whipping post and the rod. Will the spank go next? STARTING EARLY—WITH THE CHILD 99 Running Wild If I were asked what is the one most important fact about human nature, I should say it is that the human animal cannot follow nature and grow up a man; if he did he would run wild. Apparently kittens can just live out their nature and become cats. Cats have something to learn and unlearn, and mother cats both protect and guide their young. But the original wild cats, the lions and tigers, as cubs are gentle and playful, and they become wilder as they mature. Kittens make better pets phan cats. The human course is just the opposite. The child is so full of fierce impulses which it would be impossible to tolerate in our civilization that we cannot let him grow up by living out his original nature. It is that which makes education and training and discipline necessary. The child is a selfish, cruel tyrant, full of what we call mischief in a mild mood and deviltry in a severe one. The child is a victim of passionate anger, yelling, scratching, biting, striking, kicking,—a bundle of riotous impulses that have somehow to be tamed to the needs of a peace- ful life. All these childish tendencies persist in those who fail to grow up, and make it necessary everywhere, even in polite society, to police the human traffic. We call primitive men savage, and say the age of savagery came before civilization. All this outer polite behavior is a veneer. Scratch the Russian and you find a Tartar. The cave-man survives in all of us. The true story of man is the story of the taming of the wild man inside every one of us. The young person is by nature a rebel. He rebels against society; he rebels against the older generation who have become tamed in habit and are now annoyed by youthful wildness. Nature sowed a crop of wild oats 100 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT to begin with; the youthful crop is a second sowing, under the stress of the one type of original nature that must wait until the urge that sets it off is mature—the urge of sex. Civilization can exist only if we do not let one another run wild. Each man must be his brother’s and his own keeper. All this is obvious and, like much that is so, is com- monly overlooked. Of course there is another side to the story. The child in other mood seems loving and gentle, and the age of innocence is not wholly a myth. Children seem to be angels and devils by turn. It is hard to govern men in so far as it is hard for men to govern themselves; and that is hardest in early childhood. It is hard because then impulses are strong and control weak. The older generation has an easier time of it because im- pulses are weak and control strong. All training must be adjusted to this far-reaching fact. Life is a conflict; but the chief struggle is inside of us. On the one hand the battle is set as between original im- pulse and control acquired under reason. The angry man cannot think straight. War arouses passions that may again run wild; peace permits the rest of human nature to assert itself. Or the battle is set between the individual and society. Following your nature, you run up against the prohibitions of society and its rules. You learn to submit or partly rebel. If you break the more serious rules you are rated a criminal. So there is no doubt as to what is the greatest fact in life, the greatest duty, the first requirement: it is to check yourself in running wild. Control, and control, and control,—until control becomes a settled habit. Not that we should suppress or deny human nature; that has its danger also. There may be a few saints born now and then who can just grow and become worthy men; the STARTING EARLY—WITH THE orILD. 10 rest of us if we had never been taught control would still be running wild. Do Intelligence and Practical Sense Go Together? This is a most important question. Is the ability to learn in school any test of good judgment in the ordinary affairs of life? Does learning go with common sense? There is a common belief that plain practical sense and book learning are at odds. It would be hard to prove it one way or the other. The truth may be that they are fairly independent, that learning neither helps nor hin- ders good judgment. So much depends upon what you put your mind to. A good business man is supposed to exercise good judg- ment in practical affairs. But outside of his own field he may invest in beliefs that would be gold bricks as a financial venture. He may fall for notions that a pro- fessional man, trained in handling ideas, would dismiss as nonsense. A Spanish proverb says that the wisest man is at a disadvantage in a strange house. Here is a little test that may show the lay of the land. 100 boys and 100 girls in high school, about 17 years old, check off their opinions, as true or false, of forty state- ments like these: A child is born with a knowledge of good and evil; the lines in your hand tell your fortune; women are not as intelligent as men; people sometimes grow feeble-minded from overstudy; Friday is an un- lucky day; some animals are as intelligent as the aver- age man. Do you believe any of these notions or would you call them all false? One might get up a new kind of “ask-me-another” on this plan, to test your good sense rather than your stock of-information. Some of these statements are quite absurd; others are of g LS “LC ye tei «5 SCART KEEPING MENTALLY FIT more wrong than right ; and others could be argued either way. To believe some of them would count heavily against your good sense, others moderately, others lightly if at all. But so far as average results go, it appeared that except for three boys, no one had a really creditable score on the side of good judgment. Boys and girls differ but slightly in what they are inclined to believe. When a similar test was made upon grown-up men and women, it appeared that youths of 17 have more false no- tions than later on. Experience does something after you leave school. Women remain more credulous than men. But the chief result is this: If you rate those boys and girls by their tested intelligence, you find no difference in good sense as thus indicated and good intelligence. That doesn’t settle the matter. It is just a feeler. A good mind must be strong in both qualities. Your good judgment about what to believe seems to depend upon the general factors in your make-up and your surroundings, your reactions to experience rather than to book learning. Much of it you take on, like your views on politics, from the opinions about you. But even here you select; you become critical. What we need is a way to test how critical you are before you make mis- takes by poor judgment. The wise man learns by others’ mistakes. The conclusion is rather a sad comment upon our education. We should be able to educate for good sense as well as sound information. Removing ignorance is only a step in training the mind. III DELICATE QUESTIONS Suppose You Were A Criminal? Ir you were a criminal, would you choose to operate in a State where punishment was certain but light, or where punishment was severe, but where very few are caught and convicted? If caught, and you could choose the Judge for your trial, would you select one that almost always sentenced, but gave light sentences, or one who sentenced few but gave them severe sentences? Now these are not idle questions, because laws are supposed to be made not only to punish offenders, but to keep people from violation. Shall we arrange light sentences and put all our efforts on letting few escape, or rely on heavy sentences for the major effect? Severity or certainty of punishment,—which would do more to keep you from committing a crime, supposing that you were under strong temptation to do so? A group of twenty-five men and a group of twenty- five women were put through this imaginary situation. In the one case it was assumed that in ten States the punishment for the crime graded down from “life” to sixteen, to eight, to four, to two, to one, to one-half, to one-third, to one-twelfth year and to ten days; but the ten days were dead certain and the “life” sentence was given only once in a hundred cases; while in between 103 104 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT as the severity of punishment went down, the certainty of punishment went up. The results show first—and they are alike for men and women—that it depends upon your sporting nature. If you are much of a gambler and inclined to take chances, you will choose a State with severe laws laxly enforced; and if your sporting blood is thin, you will choose a State with light penalties rigidly enforced. At least, that is the way you’ll vote on an imagined situation. The at- tempt to poll the vote of actual criminals has its diffi- culties, but it would be worth getting. The life and long- term sentences on the whole are most dreaded, but the short but certain sentences form a close second; the least effective plan is in the fifty-fifty group of mild sentences with a fair chance to escape them. Quite the same is true with reference to the Judges. On the whole, the severe Judges are most feared ; but the ones that let few off, even though the sentences are light, are almost as much avoided by these imaginary criminals. But to repeat, it all depends upon your gambling na- ture. There are two major parties, the gamblers and the non-gamblers, and most of us belong definitely to one or the other party. Which is yours? So nothing is settled, and the polls are still open. If these results apply to actual criminals, you might ex- pect to find that States relying more on severity of pun- ishment would attract the desperate and chance-taking criminals, who are likely to commit more serious offenses; and the States relying more on certainty of punishment would have more timid criminals likely to commit lighter offenses. This we cannot test because the laws do not differ widely enough, and too many other circumstances enter. But it seems safe to assume that the great majority DELICATE QUESTIONS 105 of the normal as of the criminal population approach more to the cautious, hesitant, than to the bold, venture- some group. For light offenders and children, certainty of punishment is the better measure, quite apart from the far more important consideration that our purposes and methods in everyday discipline are framed in love and mercy, as perhaps official punishment should be. It is more important to make the punishment fit the criminal than the crime. Our whole system of treating the criminal is crude, because only recently have we permitted a study of the mind of the criminal to guide our practice. This is one of the many cases in which as we become more scientific we also become more humane. Do You “Thob™? Do you know the word? No matter; you are well ac- quainted with what it describes. Henshaw Ward felt the need of a name and wrote a book called “Thobbing.” We all think out the opinion that pleases us and then believe it. Take the th of think, the o of opinion and the b of be- lief, and you have thob. You believe what you find pleasant or interesting or are accustomed to believing, or wish to believe; and all the while you think you believe it because it is so, and can prove it. You really get your belief first —and look for what proofs you can find afterward. But thobbing isn’t so simple as that, nor is all false or weak thinking thobbing. There is a big or a little dose of feeling in a good deal of your thinking. Your views are distorted by an interest in the result. You back the be- liefs you take stock in, and are sure they will go up in value. There are so many temptations to thob that it is re- 106 2 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT markable that we ever think straight. Perhaps few of us do. First of all is prejudice, which is a strong emotion in- terfering with judgment. You see all the good points in persons or opinions that you like, and all the bad ones in those you dislike. Race prejudice of some sort is very common and makes the task of the melting pot difficult. We try to be tolerant. Yet when feeling runs high, as in the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, we realize how difficult it is to reach a fair judgment. Some, in advance of the evidence, tend to believe them guilty, others innocent. Thobbing in such serious matters is a dangerous tempta- tion. Superstitions furnish a rich collection of thobs. The belief in omens and charms is universal. No one has any proof that it will bring bad luck to walk under a ladder or start a journey on Friday, or that a horseshoe or a four-leaf clover or picking up pins will bring good luck, or that warts come from handling toads, or that you can cure rheumatism by carrying a magnet or an acorn in your pocket, or that coughing into the mouth of a live fish will pass on whooping cough to the fish, or that comets bring disaster and plagues are sent by offending gods, or dreaming on wedding cake will reveal your fu- ture husband, or the lines of the hand indicate how long you will live, or that fortune tellers know more than the rest of us. It is all thobbing, and rather extraordinary thobbing at that. It adds interest to life to believe in unicorns and mer- maids. It is hard to say where superstition ends and knowledge begins. At one time people traveled far to find the fountain of perpetual youth, and were ready to sell their souls to the devil to get secret powers of torturing DELICATE QUESTIONS 107 i their enemies or to get love potions to attract lovers. ~ People do not merely invest belief ; they invest capital in their thobs. Rainmakers have collected coin in dry coun- tries from the days of Egypt to Arizona. Get-rich-quick schemes make people dream of wealth and lose their com- mon sense. But mostly we thob because of the comfort as well as the interest of the belief, or because it is a beauti- ful thought or dream. Thobbing reshapes the world ac- cording to our desires. It is by no means merely the uneducated who thob. Men of science have always thobbed, helping out fact with notions that appealed to them or were already well settled in their minds. The ancients thought that planets must move in circles because that is a perfect figure; and the proof that our earth was one of a group of planets revolving around the sun had to make its way against the belief that we were the center of the universe and the sun moved around us. Private beliefs like the delusions of those who have lost the power of reason show elaborate thobbing. Such beliefs afford satisfaction or explain the world in terms of personal feelings. We cannot think straight because we cannot be imper- sonal. Everywhere we take sides and join parties and cling to opinions on all sorts of subjects, not because we know, —but because we choose the beliefs that fall in with our feelings as to how things should be. So we thob and thob while we think we think. Why Do You Pose? Now and then you meet a man with so exalted a view of himself that he seems to be carrying a portable pedestal which, on occasion, he mounts—and poses as his own 108 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT statue. Posing—passing yourself off as a glorified version of what you are, or of what you think you are—is a common temptation. Young children are natural, which means as nature made them; hence their charm. But soon they begin to pose a bit, innocently and inevitably. Posing is artificial, acquired to meet the formal relations that every social system develops. On occasion we must be on our good behavior, which implies a little of a pose. Training in the art is part of social education ; and mental fitness includes social fitness. We all maintain several selves and must do so. A man has his business or professional or official self, his sport- ing self, his family self, his public and private self, his give-and-take good-fellowship self to his pals, his gal- lant self to the ladies. With all of these selves to care for, he may at times become confused as to which self to re- lease, which to suppress. And the assignment of parts for a woman is even more delicate. The amount of energy (and dollars, too) spent in keeping up appearances in certain circles of society may be greater than the ex- penditure for any other item of the budget. It isn’t the first cost of such a pose, it’s the upkeep that is expensive. The reason why all the world’s a stage is that we are all more or less actors; some pretty good actors, more pretty bad ones. Social cleverness is largely peering through other people’s disguises, discovering how much is make-up, how much natural. If “making up your mind” hadn’t a different meaning it would be an apt phrase to describe the technique of posing. So we all dramatize ourselves a bit, exaggerate a little, pretend a little, conceal a lot and congratulate ourselves that we are not as other folk whom we have met but won’t mention. Therefore, we may reserve the term “posing” DELICATE QUESTIONS 109 for one who overdoes the part—the person known as a “shirt-front” or carrier of other defensive armor to con- ceal the anatomy of his underlying personality. The pose is a revelation of what you would like to be and an unwilling confession of what you are not. Freud has stripped off the disguises from human nature by bar- ing to themselves what people are. He finds in dreams repressed wishes when the censor (who maintains the pose) is off guard. He finds in slips of speech and lapses of behavior a letting of the cat out of the bag, revealing what the pose conceals. Have you ever met the effusive person who invites you to tell him (or is it her?) frankly just what you think of him? And have you ever done it? If so, it is to your last- ing regret. The Freudian system has been described as unmasking the mind; but it is offered as a scientific, not a polite, vivisection. Posing is living up to what we are supposed to be, o desire the world to consider us. This kind of a pose is hardly a bluff or a sham; the poser is not typically an imposer, certainly not an impostor. He is in a way posing as his own statue. The resemblance of features is there; but nature and art are not well used. Yet some pose so long and so constantly that they have forgotten, and the world never knows what they really are. The “real” poser, who displays a shirt-front instead of a heart, is the type we unreservedly or with reservation condemn. He is really a case of a maladjusted self. He is out of adjustment with himself and with his world. And the pity of it is that in some instances the poser would be more worthy and attractive if he “posed” as what he is than as what he pretends to be. A good deal of posing is more folly than sin, and the sad part of the deception is that the poser deceives him- 110 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT self into believing that no one sees through the pose. Any- one who attains a reasonable approximation to what he may make of himself has no need of a posé. So pay your- self the compliment of assuming that you will do better to be yourself than to pose as your own statue. Why Do You Swear? It is the business of a scientist to inquire into what anyone else would take for granted. When the apple fell from the tree, Newton asked: “What made it fall?” and discovered the law of gravitation. Franklin asked: “What makes the flash of lightning?” and discovered electricity. The psychologist asks: “Why do we laugh, why do we swear?” There’s a reason. When you are under the stress of an emotion, energy accumulates, and it must find a way out if peace is to be restored. You cannot sit still and hold it in. That is why you cry, why you laugh, why you swear. It is a relief, a safety-valve, and you feel better when it is over. When women do not feel quite right, or things have gone quite wrong, they have a good cry. Tears and sobs are a relief for grief. When the dentist hurts you, you want to yell; you wriggle all you can. If you are hila- riously amused, you laugh till it hurts, and hold your sides and roll in your chair. If you have emotion, you must show it. You drain it off through the muscles. The most violent emotion is anger. If you can, you strike and scratch and bite. As these crude expressions are repressed, you lash out with your tongue; you do it with words. And in these polite days we are under so many repressions that we have to use all the substitutes we can. Our big emotions need outlets that life does not supply. DELICATE QUESTIONS 11 We seek thrills and if we cannot get them in full, we use substitutes. And sometimes they are safer. Great tragedies or great romances cannot happen to all of us. We cannot all be heroes. Our love affairs are for the most part pretty conventional. So we go to the theatre and the movies and have all these emotions by proxy, and get the heroics and the sympathies expressed. We go there for a good laugh, or a good cry, or a good thrill, and we applaud to relieve our tension. Swearing is most directly concerned with anger. When you cannot fight or strike back, or there is no one to fight, you express your anger, or the milder forms of irritation, by swearing. The most direct expression is “Damn you, get out!” Indirectly it is “Damn it!” when the door sticks, or you drop a collar button, or just miss a car. Or if you are more repressed, when thwarted you say under your breath or think or look what it is for- bidden to say out loud. Now part of that is emphasis. You show that you are in earnest, as well as upset. That’s the second-class use for swearing—just for emphasis, though again primarily for the emphasis of anger. “A damn scoundrel” is a higher degree of the ordinary rascal. “A damn shame” may imply just a trace of the aggres- sive mixed with pity. “An awful shame” is a gentler phrase; and this in feminine usage may come down to a compliment like “awfully pretty.” The rest of the “why” is why we use those words. Orig- inally the curse was a serious affair, and if you were cursed, the thing wished for you was likely to happen; naturally you prefer to be blessed. And to avoid the for- bidden you may say: “I’ll be blessed if I do.” The curse was to terrify, or at least shock. You still swear to shock; and if when boys swear you’re not shocked they are dis- appointed. 112 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The greatest shock is in bringing in what is sacred. . Men took an oath on what is sacred, as we still use the Bible to swear in witnesses in courts; hence the shock when the holy name is taken in vain, and for lighter irri- tations or for mere expression of anger. What we use is largely a matter of social approval. We appeal to God only in distress; a German uses it for mild surprise, and it is quite a ladylike expression. When people are in real distress they don’t swear; they pray. So perhaps the United States Senator who defended himself when he used unparliamentary language by de- fining swearing as the unnecessary use of profane lan- guage wasn’t far wrong in his psychology. Swearing, like many another expression, has its psychology, but also its conventions. “Why Don’t I Make Good?” “I am a stenographer, well educated, fair at shorthand, a good typist, can keep an office in order and attend to the files; have been at work four years; have had several jobs; haven’t failed at any of them, and haven’t made a success. Whenever I suggested that I'd like a raise or might get another job, they always seemed relieved to have me go. Nobody ever fired me; nobody ever found much fault with me; nobody ever praised my work. I’ve had more pay and less pay than I get now. I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. I know that my present boss, who is rather easy-going and never jumps on anyone (I think he is a little afraid of girls), would be glad to have me resign. Before I take another job, I'd like to know what is the trouble. Why don’t I make good? Yet I'm not a failure, either. I am sure there are thousands like me. I'll answer any questions you ask me. I really want to know. “PF. 8. This is but one of many cases of this type. With hun- dreds of thousands of girls at jobs, there arises the new problem of adjusting the feminine mind to a business run DELICATE QUESTIONS 113 by men as men like it. And that’s where part of the trouble comes. Even when men and women are on the same job, they do it differently. It takes a special fitness to adapt one’s work to the ways of another; it is harder when the one is a woman and the other a man. When a person is not “no good” but yet “not good enough,” it is well to make sure that there is no physical handicap. If there is, get after that first. Are you well or are you always a little tired? Do you have to spare yourself, and does every extra effort upset you? Can you work under pressure? Lack of energy accounts for many failures to go for and get the bigger job. Here is such a case; and it’s a man stenographer, not a woman : “I am a Spaniard. I came to this country twenty years ago. I am a good stenographer; my English is as good as my Spanish. I am earning $35 a week, and that’s as far as I can go. I have been tired all my life. My digestion isn’t good. If I eat less, I feel better. If I take coffee, my hand trembles. It’s all I can do to work seven hours a day. Often I have to go home at noon and take a nap before I can go on with my work. I take a nap after working hours before I can go out at evening. I am sleepy. I have tried hard to get over it, but can’t. If only I had more pep! “S, PP This man’s greatest enemy is fatigue. He is one of the great army who are born tired. Anyone who can cure fatigue is a great physician! There is usually some com- plication in body health. What people often forget is that certain jobs involve a close personal relation. The salesman must be adapt- able because he or she deals casually with a procession of people, but doesn’t need to adapt for long to anyone. A workman in a factory has to turn out a part of a 114 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT product in a workmanlike manner, and his work rather than he himself must satisfy the foreman. When a job requires the adjustment of one personality to another, it is a harder order of service. Many em- ployers have told me that the trouble in this sort of per- sonal service is that the assistant cannot look upon his or her work in terms of the employer. He or she wants to work in his or her way, and that grates on the employer; it hampers and disturbs him. A personal employee is val- uable just so far as he or she can save the employer’s time and energy. It is not a separate job, it is a part of another’s job; and I am convinced that the many per- sons who do it well enough to hold the job but not well enough to get a bigger and better job, are those who cannot easily fall in with another’s habits. There is more chance for friction when a feminine mind and interest and habit must be fitted to a masculine one. It’s the girl rather than the stenographer who doesn’t mentally fit. Yet stenographers and secretaries are typical fem- inine jobs. There is good reason for this, too. The qual- ity needed is a faithful attention to detail. It is a sort of office housekeeping of a high order. It is responsible work, different every day, and each part is part of a whole. So many letters may be so many cogs in a wheel; but the “office” is a going concern, going on the employer’s plan. The stenographer or secretary who can fall in with the plan and think for others is the one who gets on. When there is only a fair adjustment, the employer has to take care of the employees instead of being cared for. He has his stenographer on his mind, at least in part. She becomes part of the burden to be carried, not of the force that carries. If F. S. and those like her would look on their jobs not as a task by itself but as the job of easing the work of another, their services would be DELICATE QUESTIONS 115 more highly valued. With one so nearly successful, it often takes very little to turn the trick to a greater success. Are You A Bore? What and why is a bore? It is said to be both a virtue and a trial to bear fools gladly. Our first concern and sym- pathy is with the person who is bored—the ‘“boree”— rather than with the one who does the boring—the “borer.” Assuming that neither B nor V is boresome by consti- tution or all the way through, B bores V because he in- sists on talking to V about matters in which V has no interest. Someone has said that a typical bore is a person who tells you all about his family or experiences or ideas, or feelings, or maladies or remedies, or household arrange- ments, or travels, or dreams, or what have you?—while you want to be telling him about yours! That is partly true but more than partly false. For B—the bore—and V—the victim—are, as a rule, not only of different minds in terms of their interests, but of dif- ferent minds in terms of their make-up. The bore is narrow-minded,—perhaps that is why he is called so. He makes a long-winded narrow aperture of talk. He lacks the breadth to realize that other minds may have other interests. But it is more than a matter of breadth or of any one dimension. It is a matter of per- spective, which implies several dimensions. It is a matter of the general plan and lay-out of your mind. Fit minds are well proportioned. The key to that proportion is importance. In your stock of ideas, in your plans and purposes and interests, some are (or should be) of major importance, others of minor consequence. No less in telling a story, making a 116 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT statement, stating a case, arguing a plea, defending an argument, discussing a plan, the result will be clear and interesting if it follows a proper scheme of importance, and vague and flabby and tedious if it is a jumble of items, all on the same scale. The one is a design; the other a patch-work of odds and ends—with more odds than ends. The bore is monotonous, all of one color, all in one tone of voice, of one scale of importance. He chokes every- thing with irrelevant detail. He can’t omit. He packs a trunk for a picnic. He has a boresome mind. Perhaps he can’t help it; he may be a poor fish with no great re- sources, and we let him down easily, as we pay the organ- grinder to move on. But should the organ-grinder have the delusion that he is an entertaining orchestra, he be- comes a “perfect” bore—the perfection of his type of limitation. A good deal of energy which one would prefer to use otherwise is spent in avoiding bores. I have seen a group of chatting companions at a club all suddenly reminded of important engagements at the entrance of a fellow member with a reputation for “buttonholing.” Such is the chronic bore. But boredom depends on the boree as well as upon the borer. If we cultivate wide interests, we will not be so constantly bored. The person without resources is bored with himself. Time hangs heavy on his hands. He doesn’t find things interesting, because he has so few interests, and these do not run deep. Much of the craving for constant amusement, going to movies, rushing in autos, window-shopping, idle gossip and mischief-making, is an attempt to escape boredom. “What shall we do?” is a problem of the idle poor in in- terest, never of the rich in interest. Then there is the other extreme, the man who is bored DELICATE QUESTIONS 117 because he is jaded. All of his interests have been satisfied. He has sucked all the oranges of life dry. The French, who are keener in making words for such mental states, call such a man blasé just as they have a better word for boredom than we have—ennui. Nature seems to have provided a special bore gesture in the yawn. This should serve as a convenient social signal of boredom; and how we struggle to suppress yawns! More wasted energy. It is inevitable that all of us, interested much in some things and hardly at all in others, should be constantly open to the annoyance of boring and being bored. It is a great art—the art of being interesting; and it’s a com- pliment to anybody to find others interested, and not bored, by what he has to say. We should all be willing to have some acquaintance with boredom in order to ap- preciate by contrast the charm of interest and the right cultivation of many interests in the cult of mental fitness. Are You a Tightwad? Why is a miser? This is not an ask-me-another catch, but a real question for a class in human nature. Stingi- ness looks like a hoarding mania, but it goes deeper than that. Nor is it just thrift overdone; though it is true that a virtue is often a mean between two vices. For the spendthrift, money burns a hole in his pocket; for the tightwad, the pocket won’t open without a wrench. They belong to two opposite kinds or sides of human na- ture. The one is open in his ways, free in his manner, mixes easily, talks readily, plays, laughs, spends, has a good social time. He is a bit impulsive; no sooner thought or said than done. He belongs to the expressive type. The other shrinks, avoids, hesitates, is often silent, apart, hard 118 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT to draw out, a sort of shut-in personality. He belongs to the repressive type. Are you expressive or repressive? Or like a good many, in between—something of both? The miser is often a recluse, a silent, lonely hermit of a man, That is his real trouble; his stinginess is only a symptom. A miser is not normal, any more than an ex- cessively shy, afraid-of-his-shadow person, whom we pity because we know that he would so much like to be other- wise. Either he may remain single, because he cannot ex- press his love-life freely; or he may find a mate of the same temper. We like generosity; we dislike meanness. Some misers, like shy people, have generous impulses; but when they try to express them, something in their make-up inter- feres. Now and then a man who has been rated “close” all his life leaves his fortune for the public good. He was at heart a philanthropist, but he was a repressive and couldn’t let himself go. If a man cannot easily collect friends, he may take to collecting dollars. Like the rest of us, he is seeking satis- faction, and gets it according to his nature. Another thing we all like is power and esteem. Money is power— perhaps too much so. Money commands respect, because it indicates success in what most of us*are striving for. But it is just as much success to acquire friends and a good reputation. The miser being by his nature denied satisfactions that other more normal persons enjoy, takes to a pursuit that he can follow while keeping much to himself. Yet he gets the satisfaction of the envy of others, which is as much of a joy as gloating over gold. The tightwad may become so by habit, by too narrow a habit. Saving being a good habit, he becomes a slave to it. Spending hurts because it interferes with a habit DELICATE QUESTIONS 119 that has become a passion. The miser confuses means with ends, and that is a common way of making a failure of life. The normal man, who is both safe and sane, culti- vates the expressive, the generous side of human nature. A certain amount of repression is all to the good; saving is repressing. But saving the best sides of our nature is far more important than saving dollars, Generosity is a characteristic American trait. It is a live-and-let-live kind of virtue, that goes with a pros- perous country. But Yankees are thrifty as well as shrewd and practical. A sense of value, of what money is good for, will cultivate thrift and generosity equally. It is only the excessive love of money that is the root of much evil. The wise use of money is the sign of a good normal open-hearted nature. The tightwad is not a well- balanced specimen of human nature. Why Do You Drink Coffee? One of the commonest things in the diet in many parts of the world is not a food but a stimulant to the mind. “Café,” the French for coffee, means a place for food serv- ice, and “cafeteria” is the American version of it. A hundred million Americans consume perhaps half as many million cups of coffee a day. How many on waking say or think, “Give us this day our daily bracer”? Coffee was un- known in Western Europe until about 1650, and tea, in- troduced at about the same time, was not commonly used until our Colonial days, when the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party started us on the road to becoming a United States. Coffee and tea are drug habits for the mind, craved by our Western civilization, though the Turk is the orig- inal coffee drinker and the Chinaman the tea drinker. 120 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT In this respect East isn’t east, or West west; but all are human. Coffee meets a need of our psychology. So it’s worth while to find out what coffee does to your mind. Prof. Hollingworth, of Columbia University, had a gang of sixteen coffee subjects under test for forty days. The chemical essence of coffee is caffeine. An average cup of coffee contains two and a half grains, while a cup of hot black tea contains one and a half grains. The im- agination works as well as drugs, and many people are kept awake more by remembering that they took coffee than by the caffeine in their system. So Prof. Holling- worth gave the drug in such a form that the subjects couldn’t tell whether they had caffeine or not, or how much they had. He gave from two to six grains, the equiv- alent of one to three cups of coffee. The effect begins within an hour and lasts from one to four hours, de- pending upon the dose. Though we don’t know exactly how these mental ef- fects work, in many drugs there is a stage of excitement when the mental pace is quickened, the mental processes keyed up a bit, followed by a state of letting down which may go so far as a depression or a stupor. The toper who gets lively or excited in the early stages of alcohol later gets groggy, then dead drunk to the world, and has a depression and a dull head the next morning. There is none of that in the effects of coffee, though it is true that the smaller doses stimulate and the larger doses lower the mental capacity. For many a person it would be true that one cup of coffee helps, two may, and three quite certainly will interfere with the mental work. The effect is greater on an empty stomach. So “there’s a reason” for your wanting your cup of coffee the first thing in the morning, and finishing your evening meal with after-dinner coffee. DELICATE QUESTIONS 121 The effect of caffeine was tested upon such muscle work as fast and accurate tapping, guiding the hand in a set pattern, steadiness in movement, and on such mental work as naming colors, adding, answering simple ques- tions ; then such combined work as making a quick choice, writing on the typewriter, etc., and finally the effect on sleep. While coffee may offset the feeling of fatigue, it does not steady the hand. Jewelers and surgeons couldn’t do their work on coffee, while the night reporter might use it to get off copy when he feels like going to bed. But it is always a matter of the dose and the person. Large and heavy people can take more coffee than thin people. You can get used to it within limits as you can to tobacco. The same variation in sensitiveness makes some men (and women) take to cigarettes, but not cigars. Taking it all in all, coffee gives a pretty good account of itself. Many adults and all children are better off with- out it; for many, in strict moderation, it helps. But it is a mind habit rather than a food habit. Man’s craving for stimulants has always played a large part in human concerns, from social customs to political issues. Are You Aggressive? To be or not to be is seldom the question, though we are faced at times with the alternative of carrying on or giving up. More common is the issue to fight or to run away, to meet the situation or to shrink from it. We seek and accept—or we hide and avoid. According to where we place the emphasis, we choose a name for this division of people. The up-and-doing, eager-for-the-fray disposition is the one; the shrinking, hesitating, withdrawing is the other. The one is the ag- gressive, the other the recessive. They have been called 122 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT expansives and contractives. The aggressive is bent upon expanding his self and his world; the unenterprising re- cessive draws within his shell. But there are divisions within these camps. Most of us are not wholly or strongly one or the other, yet belong to one side or the other of the neutral zone. The more pertinent question is: How aggressive are you? Aggressive may itself be too aggressive a word for this quality of behavior. It is a combination of energy and ambition, a strong appetite for doing things, of reaching up and striking out boldly. The aggressive person is a go-getter. Some ninety students were recently ranked on the scale of aggressiveness by their fellow students and their in- structors. From these grades were selected the thirteen most aggressive and the thirteen least aggressive young men. Then they were put through some tests to deter- mine whether the aggressive differ in their reactions from the unambitious who hold back. As there is a common belief that people who cannot look you in the eye are weak in will, it was decided to have these men do a constant bit of adding while looking the experimenter, who stared at them firmly, in the eye. The situation was much like watching a person closely whom you suspected of dishonesty. The result was re- markable, for the non-aggressives shifted their eyes fen times as often as the aggressives. Eight of the thirteen never flinched, four only once, one twice. The average for the non-aggressives was five and a half flinches. Next, how far did the staring interfere with the add- ing? The non-aggressives were distracted or rattled, made timid and disturbed, three times as much as the aggressive squad. Then a more drastic disturbance was tried—the ex- DELICATE QUESTIONS 123 ~ pectation of shock. Each man was first given a mild electric shock to show how it felt; then was told that while he was adding he might at any moment get a pretty severe shock. Though he never got it, he always expected or dreaded it. The aggressives were less disturbed by the fear of a possible shock than the sensitive, shrinking recessives. The difference was not as marked as in the star- ing test. Even such simple tests separate the two groups deci- sively. There were only two in the thirteen non-aggressives who scored as high as the lowest aggressives. Throw out the three least aggressive of the aggressive group and the three most aggressive of the recessives, and you have ten clear cases in each group concerning whom you would have no doubt that the tests showed correctly to which class each belongs. But remember this is a study in extremes; for we selected in each hundred the thirteen most aggressive and the thirteen most recessive. Of the seventy out of a hun- dred (which is where most of us belong in aggressiveness or anything else) you could not be so sure how the tests would come out. Further tests show that for such a quality as reliability the shrinking man may be as re- liable as the aggressive one. However, one must go carefully in application. This so-called aggressiveness is one of the most important qualities that make for success in any career. Everybody knows plenty of young men, intelligent, willing, well- trained, honest, earnest chaps, who somehow never make good. They are not “no good”; only “not good enough.” You find it hard to say just what they lack to round out the efficiency of what they have. This defect comes nearer to a lack of aggressiveness than to anything else. We have another name for it that 124 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT is almost equally fitting—Ilack of initiative. They are not provided with self-starters; it takes somebody else to crank them up, and they easily get stalled. Call it ag- gressiveness, ambition, initiative, or what not, it is the keystone that holds the arch of efficiency in place and gives it strength. Is Your Memory Poor? The trouble with most memory complaints, as with most systems that offer remedies for them, is that they regard the mind as a department store, and memory as one department, like the delivery service, that doesn’t work efficiently. The truth is that the mind is not organized on the de- partment-store plan, with shoes in one part of it, hats in another, and pots and pans in another—though it may be that some minds resemble a notion counter with just as miscellaneous an assemblage of contents. Memory is not a department or even a service; it is just a name for one of the supports of thinking. When a name won’t come, you stop and say, “Just let me think a moment,” though your “thinking” then is an attempt to recall. It is because this failure is often em- barrassing that you are made aware of what you call your poor memory. The failure may be due to other de- fects in mental habit, particularly the attention; for re- tention is next of kin to attention. If you don’t get clear and sharp impressions to begin with, you won’t have them to draw on later. Some people have by nature sharp ears and eyes, and observant minds, and retain well what en- ters them. In that sense the general opinion is that you cannot do much to improve your memory, any more than you can do much to increase your height. But you can DELICATE QUESTIONS 125 better organize your retentiveness for the work you ex- ~ pect of your mind. To this end graded exercises in mem- ~ orizing may help. A good book on the subject is Pear’s . “Remembering and Forgetting.” Since memory is one phase of your mind’s organization or working habit, you want it and value it for its sup- port of your thinking; and all thinking, like all seeing, is selective. If you didn’t ignore most of the shop windows and street incidents that assail your eyes, you would never do your errands. If you remembered everything you saw, your mind would be a wreck or a rummage sale. To remember what we want, we must forget or ignore all (or much) else. What you prize is a mind well organized for your work. Memory systems often neglect this point. I might like to remember the names of many people who remember me, but I should not like to remember the names of all the Pullman cars I have ever traveled in. That kind of a memory would be a nuisance. And I am not much inter- ested in remembering what to me are unimportant dates in history, though faces and dates are the favorite stunts of most memory systems. Mind training is the more im- portant problem of which memory training is a sub- sidiary part. It is, of course, important to give attention one after the other to the several parts of an organized process or purpose. So in baking a pie you learn about mixing the ingredients, making the dough, regulating the oven heat and so on, all in the interests of a good pie, which won’t be good unless each of the processes is properly adjusted to the others. Yet thinking and baking as performances are very differently organized. So review your total mental habits. Are you observant or dreamy? Do you take things in with a wide-angle 126 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT sweep of attention, or does your attention habit work like a bull’s-eye lantern? Are you in general concentrated or scatter-brained or absent-minded? Here likewise you have to accept your mind habits as they are and adopt them to your work. Yet system and method are useful. Mem- ory systems advertise large benefits in limited fields, which do not carry over to the actual work that most people have to do. You get a better view of the problem when you limit it to one form of application. “How to Study” is the right kind of problem, and there are many good books on that subject. In the course of learning how to study you get mind training, which includes memory training. ‘And the same holds true of all other kinds of work. Are You Easily “Taken In”? “Don’t trust your senses!” is foolish advice because that is all you have to trust in many cases. “Use other tests as well, and rely on an expert,” is wise advice, because by the aid of these you can tell better. Your senses may be trained to become highly expert if they are good to start with, and all may be trained considerably. The expert can make finer distinctions than the aver- age untrained person, partly because he knows what to look for, partly because he can actually see, feel, or hear differences that escape the ordinary eye, fingertip, or ear. When you first look through a microscope or a tele- scope you can make out very little; you have to learn to look for the finer points. Another distinction is most important. You tell both by a general impression and by minute observation of details. As a cashier handles banknotes rapidly, his eye may be struck by one that looks suspicious. He doesn’t DELICATE QUESTIONS 127 ~ know what it is,—it just looks different; or if it’s a coin, it hasn’t the right sheen or texture, and as he drops it, it doesn’t ring true. The color of the banknote or the feel of it isn’t right. He is arrested by a general impres- sion of a counterfeit. Then he confirms it by examining for special points. Those little silken threads woven into the paper are too thick or too regular; he has a hundred tests in the engraving, marking, numbering. He handles a good many $10 bills, and has a mental picture of what in this case is a highly standardized article. But when it comes to a personal signature on a check, he cannot remember the handwritings of all the deposi- tors, and once in a long while he may be taken in even by a crude forgery. Besides, signatures vary ; and one of the easiest ways of telling traced signatures when you have several of them, is that they don’t vary enough. Hand- work varies more than machine work. But in some weav- ings they actually loosen the parts of the loom to make it wobble and thus imitate the irregularity of hand weav- ing. Anybody who is deceived by the hammer marks that are put in by machine on brass goods, to have them pass as hand-wrought, deserves to be taken in. When it comes to passing off stained birch as ma- hogany, there is nothing to measure or to note. You just have an impression of the grain, and one can soon learn to tell the difference. But an expert in repairing old furniture not only can tell mahogany from birch in- stantly even across the room, but knows whether it is Mexican or African mahogany, and how the board was cut from the log. All this shows that our senses get impressions, like total pictures, and also special details, some of which can be measured or otherwise accurately noted. When it comes to linen or cotton, solid gold or gold plate, other 128 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT tests must be added, such as how the threads look under the magnifying glass, or how they burn, what acid does to gold and what to other metals gold-plated. There is hardly an occupation that doesn’t require telling the genuine from the counterfeit or imitation, even up to the doctor who tests whether the patient is shamming when he is trying to collect damages for injury in an ac- cident. Our modern life is so full of a vast number of things that there is a constant daily challenge to our powers of observation. Cheap imitations and wonderfully fine imitations pay, when large quantities or large values, like gems and paintings of old masters, are concerned. “Look for the signature,” “accept no imitations,” are ad- vertising slogans. Because fraud pays, it pays you to be fraud-proof. : On the other hand, our complicated world is so full of cheap imitations that everybody should be trained to tell the difference between the genuine and the counter- feit in most of the articles that he sees and buys. He should be as expert as that to keep mentally fit and spend his money wisely. But he can’t be expert in all things, perhaps not in many things; so he should know when to rely on experts. Our complicated world requires all sorts of experts to keep it going. Yet it’s an interesting idea that if so many people were not ready to deceive, we shouldn’t have to be so keen-minded. Do You Like to Feel “Important”? When you are taken by surprise and asked a question, for which as a psychologist you are supposed to have a ready answer, you are tempted to make a venture and justify it by later reflection. The question asked me was: DELICATE QUESTIONS 129 “What do most people strive for most?” My guess was: “To be important.” What is yours? Like all important things, it begins early ; but the pity is that when the end is most easily gained, it is not as yet appreciated. The baby is easily the most important thing in the family and the small universe in which it rules supreme. But soon enough the child gets to understand the game of importance very well. It will stand anything but neglect. It will do anything to attract attention to itself. It wants to be the center of the stage. “See me do this!” “Look at me now!” We all want an audience and many believe that children refuse food and are gen- erally naughty to make themselves interesting and impor- tant. They show off on all occasions. When boys play soldiers, they are all generals and captains and there are no privates. At every stage we compete for importance, and we cannot be completely important without the help of others. Importance is of many styles and patterns. Here is A, formal, preoccupied, dignified, aloof, carefully dressed, to impress you by this manner and appearance with his importance; here is B constantly in a hurry because his time is so valuable, and he wants you to know it; here is C gloating over his large mail, while complain- ing of it as a nuisance, but flattered by its evidence of his importance; here is D constantly referring to his in- fluential friends whom (he says) he calls Thomas and Richard and Henry, thus getting a sense of importance by reflection. But especially were offices and titles invented to confer a sense of importance. Colonel, president and boss sug- gest little thrills of bigness; and nothing confers the sense of importance so much as giving orders. Badges, uniforms and parades impress your importance upon 130 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT whatever persons you can get to command or to see you giving orders. The smaller the authority, the greater the show of importance. Many envy the traffic cop because he holds you up or lets you pass; he really is important. The grand manner of the hotel clerk or the floor walker impresses you with importance, and you quite forget that the hotel or the store doesn’t belong to him. And those starters of elevators that hold them just a moment longer than is strictly necessary to make you feel their impor- tance; for all of you, however important, cannot go up to your important offices until he gives the word. The newspaper is another organ for displaying im- portance; and how people struggle to be important enough to be mentioned in the society column or the financial news, or the sporting page, or what have you in the way of importance? But the really important peo- ple are trying to make themselves inaccessible, and yet make their very distance an impressive token of im- portance—that series of offices and officers through which you have to pass before you reach the inner sanctum of Importance with a capital I. Bank accounts and gor- geous autos, replacing clanking horses with silver-plated harness, are all instruments of importance. It’s a merry game. Some of it is worth while, and more of it isn’t. It makes clear how we are dependent on our fellow men for many of the real satisfactions of life. Yet one of the important things is to forget quite frequently all about importance, and go ahead and do one’s best, whether it is important or not. The chief difficulty about importance is that there isn’t enough of it to go around. If we were all equally important, we should again be on the same unsatisfactory level, from which some of us would try to emerge by being more important than the rest. So we need a lot of un- Rn A A Cl DELICATE QUESTIONS 131 important people to furnish a background for the im- portant ones. The complications of life enter to restore the balance. For each has his own sphere of importance; and thus each in his own circle gets a turn at it however modest. The real test of one’s hold on life consists in the program of importance that he adopts. If we are wise in what we hold important and what unimportant, we go far in the direction of mental fitness. To have a right view of men and affairs is really important. Should Cousins Marry? This looks like a question for the biologists who study the effects of heredity. It is. But the difference between a question of heredity as applied to human beings and to livestock is that in our kind of society people think about these things. When cousins marry they know that they are cousins and they know that some people look upon such marriages with distrust. If they live in certain States of these dis-United States, first cousins find that they cannot be united until they step across the border. It becomes a question of how this union is socially re- garded, and that is an affair of the mind. The laws regu- lating marriage of near kin may be the result of prejudice or superstition—both concerns of the mind—or of wisdom backed by science or only by experience and guesswork. Whichever it be, the evidence is important. Such mar- riages would be discouraged or forbidden when they are regarded as violating the laws of nature or of God. In Biblical times such matters were differently regarded. Sarah was wife and half-sister to Abraham. In Egypt the royal families, as did their gods, married sister and brother and near kin, and through many generations 132 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT showed no decline of power or character; nor has the be- lief that such marriages are not fertile any valid basis. We know, too, that customs of this kind have quite other considerations back of them, as the English prohibition of marrying a deceased wife’s sister. The stock breeders go on the principle that inbreed- ing of selected stock is the only way to maintain the de- sired qualities. So what the biologists tell us is this: If the stock is good, the offspring will be benefited by a double inheritance of good stock, for which the cousin- ship is a partial guarantee; and if the stock is bad, the offspring is likely to be doubly handicapped. And this is just as true whether the parents are related or not. An- other point: If there is a bad streak in a family, it may work out by marriage outside and come back by mar- riage of kin. But all this is far from certain; though it is clear that the question, “Should cousins marry?” will be answered “Yes” if they are of good stock, and “No” if they are not. The social or psychological reasons weigh most in many opinions. The regulations among Jews requiring marriage within the tribe may be partly a biological precept, but more a conviction that mixed marriages in- troduce conflicting ideas. The Catholic Church provides that the children shall be brought up in that faith, and is unfavorable to cousin marriages under the view that family ties and the bonds of marriage love are different and should be kept so. Among primitive people there are as many customs that forbid marriage within the tribe as outside it. The caste type of society introduces rigid restrictions of marriage founded on station and family, and democracy favors a melting pot of marriage as well. Much could be said in favor of bringing in new stocks, and of having the young couple start out in life with two DELICATE QUESTIONS 133 family backings and sets of interests rather than one. Apparently bride and bridegroom should be enough alike to have much in common in interests, outlook, ideals, and yet each bring something distinctive. Perhaps the answer is that good cousins may marry and others will do so if they have a strong mind to. Have You an Inferiority Sense? How far can you make things so by thinking them so? When can faith move mountains, and when is intention stalled even by a molehill? Certainly we can make troubles infinitely worse by brooding over them, making mountains out of molehills; and no less, by a wise attitude, can we reduce obstacles that seem like mountains to quite surmountable bunkers, if not molehills. The power of thought is great to do and undo, but it has its fairly definite limits. To de- ceive yourself by large doses of cheer or hope or resolu- tion into expecting the impossible is foolish. Don’t shut your eyes to things as they are. If you do, you fall a victim to the pleasure-delusion principle in- stead of to the reality principle; and that, says Freud, is. where nervous trouble and mental unfitness start. You can’t lift yourself up physically or mentally by your boot-straps, and you can’t do it by a formula. Sug- gestion is an excellent therapeutic or health-aiding proce- dure of wide application. Jump across every ditch with the full assurance that you're going to make it, but ex- ercise some judgment in selecting your ditches. If you’re too sure you’re going to win you won’t try hard enough; and if you are too sure you're going to fail, you think it’s hardly worth trying and so make a weak effort. In human psychology you are hedged in between the too 134 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT little and the too much, and that is why applied psy- chology is a fine art and will always be one. One of the commonest of all fallacies is the fallacy of the extreme. Since some things can be much helped by a hopeful outlook and a confident endeavor, you are tempted to make this excellent principle an exclusive guide to your philosophy of life. That all success is yours by an enthusiastic gesture of believing, affirming, endeavor- ing, is a fallacy of the extreme. The world needs fewer exhorters shouting through megaphones, urging people to try, than it needs wise, three-in-one friend-philosopher- guides to show them how to try. High ideals, conscientious effort, determination to succeed, are aids. Delusions of grandeur and ignoring of obstacles and deception through formula are hin- drances. The “new thoughters” bring nothing new other than the extremes to which they carry an old principle. Wise thought is better than new thought, much of which is false thought. So we come back to the seriously incapacitating sense - of failure, the depressing disappointment that one has achieved so much less than one expected. “In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as fail”; in the drab dictionary of middle age the pages seem full of synonyms for failure. All men critical of themselves seem to see a large failure overlapping the small successes. The sense of inferiority is a very real impediment to one’s great achievement. An entire psychology—that of Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna—has been founded upon it, and he believes that a physical disadvantage is enough to start it, though the real handicap is a sense of inferiority, whether real, as in a race or creed subject to prejudice, or largely imagined. DELICATE QUESTIONS 135 Overcoming inborn shortcomings is what most of us are engaged in all our lives. If we succeed, we have scored, no matter what we become. Are We Regulated by Our Glands? “I have been reading about glands, and wonder how much of it is true. Some state boldly that our characters are shaped by our glands. Does that mean that we have no control over our behavior? Kindly explain. “A Student of Psychology.” Not at all. It means that every part of your body, your circulation, your lung power, your digestion, your nervous system particularly, and your glandular sys- tem as well, in a vital and peculiar way, takes a part in the shaping of your nature and capacities. Recent knowl- edge “features” the influence of those internal secretions of which you have read. In every normal person the réle of the glands is not so rigidly set that it makes us marionettes, with the glands as the strings. For example, your thyroid has a part in determining how tall you are, but many other factors share in determining growth. You cannot change your inherited physique, but you can develop it to its best capacity or neglect it. Your body has a mind no more than your mind has a body. You are a body-mind. Whether you are more than that, science doesn’t say. You think with your brain. Under serious brain injury thinking stops; under minor injury it goes wrong. But your brain is part of your body, kept going by the blood no differently than is the stomach. With loss of blood you faint; with a blood- clot your thinking fails. But that brain of yours is af- 136 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT fected by the most complicated machinery of regulation in the entire world of nature. Part of it is through the glands, and one of these, the thyroid, a small gland near the front of the neck, is a wonder-working organ. The cretin is an imbecile, a dwarf perhaps no larger than a 4-year-old child, and with a four-year grade of mind, but lacking all that makes the 4-year-old child’s mind attractive. The cretin is an inert, pitiable caricature of a 4-year-old. But when he is fed on the thyroid ex- tract from that gland in the sheep, he begins to grow, and his appearance takes on life. His tongue no longer lolls in his mouth ; his hair and his hands lose their coarseness ; he begins to show some feeling and interest. He may go far, but not so far as to approach the normal, for there may be other trouble; but he is in every sense a changed being—changed by supplying artificially what he lacked by nature. So we know that the secretion of the thyroid gland is necessary to normal development. Now and then, usually in women, there occurs a change of character. A person bright, energetic, eager and sym- pathetic, gradually loses all that, becomes dull, doesn’t care, doesn’t try, has no feeling of joy or sorrow, of fear or anger. The hair falls out, the skin swells and alters its texture. In a favorable case treatment by thy- roid extract restores. “No fairy waving a magical wand ever worked a greater enchantment, for with the first dose the patient improves and in a relatively short time is restored to normal in skin, hair, etc., and in mind and character!” That, says Dr. Myerson, is what convinces the physician that he is dealing with a body-mind. The thyroid is a miracle gland. But the story goes farther and touches many more lives than the cretins and the sufferers from this rare DELICATE QUESTIONS 137 disease. There are many persons whose thyroid gland is overactive, secretes too much. They become restless, ~ may lose flesh, have a rapid heart action, tremor, change in chemical intake and outgo, are sleepless, become irri- table, and are not steady and controlled. When, as is fre- ~ quent in these cases, the gland is markedly swollen, there appears a goitre. When the surgeon removes part of the ~ gland, the balance is restored and the patient may be ~ cured. If too much of the gland is removed, thyroid ex- tract must be taken as some of the symptoms of “too little thyroid” appear. There are other persons who are inactive, cannot make an effort, are dull, listless, dawdling—signs of deficiency of thyroid. This explains some cases of failure, especially in young girls. Supplying thyroid has helped. There are others who never develop marked thyroid over-action, but who are excitable, easily irritable, constantly over- emotional. Such behavior is hysterical, and it may be that hysteria is related to thyroid action. For the thyroid is only one of the company of miracle glands that play their part, and make or mar our part in the drama of life in which we are the characters. Other glands, including the sex glands, regulate different func- tions and are more closely related to other growth proc- esses, active at different ages. Normality depends on gland balance. Disturbed bal- ances of the glands produce obscure troubles of body- mind. Since we are as old as our glands, the hope has been held out that, by changing the gland secretions, we may renew youth, which has been a long-sought end by miracles and otherwise. The story of the glands has been an important one in psychology, and the details of many of the chapters are still to be written. 138 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Are You Worried by Your Dreams? “I’m not superstitious, but there’s one thing: I can’t get away from, and that’s paying attention to my dreams. I take them as warnings, and when I dream that something terrible is happening to me away from home, I have to struggle to go out the next day. I often have the feeling that something is going to happen if I do this or go there, and I just can’t help thinking about it. I sup- pose I'm easily scared, anyway. How do you get over this? “Anxious.” I don’t get as many inquiries of this kind as I do gen- eral questions like: Do you believe in dreams? Do dreams come true? But I believe that many of these questions represent the same state of mind—a sort of half-hearted fear of coming events casting their shadows before them in dreams. Now that isn’t a good state of mind for mental fitness. The antidote in all cases is to get a reasonable view of dreams, for they have an interesting psychology. I can best illustrate by a number of cases. When a man had a vivid dream of being operated on for appendicitis, and a day or two later developed an attack of lumbago, it may well be that the beginning of that pain in the back was felt while asleep and started the dream of the operation. An engineer in the wilds of Canada had a most upset- ting dream, in which all of his family seemed to be dying. That worried him all the next day, and perhaps on ac- count of that worry he dreamed the same thing the next night and the next. The dream gave him no rest. He wasn’t a believer in dreams, but he couldn’t hold out. So he made the long journey home and found—well, he found all safe and sound. And if everyone kept a full record of stories of this kind as well as the other kind when there was something wrong, it would save lots of people from worrying about their dreams. DELICATE QUESTIONS 139 But if you went to a physician of the mind he might probe this dream and give it meaning. This engineer was troubled about the attitude of his family. He knew that they felt that he should have done better in life, shouldn’t have had to take a job away off in the backwoods. Their letters made him feel depressed, and he may have wished that his family were all out of the way; so he dreamed what he wouldn’t express. This troubled him when it came as a dream, and gave him a sense of guilt or worry. Here is a story of a young woman taking part in a college debate, and along with the other debaters on her side wearing a red shield on her sleeve. That night she dreamed that her mother was dead, and saw her on the bed with a large red shield pinned on the wall. This dream was not surprising, as her mother was seriously ill. On this account she went home and, hardly knowing why, she pinned the red shield on the wall. The mother died and the poor girl still thinks that she was responsible in some way, and she can’t bear the sight of red. Thus strangely do dreams and reality mix and affect behavior in those who make them part of their lives. Dreams may be so vivid that they are believed to be part of the events that have happened, when they fit in with what is on the mind. The superintendent of an asylum blamed himself when a patient who escaped went home and killed his wife and then himself. He testified at the inquest that he had been cautioned not to give this patient privileges. But he had only dreamed it. He was worn out with overwork; the tragedy had distressed him, and the dream was taken for a fact because of his worry- ing sense of guilt. Most of us in good health have no temptation to take dreams seriously. We say, “It was just a dream.” When a shocking thing is suggested, you may say: “I wouldn’t 140 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT dream of doing it,” meaning you wouldn’t let yourself do it even in a dream. But that may just be the only circumstance in which you would do it; your waking be- havior would not consider it. Freud holds that thoughts and wishes which we secretly entertain but won’t acknowledge, because they are so shocking to our moral sense, break through this censorship and come out in dreams. So his followers use the dream in cases of nervous disorder to get at these underground troublings of the mind that, like ghosts, won’t survive the light of day. There may be just enough truth in this to help explain how dreams help themselves to come true when rarely they do. For the most part they don’t, but just show that day-worries have a freer chance for expression in dreams. Looking at dreams in this rational way will help you to lose the fear of dreams as bad omens. Why not dream of pleasant things and be thankful if they come true? Is There a Cure for Clinging Vines? “Is there any cure for clinging vines? I don’t mean the old- fashioned kind of wives leaning on their husbands for every deci- sion and every dollar and passing off their helplessness for affec- tion. They seem to have cured themselves. I always managed my household and managed it well, if I say so myself. Since I lost my husband I have been in business. Just now I am responsible for a group of salesgirls in a department store. I've done a good deal of shopping all my life and noticed how often there is just one girl at a counter who knows anything and all the rest refer to her. Now I am face to face with the same problem. Many of these girls are too good to fire, and I don’t seem to get better ones if I let them go. It’s just a bad habit of depending on others. So long as there is someone to ask, they just cling. How can I get them to think for themselves? “Section Manager.” DELICATE QUESTIONS 141 This is a keen question. It is not a matter limited to department stores nor salesclerks. It strikes deep into education: how to avoid the habit of dependency. In childhood it’s natural, and mother’s apronstrings are al- ways there to cling to. Some persons may have a general a habit of dependency because they have never been taught to do for themselves. In the old days it was good form for girls to be clinging; they were expected to and they followed the tradition. But usually it is a special kind of habit. Probably these very girls are pretty independent in insisting upon controlling their own time and pleasures. Many people e notoriously lazy with their minds. It’s so much easier to ask somebody who knows than to find out for your- self. This is a common complaint among teachers. If there is a bright boy or girl in the class, he or she is constantly asked questions by the clinging vines. The matter is important because it applies so generally. It starts early; as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined. These shop-girl clinging vines should have been taken in hand years ago, before their habit of dependency began to interfere with their jobs. As for cure, I know of no general remedy, for there hasn’t been as general a recognition of the disease as it deserves. But here are a few hints in the training of the young in sound mental habits. Independence is a part of keeping mentally fit. It is inevitable that we do a lot of learning by the question-and-answer method. But the finding-out method is better. One way to cultivate it is to make people ask their own questions and answer them, too. Instead of “Ask me another,” let it be “Ask yourself another” and find the answer. For school children it won’t do to give all the answers in the back of the book; for 142 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT in life there is no such book. So the “new teaching” in- troduces original problems for which the pupils must work out the answers, and encourages them to invent problems, to make puzzles as well as to answer them. Every mind should have a self-starter. But the mind is also a sort of department store. The methods of one department are not the same as those of another. A boy or girl may be independent in one way and clinging in another. Here is the case of a girl who is most independent in her job, which is that of a social worker. She makes her own decisions and carries them out. For in her job others are dependent upon her. At home she is the kind that shouts to mother: “What has become of that dress, and did sister see anything of my umbrella? And will somebody ring up so and so? And what’s the number?” Her job habits and her home habits are in different compartments of her mind. If she could transfer her job habits to her home, all would be well. One way to cure the clinging vine habit, which is as disturbing to customers as it is to section managers, is to appeal to pride. Make it clear that to ask what you can find out for yourself is a thing to be ashamed of. Asking useless questions is a sign of weakness. You have to build up a pride in knowing without asking and in finding out for yourself. Of course, for unusual matters and things of great importance, it is well to refer to per- sons with more experience. You don’t want to carry in- dependence too far, and have anyone afraid to ask questions and so make mistakes by acting on poor infor- mation. All good habits are means between two extremes. Know- ing that you don’t know is the first step in learning; but it shouldn’t be the last. Someone has written a book on the “Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent.” That puts it DELICATE QUESTIONS 143 very well. It’s just as much a duty to be as intelligent as you can as it is to be as well-mannered as you can. If you could get girls to take as much pride in their in- telligence as in their looks, the problem would be solved. For it is mainly a matter of attitude, how we look at things. It won’t be long, if once independence is expected, before those who need not be clinging vines will use their brains. The rest, perhaps, are incurable. One of the values of a job is that it trains in responsibility and independ- ence. At Antioch College the students divide their time, five weeks at a job and five weeks in study; the idea is that they get an independence in the job which they may carry over to their studies. A busy and responsible world has few places for clinging vines. What Is Wrong with the “Almosts”? Of all the “great and glorious” feelings, the most satis- fying is to help somebody in distress. The most human of all cries is “Help! Help!” and it stirs the great human army of helpers whether they wear a red cross or not. But there are so many cases where, with all good will, one can’t help, as there are likewise so many cases of failings with the excuse: “I just can’t help it.” We must accept the human lot as it comes. Imperfection is the rule, and we must learn to live with our limitations. The last thing anyone wants to say to anyone else is, “There’s no help for you.” Yet often we cannot help. The class that appeals to mind-doctors as much as it puzzles them are the “almosts,” the people just the other side of the neutral zone which divides the mentally fit from the mentally unfit. “The Almosts™ is the title of a book which deals with those who almost but don’t quite make good. It applies 144 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT particularly to those with minds below par, partly de- fective ; but the term may be extended to include a much larger class of near-failures, whom, like the poor, we shall always have with us. There is no cure-all for poverty, and none for poverty of mind. Happy would be the mind-doctor or the mind-minister who could fill his pockets with prescriptions for doing away with mental poverty, and distribute them to all who apply. All we can hope for is to devise measures of relief, to help others to help themselves. Place one case alongside of many others and you find that however variable the ‘“almosts,” the symptoms have much in common. There is usually the feeling that one is fit for something better, perhaps for a profession which calls for a good mind. And there is usually a com- plaint which singles out one symptom or handicap that stands in the way of success. That is the “almost”— the one obstacle that needs only to be removed to make everything right. Often it is the common inability to con- centrate; and concentration becomes a blessed word, be- cause we all suffer more or less from lack of it, and it is natural to think of it as an impediment which has only to be removed to bring a cure. But concentration, so far as we can teach it, is the whole doctrine of mental fitness. If a cripple told you that he would be all right if only he could walk, you would agree heartily; but does all your good will help him to be like other men? There are hundreds of causes and cases of crippling, and the same is true of crippled minds. Thousands of doctors are devoting their lives to helping cripples, and some they help to put almost on their feet. But there are no miracles; and the lame and halt continue to carry their crutches. The difficulty for the “almosts” is that what is wrong DELICATE QUESTIONS 145 with them is not so clear. They can’t realize that what prevents their minds from moving on and covering ground as does the procession of the successful human crowds at work is something which affects their whole make-up. They can’t make the grade, and the “pall of haziness,” or how- ever they describe their obstacle, is just their name for being an “almost.” “Almosts” fall into groups; and it isn’t easy to place all specimens. Some are light cases of mental defect; others are victims of circumstances that demand too much of them. The treatment is to plan a whole course of life which will require only simple tasks, and avoid the mind’s weak spots. Doing what we can do is an encouragement. When properly directed, “almosts” become modestly use- ful human beings. Just because they are ‘“‘almosts” or near normal, they can be helped over the steps that separate them from the common average of common men. Do You Need Safeguards Against Temptation? A hardware shop is a museum of ingenuity, but it isn’t wholly a credit to human nature with all those locks and bolts and a hundred devices to keep out intruders. It is really an expensive anti-thieving exhibit. If nobody had any itch to steal, all this stock in trade would be so much junk; it would never be made, because it never would be needed. Whenever you strike a human need you tap a human trait. We need this kind of hard- ware because some light-fingered folk want an easy way to-escape work and get pleasure. And the worst of it is that on account of one thief all the rest of us have to invest in quantities of hardware. A single auto parking at the sidewalk makes every machine steer around it. There is as much honesty today as when the latchstring 146 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT hung outside the door. But we have to put the loud pedal on honesty, because there is so much temptation in our kind of lives. “Deliver us from temptation” is still a good daily prayer. A Yankee storekeeper had a good comeback for a customer who wanted a lock for his boat, and thought the one offered him wasn’t strong enough. “Locks is only for honest folks. A thief’d get your boat if you chained it with a cable. This one says ‘Private,’ and that’s enough.” A good deal of our latching and locking is to reduce temptation. Honesty, like cleanliness, is a matter of degree and standards. To say that “cleanliness is next to godliness” means that people particular about clean collars are more likely to lead clean lives. Lots of people who wouldn’t dream of picking a pocket will lie or deceive or take un- fair advantage. The trouble is that we haven’t invented any hardware to keep them from doing it. A man who is honest all the way through by habit is more safely honest than one who accepts honesty as the best policy. We all have to live by the same common habits as well as the same code. There is honesty even among thieves. Gangs as well as business partners have to be honest together. Thousands of bank clerks handle more thousands of dollars every hour, and few are tempted. The bank clerk is as anxious to make an honest dollar as the rest of us, but it has to be an honest one. Yet a bank couldn’t safely dispense with all those gratings that make it look like a place where we put thieves when we can catch them. Our most precious valuables we put in safety deposit vaults; more expensive hardware! Things have meaning only as they reveal how we be- have and what we believe. The meaning of the hardware shop or the bank is a lesson about honesty or the lack of it. It is also a sideshow exhibit of temptation. Yet we DELICATE QUESTIONS 147 live with many of our doors unlatched, and bring up children so that many tempting chances cease to tempt. It is pleasant to see newspapers offered “on honor” on the public street, but not so pleasant to think that fruit- stands cannot be conducted on the same plan. It’s a lucky school or college that can conduct examinations on the “honor system.” Whenever you pass a temptation, you pass an examination in honesty ; and pretty soon you don’t even know you are doing it. Yet so long as tempta- tion is too strong for some weak souls to resist, all of us have to spend good money on hardware. It will be a fine world when we can junk locks and bolts and bars. How Can Stealing Be Cured? Stealing is such a common practice that quite apart from the cases in which it is a symptom of peculiar mental make-up, we have to recognize it as a very ordinary fail- ing of character in all classes among all sorts and condi- tions of men and women, boys and girls. It just happens to be the easiest and most attractive kind of tempta- tion. There are probably very few people who have not at some time taken things not their own. We just dismiss these as incidents in growing up or lapses from standard behavior. Stealing is the most common form of dishonesty, unless it be lying, which is easier and has a much wider field of operation. The only thorough cure for stealing is to get into an attitude in which it is not a temptation. The cashier who handles thousands of dollars every hour could not hold his job if he had to be resisting temptation all the time. He handles that money as a clerk in a hardware store handles hardware. But taking things because the oppor- 148 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT tunity is there may be the symptom of a strong, and TE when resistance is low, an irresistible impulse. It ap- proaches what is called an obsession, and it happens to be an extremely inconvenient one that causes no end of trouble. Dr. Healy has a book on the subject which he calls “Honesty.” He finds that most stealing is done by im- pulse. Among those grown up it is more common in young women than in young men. One victim says: “I don’t know why I do such things; I really don’t want to do them” ; another, “I don’t know what comes over me. It seems as if it was something that I cannot help. I am ashamed of it afterward. I just see something that doesn’t belong to me, and I take it.” It is only when this habit continues and is more than an occasional impulse that one may call it kleptomania, which means stealing not for profit but through a strong impulse. The proper treatment is correction. It is a matter of sympathy and understanding, not of punishment. The victim can be helped over his difficulties until these im- pulses gradually subside and he gets more power to control them when they come. There will be no sudden but a gradual cure. In some young people stealing is a sort of substitute ex- citement, and sometimes is a substitute for sex excitement. That may complicate matters. When a boy says, “I steal because it makes me feel good to steal, but I am terribly sorry afterward,” it suggests an abnormal satisfaction. In all such cases stealing is a symptom of an abnormal mental make-up. Bad associations may easily turn such persons into habitual thieves. Boys and girls in some ways steal differently. Boys steal more as a matter of adventure; they plan and break in and cover their tracks and crave the excitement of DELICATE QUESTIONS 149 getting away with it. Lying comes in to protect stealing. Girls lie more to make themselves interesting, boys more to make themselves important. Such “gang” stealing is not mere impulse, and it requires a different type of handling. All show undesirable forms of craving for ex- citement. The danger of stealing, like that of all forbidden fruit, is part of the attraction. Often the shock of being found out and regarded as a common thief will wake up a boy to the seriousness of his offense. We have to deal with stealing firmly and severely; we cannot overlook or par- don human weakness: but we can and must deal with it with sympathy and understanding. “Why Crooks?” There is a book called “Confessions of a Confidence Man,” written by a mechanical engineer by training and a crook by choice. So it is natural that many of his schemes have to do with inventions. He demonstrates an automatic typewriter. You talk into the machine and out comes what you dictated on a neatly typewritten sheet, and you can see the typewriter turning it out. But you don’t see the microphone that carries the voice to an adjoining room where an expert takes the dicta- tion directly on a typewriter electrically connected with the one turning out the copy. Bankers were decoyed to see and wonder and invest. Plans were carefully laid. The interest of the widow of the inventor had to be bought with cash. Once the cash was produced, the crook vanished with it. The fair stenog- rapher who played the part of the widow was his ac- complice. Or there is a peripatetic ice factory, or match factory, 150 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT made up of wornout parts, sold to local investors at ten times its value, which goes to pieces soon after it is paid for. Or an old and wealthy man invents a window closer. He is offered a fair sum for the New York rights by Crook No. 1. Later comes Crook No. 2 and offers an ex- travagant sum for the invention outright. So the inventor is forced to buy back the New York rights at a large advance, which represents what the two crooks divide be- tween them; for the second crook now withdraws his offer. And so you can go on from chapter to chapter in this book of high crookdom, in which all the schemes depend on getting the confidence of your victim and then be- traying it. But all this represents only the elaborate “con” games. For one such scheme there are hundreds of far simpler frauds that depend on a little trickery or a bold, persuasive manner. Here is an example of two out of a thousand small- scale crookeries. In a passage-way of the New York sub- way an ordinary crook displays a wrist watch on his wrist, which he explains in a confidential voice ordinarily sells for $1.98, but if taken at once may be had for 25 cents. He sells watches hand over hand. The watch you really get doesn’t move and is sold at a profit elsewhere as a 10-cent toy. At the subway booth where change is made an opera- tor practiced for years a simple trick. When he had to change a $5 bill, he offered one dollar in silver, and handed out and counted out the rest in $1 bills which were actually three ingeniously folded to appear as four. On a large scale and a small one, and in endless varieties of ways, crooks of all sorts and persuasions are playing the game of deception and posing the psychological query: “Why Crooks?” DELICATE QUESTIONS 151 We are informed in reply that a sucker is born every minute, and the birth rate is not declining; but ap- parently a crook is born every hour to take advantage of his fifty-nine contemporaries. The gullibility of the public we must accept; and the psychology of the dupes is a separate matter, though the lure in many cases is the same as that which stimulates the crook—easy money. And in some of these schemes the investor must really participate in a shady transaction before he is let in on it. Cupidity accounts for more than gullibility, though the high-grade crook is a sharper who has a deeper hold on human psychology than is needed in many forms of honest promotion. The one fundamental question is, What is there in crookery that attracts? What makes a dishonest dollar so much more tempting to a certain make-up of mind than an honest one? In putting this question to various experts in rounding up crooks I received various an- swers, partly agreeing, partly disagreeing. The leading replies are: The fun of putting it over and the high risk give it the thrill of big game. In dupe-hunting the harder the prey is to trap and the more elaborate the setting and the richer the haul, the greater the sport. Crookery is to such a more fascinating game than legitimate busi- ness; which again attracts many of the same tempera- ment by its element of gambling and speculation and putting it over on the other fellow. The “confidence” game is also a “superiority” game. Plunder is more flat- tering to yourself than profit; loot and graft are exciting, and selling for profit is tame. All of which is but part of the story. Perhaps others will contribute their version of this interesting question in normal and abnormal psychology: “Why Crooks?” 152 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Are You I'ool-Proof? If seeing is believing, feeling is still more so. There is little sense in the dentist’s telling you that it doesn’t hurt, when you feel that it does. He may advertise “painless dentistry” to get you there; but feelings as well as actions speak louder than words. However, it hurts more if you anticipate each little shock or pain, and sometimes it hurts when nothing is going on. It may even work the other way. There are some persons who find their toothache gone when they reach the dentist’s door. When sensations are slight, you can’t easily tell whether you feel them or imagine them. And the same is true of all senses. Your nose knows, but it can imagine also. You hear sounds in silence when you expect them; and you see things before they happen. But ordinarily, if you want to fool the senses, you must do it wisely. This is how one psychologist set about it. He asked a lot of people to take a whiff from a bottle of alcohol, a bottle of peppermint, and a bottle of wintergreen, so that they recognized the odor. Then he told them that he wanted to test how fine a sense of smell each had. So in turn each smelled at ten bottles to detect the faintest trace of odor. Those ten bottles actually contained distilled water, wholly without odor. Yet forty-eight women and thirty- seven men out of every hundred described the imaginary odor. Some of them made excuses. They couldn’t smell well because they had a cold; yet they got an odor from four out of the ten bottles that had no odor. What they smelled was not much more than a chance selection; al- cohol, peppermint and wintergreen were “recognized” equally often. DELICATE QUESTIONS 153 Some didn’t fall for this test at all. Such persons, we say, are not ‘“suggestible,” while most of us are. There were three times as many fool-proof men as women in this test, and in all only 6 per cent couldn’t be fooled. Few men were fooled on the first or second bottle, but as they went on their suggestibility increased up to the eighth bottle. Touch was fooled by having each person put his hand through a slit in a curtain in order to hide his view. Then a fine cork-weight was lowered to rest on one finger, at first actually, then not at all. The result was about the same. Again, the women felt more weights that weren’t there than did the men. Imaginary warmth works the same way. The finger was pushed into a box said to contain an electric coil which would give heat. There was no coil; but six out of ten felt the heat, and again more women than men recorded a sensation. Next, the hand was placed in a jar of water through which an electric current was passed, enough to give a shock which the hand could feel. The electric machine was kept going as far as the noise went, but without current; and the subjects were to tell when they felt the tiniest shock. Four-fifths of the women and three-fourths of the men felt an imaginary shock. Now it is true that we are not often called upon to act under just those conditions, and it is natural to be- lieve a man in the laboratory. Also one doesn’t want to be found dull in sense. But there are many cases when we are off guard or have an interest in the result, when suggestion substitutes for sensation. A noted professor of chemistry gave each student two substances to mix in a tube and describe the precipitate (the mass that would fall to the bottom of the tube) when the two were 154 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT mixed. As a fact he gave them the wrong chemicals, and there was no precipitate; but a very considerable number of the students described it just the same. So we are all “suggestible” more or less. The mind is not fool-proof. We do well to be nearly so in the im- portant affairs of life, both when our senses and our common sense are concerned. Would You Make a Good Witness? This is what happened. A group of scientific men were holding a meeting. Suddenly a clown dashed in and after him a Negro brandishing a revolver. The two began to fight. A shot was fired; and both ran out of the room. Surely an impressive and exciting scene. The chairman proposed that as they might be summoned as witnesses, each should prepare a report. In reality it was all staged as a psychologist’s experi- ment to see how accurate such reports would be. These men were trained observers and had no interest except to state what happened. They were probably better wit- nesses than the average. About one in four of the reports were so far from the truth that they might be called false. Only one of the forty reports was so essentially accurate that it could be regarded as correct. Not a very compli- mentary result for the reliability of human testimony; yet the incident was short, about twenty seconds, and striking. Since no report is wholly right or wholly wrong, it all comes down to a matter of detail. The outstanding facts could hardly be missed; the fight, the pistol shot, a Negro, a clown, their appearance. The eye’s and mind’s weaknesses that lower your value as a witness are mainly three. First are the things that you fail to notice or DELICATE QUESTIONS 155 forget to record. If you make a list of what items are fairly important, perhaps who struck first, who fell, who fired and when; what coat, trousers, hat, necktie each wore ; how long the incident took; as well as height, bear- ing, color, hair or other features of the participants, and then count for each witness how many he noted, you get the score. Fourteen of the forty witnesses forgot from 20 to 40 per cent of the items; twelve omitted from 40 to 50 per cent; and thirteen over 50 per cent. That leaves one good report with less than twenty per cent of omis- sion. You see how much drops out of the memory or was never in it because unobserved, even when the scene is reported at once by good observers. Error number two is in reporting things that didn’t happen. They are supplied by the imagination; and with these must be considered the third kind of error, distor- tion ; noting the details wrongly. So while all noticed that one of the men was a Negro, only four of the forty recorded that the Negro’s head was bare, which it was. Some said that he had a derby hat on, and some even put a high hat on him. As to his clothing, nearly all reported that he had a coat on, which he had. But one had him wearing a coffee-colored jacket, another an all-red suit, and another a striped one. He really wore white trousers, a black jacket, and a large red tie. By the time you have noted for each reporter what he omitted, what he put in, and what he distorted, you would have a hard time proving to a jury that that witness could get anything straight. Now add that in most mat- ters that come up in court the actual facts are more complicated than this, that some witnesses would have an interest in reporting them favorably or unfavorably for the defendant, that almost any detail may become vital in a lawsuit, that the mere lapse of time fades and dis- 156 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT torts the memory, and you can see how far from a moving- picture record of the scene is the average man’s report. And these “honest fibbers” were above the average. The psychology of testimony isn’t very complimentary to the human mind as an instrument of observation and report. Yet it is all we have to rely upon in most cases; and what makes it worse is that it is hard to prove how good or how bad an observer any particular witness is. One really should be able to put a witness to a test of his power to observe and report before letting him take the stand; so much may depend on it. Think it over in the light of these facts and decide how good a witness you would make. Another point: the people who are most sure that they are right are often most in the wrong! Confidence is no test of truth. Do You Belong to the Great Army of Hystericals? “What is hysteria? I know I have it, for it runs through our family—four sisters. But we differ. I am normal enough for any- thing I have to do, and my friends would be amazed if they knew I was writing to you about it. Yet as I grow older I am a little troubled for fear I shall develop something serious. Here is my story. . . . What do you predict or advise? “One of Four Sisters.” A small book wouldn’t be big enough to answer the opening question; and out of the details of this case (which are confidential in part) I can select those symp- toms which are typical and widespread. What I like about this letter is the frank recognition of a condition without attempt to conceal or excuse. Most hystericals resent being called that; and many a woman has slammed the door in a doctor’s office and rushed out li ae DELICATE QUESTIONS 15% in a high state of dudgeon, thus proving the very diag- nosis which she refused to accept. So there’s your first common symptom—sudden and uncontrollable anger. That is child hysteria, and in the infant we call it tantrums. Hysteria is an unstable condi- tion of the emotions, a lack of emotional control. Nat- urally, as new emotions develop and grow strong, the hysterical manifestations change. There is the schoolgirl hysteria of the adolescent,— ready laughter and tears. There is flapper hysteria, ex- aggerating emotions, and yearning for excitement. There is young-wife hysteria, a rather dangerous brand. There is spinster hysteria, often sullen, self-pitying, repressed. Any emotion overdone, like a stream overflowing its banks, may spread the devastation of hysteria. There is fear hysteria, as marked in a stock-exchange panic as in a life panic when a theatre catches fire. The typical hysteric is overpersonalized; being over- sexed is only one variety of that. Everything is taken personally. The subject is sensitive to every slight and reacts with violent anger, jealousy, revenge, or brood- ing hatred. The affections may be equally passionate, not only in the love life, but in ties of family and friendship. The same zeal may be spent on causes, and religious de- votion may have a strong hysterical element. All of this appears in the story of the four sisters. The oldest never married, is a leader in a large movement calling for sentimental devotion, had what is commonly called St. Vitus dance at the age of 16, went through a false love affair in the 40’s—yet not one in a hundred of her many hundred friends would be willing to consider that hysteria played any part in her life, or that her remark- able energy, which is always a bit hollow, is not real strength. 158 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The second sister had a happy married life, and so much charm and generally redeeming traits that she falls out of the picture except in relation to the family circle. But the heredity is the same, with many hysterical traits present. The third is married, has brought up a family of chil- dren under difficult circumstances, is merry and is the most normal, but shows a different group of symptoms, an absent-mindedness, which some mind-doctors make a central feature. We have always known that sleep-walkers are hysterical. Their somnambulism is a trance coming on in sleep. A tendency to trance is associated with this kind of make-up when extreme. But a certain distraction, narrowed attention, is a slight, very slight, hint, when combined with other traits, of an hysterical tendency—a dazed, day-dreaming habit, observable in children. The fourth sister asks the question and gives the facts of which I have given only bare hints. She was a difficult child, self-willed, went her own way, married, but not well in any sense, has no children, has good ability, and has developed remarkable control of her handicaps, the na- ture of which she recognizes, at least now when in middle life. She is aware of some of the tell-tale signs. She has that feeling of swallowing air (the doctors call it globus). Her voice often sounds strange and hollow, and she occa- sionally almost loses it and can only whisper. She has another more pleasing hysterical trait; she looks much younger than she is. She is impetuous and has often been in violent disagreement with her sisters, apparently ir- reconcilable; yet she and they have come through it all with a fair ending. Hysteria supplies a thread that runs through many a life, explaining many a trait. The important reply to the great army of hysterical sisters, millions strong, is first to assure them that hys- DELICATE QUESTIONS 159 teria generally declines with years. It is not cured, but its hold weakens. Except in the rather few cases where another form of mental disorder develops on the hysteri- cal foundation, there is no danger ahead; the tracks are clear. But how much more effective and adjusted a life might have been planned if the hysterical nature of the personality had been recognized earlier! All that is part of the story of what might have been. And all this is but one of many chapters in the tale. [In discussing hysteria a footnote caution is necessary. I am speaking of hysterical symptoms in normal or near-normal people, not of patients afflicted with clinical hysteria who should consult a physician. ] Iv TRICKS OF THE MIND The Jazz of Exaggeration It’s a great world when you feel great; and you show that you feel great by enlarging upon your good points. You see the world through the magnifying glass of your own feelings. In short, you exaggerate. When you are depressed and things have gone wrong, you feel “small.” You see the world through the other end of your mental opera-glass. The psychology of exaggeration is interesting. All children, when they get enthusiastic, exaggerate. Every- thing gets bigger and better than it is. Fairy tales that appeal to children pile up the riches of golden palaces and caves studded with jewels. The giants are huge and the woods vast and the adventures grand. But it is mainly in deeds that exaggeration is displayed by the adult mind. When the fisherman adds a few pounds to the size of the fish he has caught, he feels bigger for having caught such a big fish. And when children or their elders add to the truth, they usually tell a big whopper to make a good job of it. Some liars are glorious liars, because they feel the exaltation of it. You can get the jazz of exaggeration by taking a dose of hasheesh. If it doesn’t make you sick, which is the usual effect, you may enter a glorified world. A young doctor who took a dose for fun, felt so “great” under 160 TRICKS OF THE MIND 161 its influence that he was obliged to speak of it to the conductor on the car on his way home, asking him to feel his muscles, and wondered why he let such puny pas- sengers ride on the same car with a Hercules such as he was. His little house seemed a castle, and his wife a prin- cess. And it took a cold shower and a night’s rest to bring things back to their proper proportions. But the pitiable victims of exaggeration are certain types of insane people. Their minds seem to break out in one great splurge of grandeur before they go to pieces. A patient 56 years old says that he is 79, that his wife gave birth to four twins, that he has 565 relations, of whom seventy-five are brothers and 375 sisters, that he had 300 grandfathers and 700 grandmothers, promises his attendants $150,000,000,000 each, believes that he has millions in stocks, owns vast estates, and rambles along in an exalted world where everything is bigger and better —and all because he feels so exalted. He has lost all re- straint and meaning in his exaggeration. Patients who think they are kings or emperors or redeemers or generals or millionaires make it all up to account for the greatness of their feelings. Everyone wants t even 1 he keeps within the bounds of what he hopes will be be- lieved. Children are more reckless because they half be- lieve what they tell. Every conceited person has an ex- aggerated view of his own importance. The psychologist says he has an enlarged ego ; the man on the street calls it a swelled head. Within limits, exaggeration does no serious harm. It adds to the interest of life and makes a good story. Read your newspaper, from accounts of fires and floods and riots to circus announcements and bargain sales, and it is e resorts to Soe peration for the eee But a 162 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT all one great stream of exaggeration. The wonder is not in what is described, but that anybody believes it. The or- dinary gets dull, and so everything has to be jazzed up to exaggerated headlines. On the whole it is best to keep sober and respect the truth. The world is interesting enough without exagger- ation, and if you exaggerate too constantly you lose the sense of proportion. Perhaps Mark Twain’s advice was pretty sound: When in doubt, tell the truth. Are You More Curious Than Afraid? Darwin, curious to know what would happen, put some harmless garden snakes in a paper bag, and threw it into the corner of the monkey cage at the Zoo. Instantly, one after another, the monkeys ran to the bag, peeped in, and scampered off frightened to the other end of the cage; then came back and frightened themselves again. | Their curiosity was stronger than their fear. Humans have the same kind of psychology, only a little more complex. Some of us have more fear than curiosity, and others more curiosity than fear. Also,*we are curious about and afraid of different things. Curiosity pulls you toward, fear away, from things; that is how nature builds us. The earlier kinds of acting from fear and acting from curiosity have a strong dose of instinct in them. Fear behavior is shrinking or crying, hiding or running—avoiding. Curiosity makes you take notice, draws you on, leads you to inspect, perhaps to handle or fondle. A baby’s curiosity is more readily aroused than its fear, though it doesn’t take much to start fears. Dr. Watson’s motion pictures show infants playing with white mice and black cats, rabbits, kittens, dogs, pigeons and TRICKS OF THE MIND 163 even frogs and snakes. The looks, the feel, the movements of these creatures attract. But anything sudden, like the jump of a frog, or the rough pawing of a cat or dog, or too big a dog or a barking dog, kills curiosity and brings on fear; and then it may not be easy to get rid of the fear and restore the playing interest. Nurses can easily make children timid, especially if they themselves are so. If you can use the natural curiosity of young children to induce petting of animals, you can pre- vent many useless fears. Curiosity must also be wisely di- rected, away from mere meddling and destroying and on to useful examining with a purpose. Those monkeys, like many children, showed a mixed sort of shrinking curiosity. Grown-ups are pulled by fear and pushed by curiosity at once. We invent elaborate de- vices to provide such situations. That is the purpose of scenic railways and loop-the-loops and shoot-the-shoots —to afford safe thrills. You have curiosity enough to want to know how it feels to toboggan and dash and whirl around sharp curves. There is no excitement in moving slowly on the level. The thrill of breaking the speed limit attracts even people who shriek and hold their breath or find their hearts thumping when they dash about wildly. Then they pay their money and frighten themselves again, or get used to it. There is a good reason why nature has built us that way. The novel should attract; following your curiosity leads to knowledge. There is just as good reason why you should approach the strange with caution, why it should repel or frighten; for it may be dangerous. The familiar: is safe. But it’s an uncertain line that divides the novel from the strange. The infant at ease with mother or nurse, cries when a stranger takes it up. Yet some chil- dren are attracted to strangers. The older child goes 164 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT with unerring “instinct” to anything in a room that wasn’t there before. The novel attracts because the fa- miliar loses interest, both play interest and fear interest. The newest toy is played with. Getting used to things lowers the excitement value in all fields. If you have never flown in an airplane, you are curious to know how it feels and yet you are scared also. To Lindbergh it is as commonplace as for you to ride in a train. Ask yourself whether your curiosity would take you up in an airplane, or your fear keep you down? The same difference in the ups and downs of human traits leads the curious to sample new food in foreign restaurants ; and makes others, when they travel abroad, complain that they cannot eat such strange things. Chi- nese restaurants had to make their way against avoidance of the strange by appeal to the curious. Pioneers had more curiosity than fear; the stay-at-homes may have been built the other way. But you are always a bit of both; you are attached to home and also welcome a chance to get away for a change. Perhaps in a larger way, the same kind of difference accounts for liberals and conservatives. When Our Actions Give Us Away! Here is an observation made by a friendly but shrewd physician of the mind. There is a woman in the case. She is saying emphatically how much she and her husband were devoted to one another, as outwardly they appeared to be. Yet, as she told her tale, her counselor noted four things. Item one: The lady forgot to meet her husband when he was returning from a week’s absence. Item two: She dreamed that some harm had come to him. Item three: She had a little habit of slipping her wedding ring on TRICKS OF THE MIND 165 and off her finger. Item four: Like Shakespeare’s queenly comment, “the lady doth protest too much.” When your deeds speak you don’t need words. The first item indicates indifference; the second may be in- terpreted as a wish that is father to the thought; the third is a symbolic action showing that she would like to be free; the fourth, like the whistling to keep up courage that shows fear, is an attempt to drown by words unwel- come feelings. She was, in fact, in love with another man. This kind of analysis or character-reading is associated with the name of Freud, who believes that we are con- stantly betraying our real emotions by such escaping fragments of behavior. The feeling goes on below the surface of our conscious thinking; we try to keep it down as an unpleasant state of mind, as something to be re- pressed. It breaks through when we are off guard. The forgetting to go to the station has a pinch of motive in it; she really didn’t want to go, not very eagerly. In dreams, Freud holds, suppressed wishes come forward and shape the scenes. These may appear in symbols; that little trick of playing with the wedding-ring is not quite innocent. Protesting, if too strong, is suspicious, just as too much excusing is really accusing yourself. All this is a subconscious or unintentional way of giv- ing ourselves away, letting an imprisoned cat out of the bag of our thoughts. There’s a good deal of this going on; and if we are shrewd, we can detect it. When it is a little nearer the surface we say that the words, whether of compliment or excuse, don’t ring true; or the action shows embarrassment, as if hiding something; or some- how arouses suspicion. If it is plainer still and conscious, we call it hypocrisy. How far we can follow Freud in finding in these tricks of the mind the clue to much of our behavior, waking 166 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT and dreaming, is not wholly clear. The interpretation has much truth in it, and gives trifles significance. He is will- ing to apply it to himself and his profession. He tells us that he carries two keys, one large and round, for the door of his clinic, and the other small and flat, his house- key. He sometimes absent-mindedly finds himself trying to open the clinic door with the house-key, but never the reverse. He concludes that he has a subconscious or secret preference for the comforts of home as against the work of the clinic. And he adds that physicians, on coming home from their rounds and finding that they have for- gotten some visits, may find also that the patients over- looked are not very good at paying their bills. It won’t do to push this principle too far. It may ex- plain some, but not all, cases of forgetting, of dreaming, of slips in word or deed. But it confirms common wisdom in proving that actions speak louder than words, and explains why and how. The Fun of Being Tricked Children adore the trick-man who pulls rabbits out of a high hat, collects coins from the air, burns a hole in your handkerchief and makes it whole again, makes any- thing vanish from a card to a lady, and all by the mere wave of his magic wand. You as a grown-up know that it is all illusion and sleight-of-hand. The magician does his part of the trick; your mind does the rest. Explaining a trick shows how the two combine, his part and yours. The conjurer collects from the audience on his wand some plain gold rings, takes them to the stage, calls for a pistol, hammers the rings flat, rams them into the pistol, and fires it at a box hanging from a TRICKS OF THE MIND 167 bracket. He takes down the box, opens it and takes out another and still another box, and in the last and smallest box are the original gold rings, all safe and sound, and tied to a favor to be returned to their anxious owners. Great applause! What was actually done, and what you were induced to believe was done, are different stories. The gold rings were placed by the owners on the wand held in the magician’s right hand. As he turned to go back to the stage he slipped the wand from his right to his left hand, keep- ing the gold rings in his right palm and substituting his own brass rings which were concealed in his left palm. These he hammers. As the assistant hands him the pistol he hands the assistant the genuine rings to prepare be- hind the scenes. In the distraction when the shot is fired, the assistant slips a small table on to the back of stage, and on this the conjurer piles the boxes. You see box No. 2 come out of No. 1, 8 out of 2, and 4 out of 3, and so are dead sure that 5, the last box containing the rings, came out of 4, but it didn’t. It was drawn from under the top of the little table, where it was concealed by a fringe and the other boxes which formed a screen for the pur- pose. As you don’t live in a trick world, you are not prepared for such doings and are deceived. When the conjurer calls you on the stage, gives you eight silver dollars to count and place on a tray, then tells you to open your hands as he pours the dollars into them, and you find you have sixteen dollars, you are not expected to know that the tray has a double bottom con- taining the other eight dollars, which are released as the flow of silver rushes into your hand. So you conclude that he can make two dollars out of one. No ingenuity or expense is spared to elaborate devices 168 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT for making people or even horses disappear or change places, or escape from locked chests under water, as did the late Houdini. He took his name from the first of the modern conjurers, Houdin, who tells the following tale: Houdin was sent by the French Government to Egypt to entertain the native Arabs. One of his tricks was to make a box heavy or light. It was done by a powerful magnet concealed under the stage, with the key to close the circuit concealed in Houdin’s hand. A stal- wart Arab stepped to the stage and lifted the box, but the next moment, when the wand passed over it, he could not budge it. The Arabs applauded. The next night, to vary the performance, he announced that he could make a man strong or take his strength away. The trick was the same; but the Arabs fled, afraid to stay in the tent with a man who had such powerful powers. They knew nothing of magnets. It isn’t what is done, but what you believe is done, that makes the wonder. There lies the charm of the conjurer’s performance to children of all ages. You know it is a trick though you don’t know what the trick is. You enjoy being fooled by one so clever. The younger children enjoy it more because they half believe in the magic of it, and the conjurer enjoys it more when the children are pres- ent. But to the Arabs, who had a real belief that a man might have magic powers which he could use against you, the situation was serious. It ceased to be an enter- tainment. Performing tricks to create belief in magic powers is an ancient device. The two orders of tricking the mind come together in séances that to some prove the existence of ghosts, and to others are just conjur- ing tricks. It all depends on your state of mind. TRICKS OF THE MIND 169 What Is Absent-Mindedness? Absent-mindedness is nowadays regarded a little more seriously than it used to be; that is, when it really is bad enough to interfere with good mental habits, and happens pretty constantly. There is no doubt that absent-mindedness is temperamental. It is something that one is born with, but can be made worse by neglect or better by training. Absent-mindedness is really narrow present-minded- ness. Attention is like a lamp with a wide illumination throwing the rays over a large area; or it may be like a bull’s-eye lantern narrowed to a small field. Attention also has another dimension. It may be powerful, like a lamp of sixty or a hundred candlepower, or feeble, like a little two- or three-candle flashlight. The absent- minded attention acts like the bull’s-eye lantern, but it may be no more powerful than what another mind em- ploys over a wide field. Some kinds of employment require a wide-angled at- tention. It is hard to say just what makes a good “secret service” man. He certainly must have eyes and ears alert and see anything and everything that goes on. Doubt- less also a hostess at her dinner table has a wide-angled attention. She notices whether the meal is being served properly and which guests seem to be talking pleasantly and which are bored. She is alert to all sorts of little signs and appearances. On the other hand, the surgeon concentrates on the operation; he has a trained corps of assistants to hand him every instrument he needs, as everything depends upon his perfect concentration. For ordinary practical purposes one must be fairly observant and alert. The chronically absent-minded per- son has a handicap of the attention. However common, 170 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT the absent-minded is none the less not quite the normal type. It is only when this tendency toward absorption in one field so completely shuts out possibilities in an- other that absent-mindedness becomes a problem. There is no way to prevent it if it is by nature strong, but if only moderate, definite attention-exercises in spread- ing the attention over a variety of details will help. Some recommend passing a shop window at a slow walk and then reciting the number of objects in it that you noticed. Persons who possess a narrow type of attention have the advantage, in that they concentrate more easily. Noises and talking in the room do not disturb them so readily as those with an attention alert to every hap- pening. Children are both naturally observant and in- tensely interested. We say that little pitchers have big ears. But children are easily distracted also. Any one of us, if completely absorbed, becomes ab- sent-minded. Pick-pockets, for example, take advantage of the absorption of a crowd at a circus or at a street parade to ply their trade. The snatching of your pocket- book, which you would ordinarily feel, passes unobserved when your attention is focused elsewhere. Briefly, then, we must more or less accept the atten- tion-habits that are natural to us. But just as we try to train in the gymnasium those muscles which ordina- rily do not get much exercise, so we can correct our weak- nesses by deliberate effort. Though most absent-minded persons merely present an interesting peculiarity which we accept and get used to, it won’t do to overlook the fact that absent-mindedness may be one symptom of a more serious mental condition. But no one would be in this group merely because he is absent-minded. There would be so many other indications of mental abnormal- TRICKS OF THE MIND 171 ity that the absent-mindedness would be a small part of the whole set of symptoms. On the stage, the typical absent-minded person is the professor. He has forgotten to tie his tie, dips his pen in the mucilage bottle, and tries to write with the brush; doesn’t notice his wife flirting with a visitor, or that the telephone is ringing. This may mean that per- sons with that kind of attention would go in for pur- suits requiring concentration, or that the pursuits culti- vate it, or both. On the whole, absent-mindedness should be corrected, but not to the disadvantage of concentra- tion. The opposite type is the scatter-brained. Can Y ou Tell When Somebody Is Staring at ¥ ou? Lots of people believe that they can. It’s an old be- lief, and if you had lived a few hundred years ago it wouldn’t have been quite safe to practice that staring habit. You might have been suspected of black magic, of having an evil eye and casting a spell on your enemy by staring at him. Even a Pope has been suspected of possessing that diabolical power. That is the kind of thinking that long held sway over the masses of men, and which we now call superstitious when we have got over believing in it—very much. But beliefs of the same order survive, though they may not shape your daily behavior. As important as that we have stopped burn- ing people as witches is that we have stopped accusing them of witchcraft. Witchcraft does not belong in the same world with radio and flying machines. An interesting hangover of this kind of thinking is the common belief that you have a peculiar feeling (say at a church or a concert) when someone is staring at the 172 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT back of your head, and that makes you turn around and catch them at it. Some persons are sure that they can make you turn around by staring at you, and “will- ing” you to look; they have proved it too often to have any doubt about it. So Prof. Coover, of Stanford University, thought it would be worth while to test the whole thing by ex- periment. In the first place, he questioned 1300 students and found that 84 out of every 100 women and 72 out of every 100 men share this belief, and these are selected students. If the majority vote ruled in such matters, the vote would be all one way. But one vote of science out- votes many impressions. So they tried it. They arranged signals for staring and “willing” at the victim, who, with his back to them, sat in the front of the room. Then either one starer or a battery of starers were put to work. On another signal they all closed their eyes and thought of their favorite landscape. They kept notebooks. All the subject had to do was to put down a “yes” when he thought or felt that he was being stared at for the fifteen or twenty seconds between taps, and a “no” when he had no such feelings. This was done 1000 times. If considerably more than 500 of these impressions or feelings or ‘hunches are right, there’s “something in it.” If just about 500 guesses are right, there’s nothing in it. Well, 502 is the actual score! All pure chance! Verdict: Nothing in it! Now a detail. If you put down an A when you are very sure you are right, a B for a less sure feeling, and so on down to an E for a pure guess, will you be more often right when you are sure with a strong “hunch” than when doubtful with a weak “hunch”? Again, no difference at all. That feeling of confidence has no basis TRICKS OF THE MIND 178 in fact. One last hope. Of course, we may say not every- body can do this. You must be built right, be sensitive to the “vibrations” or “radiations” or “influences” that some people believe in. It remained to test persons— both students and those who in an amateur or profes- sional way claimed such “psychic” powers. But they proved no better than the rest at this staring game. What is true of staring, which you can thus disprove, is probably true of other beliefs not easily tested. Why do four out of five people believe it? Well, in church or at a concert everyone is self-conscious and often not interested, and so fidgets and turns about, and will often catch the eye of someone who returns the gaze. You count the successes and forget the failures. Besides, everybody says so, and it makes life more interesting to believe it. Mood and Performance Do you work best when you feel best, or do you merely think you do, because you work with more pleasure, with less effort? Does your mood show in your performance? This is not an easy matter to decide. You are trying to measure one thing as against another, and neither has a fixed scale, neither the scale of mood nor the scale of per- formance. Suppose I put a mark in the center of a line, thus: and let that mark represent your average condition, when you feel neither better than usual nor worse than usual. Let the extreme left end of the line indicate your worst feeling when you can still work but feel very unfit; and let the extreme right end of the line indicate your best mental fitness when you are in unusually tiptop 174 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT shape. Where do you register today? On the below par side or the above par? Much below or little below? As compared with yesterday has your fitness gained a point or two or lost? Physical tests have been used to check up on your feelings, such as your blood pressure, your pulse rate, your maximum grip, the delicacy of your sense reactions. But we cannot as yet read your feelings. As to performance, when it is simple and fairly routine, we can measure the output, much as we measure goods by the yard, but never quite so mechanically because a meas- ure of quality enters even into the simplest performance. In bricklaying or nailing on laths, there is a measure in the number of bricks laid or square yards lathed, but if you go too fast you may slight your work. Simple mental performances,—such as drawing a line equal to a given standard line, tapping for one minute, naming colors as fast as you can, adding four columns of two-place numbers, thinking of a word suggested by a given word, naming the opposite of a given word,—yield a measure of performance not as simple as the number of bricks or laths, but, when properly corrected for error, afford a rough scale of performance. When thus measured, was the performance better when the mood was good? Did mood and performance keep step? On the whole, very little—so little that you are not far wrong in saying that you do as much and as well when you feel rotten as when you feel fit and cheerful. But when there is some relation, it is in favor of a better mood for a better performance. In explanation one thing seems pretty well established. When you feel (and really are) below par, you make an extra effort, and it is that effort that enters into your feeling. The extra effort carries your output toward and up to the average. When you feel well, you relax a bit TRICKS OF THE MIND 175 and still do your quota, and you report that the going is easy. Also, in these tests you know you are on trial— something like the feeling you have in playing in a tourna- ment as against an ordinary practice game. If your work is of a kind that is not measured by quantity, but estimated by quality (usually both), the resulting score doesn’t tell the whole story—not even in golf. The score doesn’t show the good form of your stroke, whether you were steady or irregular, missed easy shots or hard ones. Yet our feelings are not so reliable a test of our con- dition that we should work only when we feel like it. The habit of yielding too easily to one’s feelings does mot lead to mental fitness; but to ignore one’s feelings is not a good policy either. A sound policy lies, as usual, between the too little and the too much. We must not let mood dictate performance; but we may learn to make it serve our purposes. In that adjustment lies mental fitness. When Do We Work Best? Good work depends on two standard sets of conditions. The first is your physical and mental fitness ; and to that end you arrange your habits of life, cultivating a sound mind in a sound body. Being what you are, your problem is to make of yourself what you can. The second is the favorable condition of the environment. You aim to make your surroundings conducive to your best efforts. Mental fitness considers both sets of conditions. Experiments comparing the efficiency of work done un- der favorable and under unfavorable conditions yield un- expected results. Thorndike, McCall and Chapman looked into the matter of the effect of the condition of the air on simple mental work. They found that if you are urged 176 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT to do your best, you do as much and do it as well, and you improve as rapidly in a hot, humid, stale and stag- nant air condition (in a room as hot as 80 degrees, with 80 per cent humidity, and no air in circulation) as in the most favorable condition of the air for comfort, which is a temperature of 68 degrees, 50 per cent humidity and a supply of 45 cubic feet per person of outside fresh air. What this conclusion establishes is that feelings of mild discomfort afford no measure of ability to work or of the work actually done. Working under unfavorable conditions is more of an effort, and the feeling of making an effort adds to the sense of discomfort; but if you make the effort you do as well. Under the usual conditions, when the hot humid weather comes on we relax our ef- forts; we complain of the heat and we take a vacation. So these writers regard the custom of taking our vacation in summer, especially from school work, which is so largely mental, as more a matter of custom than of necessity. It is important to realize, therefore, that good work de- pends more on attitude and determination than on outer conditions; that we can rise superior to such conditions. But that is not the whole story. Doubtless there is strong temptation to yield to conditions too easily, and hot weather may be more an excuse than a reason for laying off. Perhaps we insist on comfort too much be- cause we can get it so easily. We certainly overheat our houses in winter, and since we cannot keep comfortably cool as readily as we can keep comfortably warm, we fret about hot weather more, and fretting is an enemy of work. An electric fan may dispel the sense of discom- fort enough to stop the fretting and start the working. Habit does much. Americans suffer in the poorly heated houses of European countries, and Northerners freeze on chilly days when they go South in winter; Eu- TRICKS OF THE MIND 174 ropeans suffer in overheated American houses, hotels and trains. The sense of comfort is a mental aid to efficiency for the reason that we work best when we think of condi- tions least, and the very effort to disregard conditions acts as a brake. Individual susceptibility counts heavily. Some persons need the incentive of a stimulating climate to do their best. Some persons are far more susceptible than others to the weakening effect of heat and humidity. Their dis- comfort is greater; they have more to disregard and less power to forget it. The same is true of susceptibility to cold. Older people hug the fire because they have less re- sistance to the misery of cold. Moreover, what may be true of simple routine work will not hold true of difficult and creative work. When we do our best under stimulat- ing conditions and have to rely on a happy combination of all sorts of circumstances, quality ever enters as the uncertain and yet decisive factor in the product. So we cannot apply the results of experiments under one set of conditions to conditions in general. It is safe to infer, however, that we tend to mistake a disinclination to work for the effect of unfavorable conditions. They are more unfavorable to the sense of comfort than to actual efficiency. The major emphasis falls on the first condi- tion of mental fitness. We do well to cultivate the power to rise above rather than to yield to conditions; but in all such matters of regimen there is a middle ground. It doesn’t pay to work too much across the grain of disposi- tion. All of which helps to explain why the practice of mental fitness is a fine art, Vv HOW QUEER WE ARE What Is a Complex? Or all the words that have come into our daily speech through analyzing human behavior, the word complex seems the most popular. The word is used in many senses. Originally it applies to quite normal and useful mental products. For example, how do you find your way? Have you a good sense of direction? Do you know north, east, south and west easily? Do you go by signs or have you a mental map? Your method of finding your way is not the same as that used by a bird or a cat or a mouse. Since so many factors enter into your “finding-your-way” or di- rection system, it is complicated and so makes a complex. So we build up any number of systems or interests or relations into complexes—our sport interests, our family feelings, our clubs and what they stand for. Two changes have happened to the word. It is usually applied to sys- tems that have a high emotional value; something that we care much about. So it approaches a fad or a hobby for our likings, and a prejudice or antipathy for our dislikes. A “golf fan” may have a golf complex, a “bridge fiend” may deprive other energies of their proper due; but these are all to the good if not overdone. But to have a complex on the Negro question or on teaching evolution 178 HOW QUEER WE ARE 179 in the schools is not so harmless. Because so highly charged with emotion, the complex—that is, a system of belief or sentiment—may overflow its proper bounds and cause disaster. Well-balanced people avoid upsetting complexes on any subject. When you are told in a whisper: “You may talk to so-and-so on any subject but . . .” the “but” touches his complex; he is touchy on that subject. The second shift of meaning adds to the complex the idea of a conflict, something that we are trying to avoid or escape or suppress, and it may be more or less ab- normal. When any matter of strong personal interest absorbs attention to the loss of balance among the many interests that enter into a normal life, and when the attitude re- sulting ceases to be a reasonable one, there is a complex. If a person thinks and reads of nothing but sex and sees the world wholly in that relation, a normal sex interest has become a dominating complex. The converse, the avoidance and ignoring, the prudish recoil from the sub- ject, may also grow to the dimensions of a complex. But most of all in the personal and social relations do complexes develop and distort behavior as well as thought. There are many varieties of repressed complexes. There is often a guilt complex; and this led to the invention of a complex detector, a sort of psychological “third degree.” When a valuable piece of jewelry was stolen from one of the patients in a hospital, the nurses were put to a test of answering to a given word by the first word that occurred to them; if “hand” were called, the reply might be “foot” or “palm” or “handy” or any- thing. But catch-words were put in like “ring” and the nurse who hesitated most and gave peculiar answers proved to be the thief. 180 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Then there is a “persecution” complex, in which a per- son is convinced that his enemies are everywhere plotting against him; or a “reformer” or “messiah” complex, when the victim is convinced that he is destined to play this important role. But mostly you have heard of the “inferiority” com- plex, of being troubled with a sense that you aren’t as good as the people you meet, or that they look down on you. You are hampered in your feelings and behavior; that is a serious handicap in your personality system. Some people have a superiority complex. In either case it is a highly emotional, not quite reasonable product, a little of a delusion, that loads or slightly unbalances the fairest view of ourselves and others. Then there are the complexes that are also called fixa- tions. The young man who is too closely tied to “mother” and never marries, because he is looking for the “image” of his mother, is said to have a mother-fixation or com- plex. And then you read of those disturbing complexes which are explained as a desire on the part of the boy to oust his father in the mother’s affection. These are ex- treme and abnormal complexes. Like all useful words, the term “complex” is apt to be abused. Perhaps all of us have a large variety of little complexes, slight emotional exaggerations that do little harm and some good. But we must beware of serious com- plexes that make us mentally unfit. When You Are Hungry Hunger is an interesting sensation, and so is thirst, and so is fatigue, for they, like other calls of nature, are symp- toms or signals of elemental needs, and each is quite specific. HOW QUEER WE ARE 181 The hunger feeling and the thirst feeling and the tired feeling have special connections in your brain central— and they never, through confusion, give you the wrong number. The relation between the feeling of any need and the actual need itself, is worth investigating. The control of these needs is part of the will-training, and that is a big chapter in mental fitness. It’s an advantage to be able to go without food or drink beyond the usual period without being too much upset, and to keep awake and active if called upon for extra hours of service. It is a sign of normality when these appetites work regularly, so that you eat with relish when hungry and are properly satisfied with just enough, —when you rest and sleep when tired and wake refreshed. If you have a poor appetite or overeat, or feel hungry when you shouldn’t; if your sleep is broken, or you get too tired or excited or worried to sleep, or if you can’t keep awake, your mental health is lowered. To maintain a fit relation between needs and their satisfaction is the desirable aim. Of these needs, hunger presents the most observable mechanism, for it has long been known that at intervals the hungry stomach undergoes powerful contractions. The ingenious physiologist has recorded these contractions by means of a rubber balloon with tube attached, which can be swallowed without serious discomfort. If the sub- jects are instructed to push a button when they experience that well-known hungry feeling, it is found that the feel- ing coincides with the contraction as registered by the stomach balloon. So you feel hungry and get the hunger signal when this muscular mechanism in the stomach goes off. The signals are given even in sleep, showing how automatic and subconscious is the operation. No one can start or stop the contractions by trying 182 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT to do so, nor will the thought, sight or odor of food do it, but swallowing small bits of food or juice or even saliva will stop the contractions and thus dispel the feeling of hunger. But an electric shock, prolonged work, or reading exciting stories, tends to stop the hunger contractions. They take your mind off your stomach. Typically the contractions begin three to four hours after your meal, each lasts thirty or forty seconds, and they continue for quite a period so long as the stomach is empty. Such is the mechanism of the hunger feeling, but the psychology of the hunger urge has a far wider reach. We must eat to live and we know it, and the fear of lack of the staff of life drives men to despair, leading to bread riots when the unsatisfied need reaches the agonies of starvation. Dr. Cannon, the physiologist, says of hunger: “It is a sensation so peremptory, so disagreeable, so tormenting, that men have committed crimes in order to assuage it. It has led to cannibalism even among the civilized. It has resulted in suicide. The dull ache, or gnawing pain, re- ferred to the lower mid-chest region and the epigastrum, may take imperious control of human reactions.” While we try to tame this urge and make it behave itself in polite society, so that we eat with appetite but not ravenously or glutton-wise, we know it cannot be trifled with. Yet some can down even so elemental a need, as appears in hunger strikes of protest against unjust imprisonment, even unto death. The relation of food and work deserves special mention. Hunger may distract. We feel that we can’t settle down to work until we have had dinner, or the work lags as the lunch hour approaches, or if we go too long without food we feel faint and confused. On the other hand, the nibbling HOW QUEER WE ARE 183 habit is distinctly a nervous indulgence, often resulting not from a lack of nourishment but from too much thought about food and an imperfect habit control. The restlessness comes not from the stomach but from the brain. Experiment confirms the practice of many brain workers of eating lightly before a period of hard work. The amount of mental work done in the period when the stomach was contracting as compared with that of the period when it was quiet, shows that mild hunger in- creases mental efficiency. Many persons become sleepy after eating; the quietest time in the zoo is just after the animals have been fed. So once more the principle is enforced that a need satisfied but not overindulged is the rule of mental fitness. When You Feel Tired— Fighting fatigue is a frequent battle, and one you rarely win. Eventually Father Time counts ten, and you are down and out, until you have slept it off. Fatigue is the indicator that tells you that the gas tank of your energy is running low. But it doesn’t register mechanically. It registers in the reports of your nervous system to your intelligence bureau, and though generally truthful it may lie either way. You may feel more tired than you are, and you may be more tired than you feel. And if your fatigue mechanism is out of order, you can- not trust its reports at all. Fatigue as part of your energy system belongs to the most fundamental part of your organization. The pattern of your energy is worth investigating; it determines how you run. Some nervous systems run steadily and regularly but not very intensely ; others by fits and starts, by spurts and lags, and they go strong when on the go. The latter 184 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT is the older, more natural pattern. Children and primitive people work that way. Some people are so regular in their daily rounds that you can set your watch by them; others are as tempera- mental as a cigar lighter. You can never tell when they will work. If we could fit our industries to our psychology, some workers should be paid by the hour and others by the piece. Though worry sets the pace that kills, overwork is real enough. It is far from a joke that some people are born tired and never get over it. They get dead tired. It is amazing what fatigue will do to you if you are sensitively organized. If you are built on the self-running plan, you will just go to sleep when you are tired and wake up when you are rested, and work between times. But you may be too tired to sleep, you may be too tired to eat, too tired to enjoy yourself, too tired to care, so dead tired you drop. Your stomach and your energy are so closely connected that if you eat when you are “all in,” your food will not digest. All of the working mechanisms get out of align- ment when you are tired. Brain-fag is (for the time) a chronic state of fatigue, with low energy; you recuperate less at night than you require for the day. You may feel more tired in the morning than when you went to bed. A rest cure may then be the proper prescription. The other day a tired New York business man went to Chicago, where he had important affairs, thinking the change would do him good. He intended to get back in three or four days, but he spent those days, when not in bed, sitting like a wooden statue in the hotel corridor. Then gradually he attended to things, for a few hours daily, and came back in ten days fully rested and ready for work. He may have saved himself a month’s enforced HOW QUEER WE ARE 185 and wretched vacation by obeying that impulse to rest; in fact, he had to—he simply couldn’t function. I know of a case in which the patient had to give up work for eight years, but he came back and is still at it. What happens seems to be like this: If you get over- tired, a degree which we will call X, you have to rest a period that we will call Y. If you overtire by 2X, you have to rest 4Y. If you overtire by 4X, you must rest 16Y. Not that this is true literally, but you pay in a tremen- dously increasing ratio for your exhaustion. This doesn’t mean that we must necessarily give in to the first feelings of fatigue. If we do we may never learn to endure. Moreover there is not only a second wind, but a third and fourth. You draw on your reserves of energy. But you must have them to draw upon. Strangely enough, it will happen that just before a serious breakdown, the patient may not even feel fatigue. His disordered fatigue system fails to give the cautionary signal. When your energy-traffic is properly regulated, it will give you the right “green” feeling for “go,” the right “red” feeling for “stop,” and in between it will flash a “yellow” fatigue feeling of “caution.” Obey those signals and go safe. Likewise don’t break the speed limit after you find out what yours is! What Happens When You Lose Sleep When Lindbergh electrified the world by landing in Paris as the first flying passenger from New York, the first claim upon him, despite the wild clamors of the crowds, was sleep. Part of the feat of flying the Atlantic is keep- ing awake and on the job every moment for thirty-three hours. For no other reason than to see what effect it would 186 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT have on their minds, a squad of twenty-five students at the University of Chicago, including three women, went one night without sleep, like Lindbergh, and three went two nights, a waking run of sixty to sixty-five hours. They were tested before, during sleep-loss, and after. At night they kept awake by anything from walking to reading, to going to a thease, in all combinations. The test included such simple mental work as reading, multiplying, and muscle control in aiming, tapping, squeezing. Their per- formances were compared with a squad who had their usual sleep. The general result is this: As judged by such simple and, when kept up, rather monotonous work, there is no definite loss of efficiency through loss of sleep. There is a good deal of fluctuation as the sleep lowers efficiency, and then a pulling-up again by increased effort. It holds for the one-nighters and the two-nighters. But when you ask these young martyrs to science about their feelings, you get a marked increase in that well-known tired feeling among the sleep-losers, though not in all of them; they had to make a stronger effort to go through the tests, again not uniformly for all. In fact, those with normal sleep were a little bored by the tests, while those without sleep responded to the extra effort they had to make to keep going. In sleep-loss the mind goes through a sort of compen- sation. You feel less fit, and make an extra effort to make up for it; you pull yourself together under the call of duty. Night nurses report the same thing, only they make it up by cat-naps. Those who suffer most from sleep-loss show it in such symptoms as a restless excitability or irritability, a sense of dullness or dizziness, headache and shaky movements, as well as sleepiness. How you respond to loss of sleep depends upon your nervous make-up. HOW QUEER WE ARE 187 There are levels of sleep. There are stories of soldiers sleeping on the march. When much sleep has been lost, it doesn’t have to be made up in hours as much as in depth. There are many stories of sleep-loss in the war where de- tachments could not be relieved in time. They range from light-headedness to delusions and insanity and collapse. ~ But the men recover after one long, deep rest. This means that those portions of the brain with which we do our best and most difficult work are the ones that suffer most read- ily from fatigue and loss of sleep. You can no longer do your best, but you can keep puttering at routine work, though it gets harder and harder to keep going, until you can no longer make the necessary effort. It may have been fortunate that Lindbergh’s hardest tussle with fog and sleet was in the first half of the journey and the easier going toward the end, when the prospects of success would have kept anyone jubilant and awake. The power of the mind to break through habit and respond to unusual occasions is present in all of us. It is marked in heroes. Under the Weather Why, when we are slightly ill, do we say we are under the weather? How far are mood and working trim dependent on rain or shine, heat or cold, state of pressure of the air? Weather in its larger aspects makes climate, and climate and civilization have a direct relation, as Mr. Ellsworth Huntington has shown in several interesting books. There is evidence that when Assyria and Egypt were in their glory, their climate was more stimulating than in the modern days of their decline. Life in the Polar regions is compatible only with bare existence; in the torrid zone human energies are subdued to ease and languor. Some who have migrated from rugged climates, alternating the 188 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT rigors of winter with the heat of summer, to equable re- gions like California that lack this stimulus, find them- selves succumbing to a paradise of weather. People vary in their susceptibility to weather; some are indifferent and go ahead in all climates; others regard most weather as a conspiracy against their comfort. It is a favorite topic of conversation if not of investigation. To cite Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather; but nobody does anything about it.” Some psychologists have done something to find out about it, and the results of Prof. Dexter, though gathered thirty years ago, are just as valid today, as neither human nature nor climate have altered in that period. The idea was to turn to statistics, which tell what happens in the long run and on the average. Even slight differences take on meaning when they represent long-continued observa- tions. Here is a pretty miscellaneous list of bits of behavior on which we keep tab, and so can see whether they go up or down with the temperature or the state of the barometer: School absence and misconduct, assaults, attacks of insan- ity, suicides, deaths, crimes, errors of bank clerks. These are samples of unwelcome events, things to be avoided. Speaking generally and roughly, they are all more prev- alent in hot weather. Heat upsets human behavior, and so does humidity. Such issues depend on many causes, and weather just enters to cast the deciding vote when things are going that way anyhow. Unfavorable weather uses up the reserves of energy, and so disturbs the mental and emotional balance. Shakespeare noted this: “The day is hot, the Capulets abroad; and if we meet we shall not scape a brawl; for now these hot days is the mad blood stirring.” We can do a little some- thing about it. We can ease the strains of work and HOW QUEER WE ARE 189 routine in extreme hot weather. We can find out what special factors aggravate the situation. Bad ventilation and stagnant air interfere particularly with mental fit- ness because they lower bodily fitness. These are condi- tions of the indoor weather that we create for ourselves in the artificial atmosphere of our lives. Electric fans, by keeping the air in circulation, afford relief. So depend- ent are we on sunlight that we have found artificial sub- stitutes in special electric lamps to flood the skin and stimulate its natural function. Sun baths and sun parlors are much in vogue, and show how closely body-health and mind-health go together. : Yet in all these subtle influences the mind does much to make its own weather. Mood is real; but we can’t afford to yield to it unduly. It won’t do to frown and sulk be- cause it is raining outside or because we feel dismal inside. More or less we must get from under the weather and rise superior to it. For undue susceptibility to trifling dis- comforts makes against mental fitness. Nobody can escape in some measure the tyranny of his temperament if he happens to have a pretty pronounced one; and those who are free from weather influences should not be too severe on those who suffer from them unduly. Susceptibility to hot weather particularly is widely dis- tributed ; heat prostrations are real. Precautions are wise. Storms and squalls are bound to come and go. We must come to terms with weather and avoid a weather complex as we do a health complex, Cultivated Stupidity A journalist who wanted to say the worst thing of a fellow writer, remarked that he had a genius for igno- rance, or else he could not have accumulated so much in so 190 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT short a time. The joke of it is that this could not be true of ignorance, which is a negative quality, the absence of knowledge—but it might be true of stupidity, which is something more than an absence of intelligence. Considering how plentiful are. examples of stupidity, we have given them slight attention. Stupidity is a very democratic and a very costly quality, and there is such a thing as “cultivated stupidity,” which is less excusable than a native lack of intelligence. Underlying cultivated stupidity is the widespread in- ertia of the mind, for which a simpler description is “too lazy to think.” If possible, get some one else to think for you. Let George do it! So we begin with the personal side of the failing. Lots of people ask questions less because they are anxious to know, than to save effort. They ask for mental alms instead of working for what they need. If they become addicted to the habit, they become mental depend- ents. There is an irritating example of it among salesclerks and shopgirls particularly. If you ask for anything out of the ordinary, A will refer it to B and B to C, and there may be but one woman behind the counter who uses her mind. The others use hers, too, because they find it easier than using their own. That habit leads to cultivated stupidity. Now that touring is so common, motorists will tell you that they are lucky, when they inquire of the local in- habitants about perfectly familiar roads and places, to find one in five, young or old, who can give them any in- formation. And cultivated stupidity is not a rustic quality only. A teacher looking for a private school in a fashion- able part of New York City inquired concerning an- other school and was told by the director that he had never heard of it. Yet the one school was number 24 and HOW QUEER WE ARE 191 the other number 48 on the same street, and both had been there for years. That may be partly a native defect—the absence of casual observation. Some people never happen to observe anything ; they see only what they set out to see. It sounds incredible but it is true that one college student spoke to his roommate about a house that was blocking the street as it was being moved from one site to another, and the roommate replied that he hadn’t noticed it, though he had passed it on his way to college a dozen times. There are many varieties of cultivated stupidity and many factors in its make-up. Lack of curiosity, mental laziness, dependence on others, and perhaps most of all, low standards or requirements of what you are expected to know—all these make up the narrow-gauge habit of mind. It is all very well to form the habit of inquiring, for that is the only way to find out about many things ; but it is still more important to acquire the habit of finding out for yourself. Getting other people to tell you what you want to know should be secondary to telling yourself. There is a familiar joke about the college student who was looking forward to the happy day when a fellow could lie in bed and have the studies sent up to him. And Mr. Dooley takes it off in the question: “What particular brand of studies would you like our competent professors to study for you?” One should not be so ashamed of not knowing as to hesitate to ask; but one should be ashamed to ask what one can easily find out for oneself. There is a moral obligation to be as intelligent as you can be. And that means that you must set yourself high standards of what you expect of yourself. By doing so you will be cultivating intelligence instead of stupidity. 192 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The Mania for Collecting Collectors as a class form a gentle and agreeable variety of human beings, departing amiably, if at all, from sanity. It is only occasionally that collecting amounts to a mania that somewhat disturbs the rule of good sense—which is the standard test of mental fit- ness—or shades over into a costly pastime. The best known of these manias is the tulipomania that swept over Holland in the seventeenth century, when everybody who could afford it and many who couldn’t went in for growing rare tulips with fancy colorings and grandiose names. It is related that one tulipomaniac ex- changed his farm with all its stock for one rare tulip, and that another found one of his farmhands eating a bulb under the impression that it was an onion, which mistake cost the owner a hundred dollars and more. As usual with inflated values, the crash came, the fad died out, and tulip-growing settled down to a standard Dutch industry. The collecting passion varies with age and with the ages. The most common is collecting stamps and coins, which has become a regular trade listed in the business direc- tories of large cities. Almost everybody is interested in collecting coins—the more of them and the larger the denomination the better—but that applies to current coins of the realm or just plain cash. We have so little senti- ment about it that we show our (assumed) contempt by speaking of the collection as filthy lucre. But postage stamps lead because there are so many of them, and they involve so much geography and human interest that every- body can make a fair beginning. Collecting, like most hobbies, serves an admirable pur- pose. It is an offset to business, and even when it comes to be a business, it retains the sentiment of attachment. The HOW QUEER WE ARE 193 objects collected have a value beyond their intrinsic worth ; the collector gets a thrill, first in finding the rare and unusual, next in the joy of possession, also in out- doing his rival and in shrewd bargaining. The aristocracy of collecting is in the fine arts, and it has almost come about that a millionaire is expected to have a collection of paintings or tapestries or rugs— costly and rare arts of ages that were devoted to objects of devotion and beauty. In all this there is a genuine thrill that serves an outlet for sentiments that have slight place in the absorbing pursuits of business. No one is in business for his health, but he is in collect- ing for his health, his mental health and the satisfaction he gets out of his own growth in the art of collecting. Collecting is also educational. Many a boy learns as much geography from his stamp collection as from the textbook. Museums form an important aid to education. Collections of art and human industry keep us in touch with our past; collections of science unroll the great panorama of nature. Both enlarge interest, develop ap- preciation. But seeing a collection and owning one are different experiences, like listening to music and playing an instru- ment. Music 1s kept alive by amateur performers. “Ama- teur” is a French way of saying “lover”; collecting is something you do for the love of it, though the joy of possession and the sense of being richer—more in knowl- edge than in goods—enter into it. All that is an individual matter. One collector’s col- lection may seem junk to another, and all seem rather costly junk to those who have no interest, or not enough to go in for collecting, whose mental make-up does not in- clude that sort of satisfaction. They may derive their own thrills from sport or gambling. 194 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT 4 A Mind-Cankers and Mind-Cures Every one knows somebody who is a walking exhibit of a wonderful mind-cure or faith-cure. Faith will move mountains ; but it will also raise molehills into mountains on what to the rest of us looks like level ground. For the same mechanism is responsible for creating the canker and causing the cure. Here is one of the hundreds of cases. Until he was 36, Jones was a well man, engaged in routine office work. He then had some digestive trouble, was occasionally sick, and had an itching rash. Like many another patient he tried to be his own doctor. He read advertisements of remedies, and pored over medical books. He decided that he had a rare form of blood-poisoning, for no doctor could give it a name. He concluded that at some time he must have swallowed an infected blood-clot. A long period of rest didn’t help him. He gave up his work and devoted his time to his bodily troubles. He went from one hospital to another. At one of them a doctor, wearied with all his complaining, covered him with sulphur oint- ment, which set up a rash. Then Dr. Bridger, of Edinburgh, who tells the story, hit upon a device that worked. The blood-clot notion couldn’t be dislodged. But a written opinion that he could be cured satisfied the patient. He was put to work on an outdoor job, was given some injections of arsenic which impressed him with the fact that the case was being re- garded seriously, and promised to avoid medical books and doctors, including Dr. Bridger, for six months. Jones is now a well man; and the blood-clot is out of his mental system. But Jones insists that he never would have re- covered without that precious written opinion and promise. There was something out of kilter with Jones, un- HOW QUEER WE ARE 195 doubtedly ; there usually is. But his disorder was magnified from molehill to mountain by the firm belief in’ the blood- clot. That belief or faith created the mountain, and the like belief or faith or confidence in Dr. Bridger’s state- ment, with the help of time and a rational treatment, re- moved it. The patient had read and talked himself into his state of sickness; and the doctor chose the same method of leading him out of it. In an older day, the doctor wouldn’t have shown the patient what was on the paper, but would have told him that it had power to cure if he wore it around his neck for six months. In each case the charm worked through the same mechanism; each was suited to the mind of the patient. It would be wrong to give the impression that all cases of canker and cure are as clean-cut as this, or all of the same kind. In most cases there is a worrying suspicion or a haunting dread of something seriously wrong to account for so profound a sense of illness, misery and incapacity. If there has been previous illness or operation, there may be fear of a return or further development of the trouble. A vague dread is more common than a fixed belief ; or con- vinced of the falsity of one explanation the sufferer turns to another; or fairly free from the insistent bogy for a period, the oppressor returns in full force. Casting out mind-devils is usually a slow process. The extreme attention to self focused on disease-symptoms magnifies them. The cure consists in getting the patient to see things in their true perspective. If the habit is broken rather sharply by a bold right-about turn, there is an- other wonderful mind-cure added to the records. There is no magic in it; and it takes a wise doctor to know when he can afford to resort to tricks. It is safer to redirect than to try to outwit disordered nerves. 196 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Friday the 13th Now and then, as the calendar decrees, we pass through an ordeal and, as after every election, the country is saved. Yet no matter how “big” the news of the day, “Friday the Thirteenth” always gets on the front page. The editors say the people want it; and the people say the editors remind them of it. Nobody believes in it, but everybody else does. It affects travel, architecture, hos- pitality, and who knows what. It isn’t very long ago that there were no sailings from New York on Fridays. Mr. Dreiser, the novelist, reports that he lives on the four- teenth floor of a New York apartment building, but the floor below him is the twelfth. If you have invited fourteen to dinner and one fails, more than one person is put out; and it is said that in Paris there are “fourteenthers” ready to take the vacant place. It’s true that we have berth “13” in Pullman cars; and there are many people, not in the least superstitious, who think it more appropriate that somebody else should occupy it. Why Americans should be partial to this notion is hard to say, since we started with thirteen original States and are still going with thirteen stripes on our flag. Origins have as little to do with the currency of these beliefs as reason. It is agreed that the belief as now cur- rent was fixed by the Last Supper when thirteen were present (hence its especial reference to thirteen at table) ; and that Friday was the day of the Crucifixion. But belief in lucky days and numbers is far older and more wide- spread than Christianity. Three and seven are regarded as significant numbers and like thirteen are “odd,” some- how implying that even numbers are more ordinary. In incantations and charms things must be done three times to make them work. Then came the doctrine of the Trinity HOW QUEER WE ARE in and gave it a sacred reference. Who can ‘tell why in the smoking room of this same modern Pullman car, chummy, hard-boiled traveling-men will decline to light three cig- arettes with the same match for fear of disaster to one of them? If you dig down deep enough for their roots, supersti- tions are all of one source. It is the habit of attaching im- portance to the minute details of how a thing is done as influencing how it will come out. It is a ceremony for bring- ing good luck and avoiding bad luck. The rest is all a matter of the nature of the enterprise, and where you look for your signs and how you arrange the ceremonies and the ritual. When to be born and get married, and start on a jour- ney, and plant your seed, and go on a hunt or a war or take medicine or be operated on—that is the question. You are at the mercy of wind and weather and wild beasts and plagues and enemies. The real dangers as well as “the goblins will get you if you don’t look out.” Now the primitive mind’s way of looking out was to do all the right things at the right time in the right way. But what made them right or wrong was a fanciful kind of thinking with a little dash of reason in it now and then; and once started it got fixed in the tradition. Everybody: did it, and that settled it. About the simplest kind of right way was this matter of time and times, of numbers and counting. That is really casting lots, like the counting-out rhymes that the chil- dren still use but which once were formidable magic. Hence numbers in all relations grew into vast systems of divina- tions and fortune-telling; and fate good or bad was as- sociated with them. The seventh son of a seventh son would have power of curing ills and foreseeing the future. When an ancient Egyptian had to be operated on or have 198 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT a little blood taken, the important thing was to know when it was lucky to do it; not as today to choose the best surgeon you can find and disregard all else. “If you marry in Lent, you’ll live to repent.” “From the marriages in May, all the bairns die and decay.” If you observed all these signs, you’d never marry. The rea- son we ignore these warnings today is not because we have disproved them, but because we have outgrown that way of thinking. Friday the thirteenth is a hangover of the old mind of the race. Why Turn to the Right? How much of human habit may be traced back to nature and how much of it is custom? As a race we are overwhelmingly right-handed, which is fortunate. In handling a knife and fork at the table without interfering with your neighbor, it would be awkward if half of us were right-handed and half left-handed. Much uniformity of practice is the result of custom and training. But those who are by nature strongly left-handed go their own way. Some hold that original right-handedness is related to the slight left-sided position of the heart; we really can’t say for sure. So when you turn to the right it isn’t because you are right-handed, though the right-handedness of the human race affects many of our ways of doing things now and in older days, and ancient customs still affect modern habits. When spear or sword was carried in the right hand and the shield in the left, the left side became the protected side. When knights on horseback fought in tournament and battle, there was an advantage in pass- ing to the left, and this was continued when the horse- man became the driver. The right-handed horseman would HOW QUEER WE ARE 199 naturally mount from the left side. So to this day in England and Italy the rule of the road for riding and driving (and now motoring) is pass to the left. The rule of the road is a paradox quite In riding or driving along, If you keep to the left you are sure to be right; If you keep to the right youll be wrong. But in walking, a different custom applies, And just the reverse is the rule, If you keep to the right you’ll be right, safe and wise; If you keep to the left, you're a fool. Here conflicting customs, one for walkers, another for riders, sacrifice the convenience of uniformity. Now that traffic regulation is so serious a problem, with half the world on wheels, uniformity is indispensable, and the more the world is united international uniformity is neces- sary, as on the high seas, where the rule is also keep to the right. But when you control your road you can make your own rules. Three American railways are left-passers, while all the rest are right-passers. It’s too expensive to change, as the switches, signals and siding are arranged for passing on the left. There is a disadvantage in the left-passing ; since we are right-handed by nature, we are equally right-legged, and particularly right-eyed. While both eyes act together, the right has a better view of the right-hand field ; and when the right hand is in operation we must see what we do with it. The left half of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, and is a little better developed and more specialized than the other half, gives a preferred use of the right organs, which, by practice, leads to a more skilled use, and a greater alertness on the right side. Usage dominates over habit socially; habit dominates over usage privately. The left-handed man can write and 200 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT draw with his left hand and do as he pleases in solo per- formances ; but when he shakes hands he has to learn to do as the rest do, because a right hand cannot grip a left hand conveniently. Habit and nature combine in deciding on which side of the coat shall be the button and on which side the button- hole. On men’s clothing the buttons are on the right side, which is slightly more convenient for right-handed per- sons. But on women’s clothing it’s just the reverse, per- haps just to make them different. Raincoats are cut on much the same lines for men and women ; but mere custom sets the buttons on differently. This is all habit and not at all nature. On the other hand, as the heart is considered to be on the left, the stage lover swears fealty to the lady of his heart with a gesture of his left hand on his breast; but as a soldier he swears fealty to his country by raising his right hand, holding the sword. We raise the right hand when sworn in court. Custom shapes most of the rules of life for the convenience of uniformity. Since the right is the abler and thus favored and correct, the left has come to carry a flavor of awkwardness or in- feriority, such as “left-handed compliment”; while the word “sinister,” which is the Latin for “left,” means un- lucky. Belief is also affected by right-handedness. Why Do You Veer in a Circle? It is a common belief the world over that when you lose your way in the woods or on the prairie or desert or ice- fields, or in a fog or a snowstorm, you tend to go round in a circle, or in a series of circles like a clock-spring spiral. And the same is reported of rabbits, foxes, ante- lopes and other animals when driven in chase. Even worms, HOW QUEER WE ARE 201 however slowly they move, tend to move in spirals. Is there a circling or spiraling mechanism? The only way to find out is to experiment. On a level stretch of Kansas prairie the subjects for this experiment were shown a landmark in the distance, blindfolded, told to walk toward it in a straight line, and their paths charted. Some walked, others ran, some even drove a car, and when the experiments were transferred to the water, some swam and others rowed. So there were several kinds of locomotion. They all had the impression that they were moving in straight lines; they all had no sense of going irregularly or of veering. Yet their paths were all more or less like clock-spring spirals. The experiments support the com- mon belief. The circles or spirals turn either right or left—as the hands of a clock move, or in the opposite direction— and do so in the same person, may even go at times one way, at times the other way, in the same experiment or trial. Yet for most persons there is one stronger tend- ency; they are either in inclination right-turners or left- turners. The trails differ. They suggest differences of tempera- ment—another way of reading character. If you are a slow-going plodder, you tend toward long and rather reg- ular spiral turns without reversals; if you are impulsive and not so steady by nature, you go irregularly, first straight, then a turn or two, often reverse, but with sev- eral straight stretches. You get the record in as short a path as 300 steps; and you get circles or spirals as small as 6 yards in diameter and as large as 40 yards; and it’s about the same for swimming as for walking. The general drift of your course is nearly always in the same direction as your 202 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT first turn, and so may be nearly at right angles to the correct path. The auto-drivers, going at the rate of one to eight miles an hour over the prairie, used remarkably little space, turning without intention in circles from 13 to 110 yards in diameter. One expert Ford driver kept on driv- ing in smaller and smaller right-hand circles, until the car reached the limit of turning, when he became aware for the first time that he must be going in circles. The auto paths were only moderately larger than the walk- ing paths. As for an explanation—that isn’t easy. It was com- monly held that you circle because your right leg may be slightly longer or stronger than your left, or the left than the right. But when you observe that the same per- son may circle in either direction, that explanation falls down. Besides, the strongly right-handed or strongly left- handed do not follow any one pattern. And if you walk or swim first forward and then backward, it doesn’t change your circling habit. It isn’t a matter of your muscles, either, for if you sit blindfolded in a car and just give orders to the driver to turn one way or the other as you feel that you are veering away from the straight and narrow path, you circle just the same. So the physiologist, Dr. A. A. Schaeffer, believes that the spiraling mechanism is in your nervous system. You go by a certain feeling when you intend to walk in a straight line, but you don’t go by that feeling wholly or even rely upon it largely. You are constantly correcting your direction by shifting according to what you see. It is these constant little shifts of correction that fall away when you are in a blinding snowstorm, or in the woods where everything looks so much alike, or when you are HOW QUEER WE ARE 203 blindfolded. Then your feelings—set by this direction mechanism in the brain—run free and reveal the uncer- tainty of their operation. We are not aware of it ordinarily; but it is always working when we move. It means that we have a poor sense of direction, depend on signs, get lost easily. Were it not for the compass, Columbus wouldn’t have discovered America ; and if Lindbergh had not had a special kind of compass, he could not have flown across the ocean. Man helps out his defective senses by his inventions, which are likewise the product of his brain. Can You Do Two Things at Once? It all depends upon what one counts as a “thing,” how the “things” are related and how strictly you mean “at once.” It’s a good question to start a discussion. As I write these words with a pen in my right hand, I am hold- ing a cigar in my left hand, and now and then puff at it; and just now I answered a question put to me by my stenographer without stopping my work; and I could go on working, with a phonograph playing in the room, and listen to that, too. Though writing, I am doing sev- eral “things” at once not related to the writing, but not needing enough attention to interfere with it. But there is some swinging from one to another of these occupa- tions. When I get absorbed in my work, I let the cigar go out or drop the ashes; and, if there were constant inter- ruptions, my work would suffer. Writing isn’t one “thing” ; it is “at once” thinking what to say and putting it in words, and moving the pen, and reading what I write. These are all bits of one performance, and my attention must be properly divided among them. The main point is how the occupation is organized and 204 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT what mechanism the performance demands. The pianist looks mainly at the notes, a little at the keyboard, plays one part with his right hand, a very different part with his left hand, and uses the pedals with his foot; but all in the interest of one result. He might sing and accompany himself, and still be doing one “thing.” But if he could play one tune with the right hand and another with the left, it would be quite a stunt. A person who is knitting and talking at the same time is attending to two things quite differently organized, yet both so practiced and independent that they do not in- terfere. And we can all walk and talk at once, though some persons when they get excited stop walking. So we make one performance out of what goes together, such as the many things to be done, though not quite at once, in driving an auto, as we organize it, and call it driving; and we can do easily two things at once that are practiced and easy. Now and then somebody appears with a rare skill for managing two tasks that are differently and highly or- ganized, and involve related parts of the body to per- form them; and that is a real trick. There is an account of a young woman who was so remarkable at it that she went on the stage with her “act.” She could play with one hand while drawing with the other. She could work at different parts of a portrait with right and left hands at once, and complete it in twenty seconds. She could even hold one piece of chalk in her mouth and one in each hand, and write three different words at the same time, even words in different languages. In writing her left hand starts with the last letter, so that the two hands travel in opposite directions. She can write either or both words upside down, for her mind-images of what she wants to draw are so clear that she copies what she imagines. She HOW QUEER WE ARE 205 can divide the writing between the two hands, so that in these nine words the words in italics would be written with the right, and the others at the same time with the left hand. Remarkable as this is, it is only a more skillful training of what we all do, and could learn to do better if it were worth while. The inventor of a typewriter on which you could strike two letters at a time, and, as he thought, double the speed, found that he could learn to do it pretty well, but he couldn’t sell the invention. Most persons pre- fer to get more speed in a simple performance than to learn a more difficult one that is differently organized. No one proposes that we should all cultivate the ability which this young woman found she could develop; it is interest- ing to find that some people can use the mind in ways that require unusual organization. But it is working rather than juggling with the mind that concerns us. V1 THE CULT OF BEAUTY Beauty, Behavior or Brains? I do not like thee, Dr. Fell; The reason why I cannot tell; But I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. Tue why of our likes and dislikes of persons is an impor- tant inquiry, because so much in life depends upon it. What draws you toward those who become your intimate friends? Naturally, first is appearance. This is what nature has done for you—your figure, your coloring, your complex- lon, your facial features. The second is expression, and this is of several orders. There is the care you take of your person, tidiness of teeth and nails and hair and skin and showing of health, which maintains the lucrative business of the beauty par- lors. The second and central order of expression is your poise, your carriage, your walk and gestures, your vigor and vivacity, your smiles, laughter, frowns, embarrass- ment, showing of interest, your manner and manners. This is the care of your “you” expression and includes the appeal to the ear in voice, tone, modulation. Some persons are attractive until they speak; others more so in anima- tion. The third order of expression is what you wear and how you wear it; your neatness, your good taste, loud or 206 THE CULT OF BEAUTY 207 quiet clothes, your idea of what becomes you and what you want others to think of you. It takes time to make yourself up for the day. There is finally your intelligence, not so easily made up. It appears in what you say and do. This goes deeper than manner, reveals your education, your tastes of mind, your emotional as well as your in- tellectual self. There is much difference of opinion as to how these orders of attractiveness combine and what their value is in making friends; whether you expect beautiful persons to be intelligent or stupid, and how much beauty consists in feature or in expression. All this counts heavily in hu- man relations—so much so that one writer suggests that we reduce school studies for girls and concentrate on charm, which sums it all up. Here is a short result of a long inquiry in this intimate yet unexplored territory. A group of persons were asked to consider the ten men and the ten women for whom they had the greatest liking, and to check off in order of in- fluence the qualities most in evidence in these admired friends. In so involved a matter, of course, one cannot ex- pect clear-cut results. The deeper qualities of expression of personality have done most to make friends; pleasing manner, affectionate disposition, sincerity, social grace, strong individuality, constancy, while physical beauty also stands in this fa- vored group of traits. The least magnetic in drawing friends is mere beauty of face or form, and especially inef- fective is dress unsupported by other charms. In between, along a variable scale, are the more intellectual and related qualities, brains, cleverness, energy, good nature, voice and refinement. Interfering with any more definite result is the disturb- ing matter of sex appeal. While women are freer in giving 208 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT NER the highest ratings of attraction to men, they are fairly generous in including women. Men cannot find anybody really attractive except women. Beauty is too dazzling. Yet the women who appeal to men appeal to women also in large number, and persons who are attractive know how to make themselves more so by dress and social graces ; perhaps by the same strengthening of what they already possess, by which the naturally strong develop as athletes. To him who hath shall be given. According to one’s disposition, one may find encourage- ment or the reverse in these hints. Brains do not come out well in this schedule of friendship. Intelligence is a sort of Cinderella until properly appareled. But beauty alone and fine clothes count only slightly in making friends. Expres- sion comes out best, especially that personal order of expression which brings to the surface the qualities and charms that lie below. What Price Beauty? Millions of women, and consequently more millions of men, and still more millions of dollars, are all devoted to the service of personal beauty. So universal an interest must concern every lover or observer of the human race. The psychology of beauty is more than skin deep. It would be a bare world if there were nothing to ad- mire in it but landscapes and pictures. The praise of feminine beauty has been sung by poets in and out of love throughout the ages. The theme is now taken up by the scientist. Prof. Dunlap, of Johns Hopkins University, sets forth that the cult of beauty serves the improvement of the race; that the natural admiration which goes out to the most beautiful women and the handsomest men en- courages a preference for the kind of parents we should Ey THE CULT OF BEAUTY 209 : like for our children in order to give them the best ad- ~ vantages of body and mind. We may as well speak of beauty as feminine. The moon as “she” shines by the reflected light of the sun as he”; in the dazzle of beauty it is all the other way. The human race falls naturally into the admired and the admirers, though there is some exchange of parts. Many points and pointers enter into the make-up of beauty as nature makes it, and as the make-up of art tries to make up for the neglect of nature. Beauty follows the ideal of the race. However much it takes to make perfect beauty, it takes very little to mar it. Not defect or deformity but one markedly bad feature spoils the harmony. Only a few of many “fair” women are beautiful, so critical or jealous are men and women of the standards of the race. Beauty considers stature, figure, complexion, tone, poise, manner, expression and the minute detail of all the features of the face and their blending. Some details count more than others, especially the conspicuous ones, and those concerned in action and ex- pression, such as lips, mouth, eyes. Here differences of standards or ideals enter. Each race has its own ideals of beauty within the race, and each sex within the sex. Any sign of effeminacy in men spoils what we expect in men, and even a trace of hair on a woman’s face is a blemish. Beauty typifies the human form divine at the most vigorous period of its development. Yet there is beauty at each age. Beauty in children is judged differently than in youth ; the beauty of old age is rather a look backward to what it may have been at its prime, and the wrinkles of years make a sad havoc except for the favored few. Beauty with years gives way to dignity. “Keep young with your daughter” is a noble appeal, easier to accomplish on a poster than in real life. 210 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The components of beauty are accepted as signs of vigor and health. Hair plays an extraordinary part as an index both of vigor and type of personality. Luxurious hair seems indispensable to the artist; and its lack offers only the weak consolation of the highbrow. Whether gen- tlemen prefer blondes to the complete neglect of brains is still in dispute. The most critical judgment falls on bulk. Fat and forty, however fair, must resign from the competition for beauty. Only the slenderest can get into the fashion papers; and the cult of slenderizing the stylish stout is mainly flattery. Yet it is only as we page back to the fashions of another day that we realize what crimes have been committed in its name. The cult of beauty keeps the world aglow, from the follies of Broadway to the rivalry of cities in the annual choice of “Miss America.” Beauty parlors are sprinkled thickly wherever women congregate. The cost of beauty culture almost rivals that of agriculture. But the most intimate psychology of beauty is the re- sponsibility it imposes. Men have time for so much hard work because they need give so little to a hopeless pur- suit of beauty, and would accomplish still more were they not distracted by its presence in others. A noted beauty has to live up to her reputation, and a professional beauty makes one critical to discover whether the beauty makes up for the lack of art or re-enforces it. From childhood up, beauty seems almost too great a favoring. When mere appearance instantly wins friends, why cultivate graces or any other charms of mind? Beau- tiful children easily get spoiled, and to be the center of attraction without effort may well turn anyone’s head. Knowing all this, we place the stress on more deserved qualities, and even question whether great gifts of head THE CULT OF BEAUTY 211 or heart can go with so fair a face. The answer is that true beauty may include all that with an added charm. Mere prettiness is not beauty; it lacks the animating quality that persons of taste demand. True beauty is soul deep. Those who lack beauty rather conspicuously naturally seek distinction elsewhere. Perhaps some are led to achieve success in order to compensate for their lack of natural charm. The psychology of beauty reaches far into per- sonality. Your Clothes As Self-Expression Considering the enormous amount of time and money spent upon clothes, it is surprising how little attention is paid to their psychology. Whether or not the clothes make the man, they seem to make the woman. Women have a more developed clothes consciousness than men. The first popular poem that swept the country was the tale of Flora McFlimsey and “Nothing to Wear.” There’s a “Women’s Wear” daily newspaper issued in New York, and fashion news in print probably out-columns political, even rivals sporting news. Women’s periodicals out-circulate men’s periodicals, and all “feature” the fashions. And still the ery goes out all over the land, “nothing to wear!” During the height of the “Votes for Women” campaign, someone suggested as a counterslogan: “Hooks for Men.” The fashion side of the psychology of clothes outranks in importance all other phases. Speaking to and of women, your clothes are so much you that a separation of the two suggests a divorce. Considered in themselves, ¢lothes are a nuisance; and the small boy will tell you so. He rebels against them in every shape and form. Little girls 212 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT have the advantage of vanity in overcoming the natural resistance to the restraint of clothes. And it is interesting to consider whether the recent wave of less and less cloth- ing for women is chiefly in the interest of displaying nat- | ural charms or of release from weight and length for the sake of freedom of movement. The cry is for more and more clothes, but less at any one time. So the small boy isn’t as much in the minority as he appears to be. The elementary psychology of clothes is in the “feel” in connection with comfort. Soft, light, easy, loose, loung- ing garments, and old ones that have settled to the shape of the body, all attract by feel and texture. Graceful lounging is still an art. But fashion rules, and what men suffer with high stiff collars and high stiff hats is a fair second to the tight lacing and distortion and dragging skirts of those dreadful “nineties,” when the older genera- tion was young. Dress reform was part of the emancipa- tion of women. The motive of conformity or fashion dominates. Dis- play comes next. Clothes reflect balances at the bank or credit at the shops. Then comes taste, elegance, refine- ment, individuality. Your clothes emphasize and express you; they show your idea of what looks well on you, mod- ified strongly by the fashion. And as fashions are for the slender, the stylish stouts often lack assurance. Nature cannot be ignored. Even your clothes have to consider you. Your clothes express or conceal your character ac- cording to your make-up. And make-up has come to ex- press your idea of what nature should have provided but neglected. Silks and satins, sheer and fine, the richness of stuffs and furs, and more than all else the quality, so hard to acquire, of wearing your clothes not like a clothes model, but as an owner, as a visible expression of you—all this THE CULT OF BEAUTY 213 adds to attraction and importance. It all looks super- ficial, but clothes penetrate deep into the mazes of human traits and social rivalry. And then there are so many sides of you in occasions and seasons. Formal and informal, the correct and the latest thing, all enter into the burdens you have assumed in wearing clothes. There are so many yous to consider that as the wardrobe multiplies you do not escape the poverty of nothing to wear. Dress for modesty is a strange story with an ancient flavor. The ride-astride replaced the side-saddle before the auto replaced the horse; and the knickers thus intro- duced were seized for all outings. Veils have departed, leaving bobbed hair in their place. Your clothes reflect the social ideal of you and your class. Clothes for protection we may well leave last, for it has come to be least; bare throats in winter, and summer furs. Hands must be kept shapely for gloves to look well, and the modern shoe has a low opinion of the anatomical foot. A concession or two to raincoats and sweaters. But even primitive man dressed more for adornment than pro- tection. Clothes express even more than they protect or screen you. The Psychology of the Lipstick An up-to-date Rip Van Winkle, returning to Broadway after a five-year nap, might suspect that some strange epidemic had come upon his people, affecting women only —young women and those not so young—with a sort of scarlet fever of the lips. Make-up has come out boldly from the stage to the street,—and all the world’s a stage. Why? Fashion is not so rational that it is easy to give rea- sons for what is done in its name. But fashions, even those 214 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT of this ultra-modern world, are not made wholly in Paris, but in the psychological workshop of human nature, ever ready to improve upon Mother Nature. Red lips mean good red blood, rich vitality, youth, and all that goes with it. Nature makes red lips; art proceeds to make redder ones. Far from being new, the trick is an old one, and is taken more seriously among primitive people. The Indian puts on his war-paint to make himself look formidable; the cosmetic lady puts on hers to aid her conquests and make such gentlemen as prefer blondes prefer a little harder. And since so much in nature and in art depends upon contrast, the whiter skin brings out the redder lips (or spots on the cheek), and the red lips bring out the complexion, aided by the facial powder. The psychology of the lips begins in the nursery. In the first months of life mouth-psychology dominates. The mouth is the receiving station of the serious business of feeding; it is the sending station of the emotions. The smile, the pout, the sulk, the down-in-the-mouth misery are all registered there, not so elaborately but quite as ex- pressively as at Hollywood. Vocal expression issues from the same source,—the gurgle, the croon, the chuckle, the cry. But it is the lips as organs of touch that make their part of the intimate emotional psychology. All touch is ultimate. We express friendship by shaking hands. Petting is natural. When we are touched, we are emotionally moved. The kissing that starts in the nursery graduates to other settings, and becomes subject to custom. Yet it is naturally the seal of devotion—to our way of think- ing, of romantic devotion, of the love of maid and man. Yet our soldiers who received French decorations had THE CULT OF BEAUTY 215 that manly ceremony solemnized by a kiss on each cheek from the lips of the ranking officer. When we talk we move our lips, and this attracts at- tention to them. So accurate is this art that the deaf can get our words by lipreading. Talking is revealing. Some women are beautiful until they speak; some more so when they speak. All this attention naturally make us lip conscious,—and the lipstick makes us more so. The special psychology of the lip-revival, which has for the time being made the lipstick, the powder-puff, and the pocket-mirror an indispensable feminine kit of compact between nature and art, is variously explained by the adept. It may be part of a general wave (doubtless a permanent wave) of emancipation, a sort of frankness in the arts of femininity, the same wave that shortened hair and skirts, encouraged freedom in appearance and speech, concealing less and revealing more. ~ There is no pretense about it; no suggestion that this rouge is nature’s color—the lady of fashion having left the child of nature far behind. It is urged that it was first employed to restore the fading charms of years, and so even up the terms of competition between the dé- butantes and the graduates. The challenge was more than accepted by the flappers, who overdid their elders. The craze of schoolgirl complexions gathered force, and beauty parlors were more accessible than golf courses. Perhaps modern glare has a part in it. The make-up necessary to stand the footlights found a rival in head- lights and the incandescent glare of Broadway and bril- liancy everywhere. Electric light is so trying to facial features that art must come to the rescue. Yet most of it is fashion, which means that the many without very much thinking follow where the few lead, but follow willingly when the cult fits in with their habits of mind. 216 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT So long as beauty is so highly and so properly es- ] teemed, beauty culture will flourish. But the selection of ways and means by which art is to aid nature, reflects even more the lines of the mind than of the face. As fash- ion is so changeable, who can say whether it will stick to the lipstick? The Cleverness of the Powder-Patch I was looking recently at a collection of jeweled patch- boxes. Perhaps you don’t know what patches are, or, rather, were. The encyclopedia says under “patches”: “Small pieces of black silk or plaster worn on the face by women, and occasionally by men, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They were considered to be ornamental by reason of their contrast to the fairness of the skin, and were placed in a position to call attention to special beauties, such as dimples. They called forth satires in literature, sermons from the pulpit and abortive acts of Parliament.” Whoever invented the powder-patch (presumably it was a woman, or was it an accident?) devised a clever bit of psychology. To pretend to a defect in order by covering it to call attention to an excellence is shrewd indeed. Were there a pimple or a bruise, the plaster would serve to pro- tect it and thus explain itself. Incidentally it would attract attention to the chin or cheek which it set off. The spot of black brings out the white of powdered skin, and it was worn in days of powdered wigs. As a technique of facial attraction, the principle per- sists. The lipstick, though it may supply a glow that na- ture neglected, may also suggest that the lips with charms thus heightened are worthy of attention in their own right. THE CULT OF BEAUTY 217 It is a subtle technique, at the least. If it could be trans- ferred to other fields it might develop a new kind of diplo- macy. In principle, it is the contrary method to a bluff or a pose in which you assume an excellence which you largely lack; it may be wealth, it may be influence, it may be ex- ploits, it may be an attitude of superiority; and the more incongruous the pretense with your actual appearance or: station, the more disastrous the fall if you are shown up. Such is Malvolio, the ridiculous steward in “Twelfth Night,” who is duped into thinking that he is called to high office. There are many Malvolios. In matters of in- tellect the part of the fool, with cap and bells and motley, speaking words of wisdom, approaches the principle of the powder-patch. But if we alter the technique a bit, we see a similar device in common use. Recently I was present in a com- pany quizzing a returned traveler from distant parts, who told a little, but to many questions replied “Really, I don’t know.” It wasn’t false modesty—this alleged ignorance; it was a powder-patch setting off his extraordinary knowl- edge of a country visited by few. A novelist with many good books, though not exactly best sellers, to his credit, never tires of telling that his first novel was a dead failure. He continues to flourish it as a powder-patch. If the principle is still further thinned or extended, we reach the general position which the Freudians emphasize, namely, that so many of our efforts, including our pre- tenses, are all so many devices to secure favorable atten- tion and add to our self-interest and importance. Even children catch the spirit of it and assume a baby-talk or dependent manner to regain the attraction of a period which they have outgrown. Common is the opposite pre- 218 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT tense, the swagger of an older age. They are in the inter- mediate stage when they can appeal through weakness or show off through strength. And with the final extension we reach the general formula of pretension or affectation. In the one direction it leads to the pretender, the boaster, the pompous, opin- ionated man, exalting his personality and thereby attract- ing attention, and in the other the affectation of the modest violet, overdoing the part of humility by confes- sion of blemish. Between pretending to be more and pretending to be less than we are, a true self-estimate must find the way of safety and sanity, and may find it easily by giving the matter scant attention. It isn’t complete indifference to what others think of us, but a readiness to accept that estimate rationally and let it affect our actions slightly, that marks the course of mental fitness. There will be no temptation to put on high heels or a high-hat manner or attempt other additions to our mental stature, and no inclination to indulge in powder-patches, but rather to accept oneself naturally for what one is, and not bother unduly as to how others see us. VII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SPORT What Is the Sporting Instinct? THERE is more than one appeal in sport; and first is the liking for venture, for taking chances. Certainty and regularity get to be dull. If all you had to do was to bait your hook, throw out your line and pull up your fish, it might be good pot-hunting, but poor sport. Part of the game is the uncertainty of fisherman’s luck. Sport appeals to ancient and deep traits of human na- ture. Primitive man was a hunter. He got his living in ways that brought moments of danger, of suspense, of triumph. That kind of life set one of the enduring patterns of human behavior. Living by big-game hunting was exciting ; raising crops promised surer food, but duller work. The lure of the old patterns survives. You will find sportsmen everywhere—among lawyers, professors, bankers, man- agers, workmen. Follow the clue of chance or luck, and you get to gam- bling. All peoples from primitive to civilized, all classes from poor to rich, gamble. Dice, dominoes, cards, lotteries, guessing games have been invented to satisfy the gambling “instinct.” The “Forty-niners” tried their luck all day in panning for gold, and played poker for their gold dust all night. Venturesome careers attract the sporting ele- ment in human nature. So do stock-gambling and specula- 219 220 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT tion of all sorts, however organized under the patterns of business, which means making a living. Sport is rather definitely a masculine need. Perhaps some women take to flirtation and bargain-hunting as an indoor sport. For hunting is pursuit, and that is the second trait in the sporting make-up. When the business man grows tired of chasing dollars in his office because the routine of it gets dull or wearing, he takes his recreation by chasing a golf ball. In both cases there is a contest, and that is the third trait appealed to—the fighting side of human nature. Business is a contest with your competi- tors; in golf you take your friendly enemy with you. And you keep a score, which in business is your balance at the bank. Breaking a record is the big thrill, because then you are beating all your competitors at once. You have become a champion. A contest is a challenge. The sporting instinct will not rest until the highest mountain has been scaled, the far- thest north reached. The Atlantic Ocean was a chal- lenge to the birdman, and the whole world was sport enough to go wild when Lindbergh called its bluff. Stage an argument as a debate, and you will draw ten times as large a crowd as would listen to a speech, but not the huge crowd or gate receipts of a prizefight, for that is a direct primitive encounter that appeals to the masses. One of the side issues of sport is betting, which is a way of getting into the game for those who do not play. It is playing by proxy and gambling in earnest. The baseball or football fan gets a huge kick by taking sides, whether with enthusiasm or with money or both. Lots of people cannot get sufficiently excited about any game, whether golf or whist, unless there is a stake. Quite a different side issue is superstition. Those who THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SPORT 221 lead venturesome lives are quite apt to show a faith in signs of luck, and charms to bring good luck and avoid bad luck. Card players turn their chairs around to make the luck turn. Sailors are full of it. The sailor’s tatooed arm may be for identification, but it is really more for luck or sentiment. Until recently there were no ships sail- ing on Friday; whether on account of the sailors or the passengers, you may make your own guess. The business man escapes from business to sport be- cause it gives him an older and deeper kind of satisfac- tion, and when he gets back to his office he still talks of playing the game. Being a good sport means to take your gains without being too much set up, and your losses with- out being too much upset. Fair play is a good code for all life. Even the poor fish gets it; for the true sportsman goes for the gamey trout that fights back; and he gives him the odds of the lightest tackle. Why You Are a Fan “Fan” is reporter’s slang—short for fanatic. So the dictionary says, and calls a fanatic “excessively enthusias- tic”’—all pepped up on one idea that he works over- time. In the old days there were dangerous fanatics, usually about religion or politics. When they could be, they were pretty rough to those who thought differently. A “fan” is an innocent fanatic, wild about baseball or golf or movies or whatever he can get the most kick out of. How do fans get that way? It’s because, though we like our jobs, most of us have to work pretty steadily and do a lot of chores to pay our bills and keep things going; and the daily grind gets dull, 222 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT or we get stale. So we must have something handy to turn to and get excited about—something to put the joy into life, something to do and to talk about for the fun of it. It may be a sport, or a hobby. If it isn’t a joy-ride, it’s a fear-thrill. “Amusement parks” build elaborate loop- the-loops where you can frighten yourself safely; but it doesn’t last long. A real fan wants something with more staying power. The collector is a quiet sort of fan, and gets his kick out of a rare stamp or coin or antique. To the rest of us who are fans on something else, his collection seems mere junk. The sport fan is the genuine article. He is a fan about something live and lively. Life is a chase. When an officchound gets tired of chasing dollars, he chases a golf ball, or he yells himself hoarse when Babe Ruth makes a home run before he can be stopped. Life is a fight; there is another fellow after the same thing. Call it competition, if you like. Anything that you can stage as a fight draws the crowd, from a debate, where they fight with arguments, to the ring, where they fight with gloves. There is a fist in both. The pleasure of winning and the danger of losing add to the kick. The spectator is a fan by one remove. He gets into the game on the bleachers by taking sides. He may be a fan at two removes and yell when a chalk- mark goes up for his side on a blackboard in front of a newspaper office. The easy way to get into the game is to bet on it. Then you have a stake to win or lose; it adds to the thrill. Gambling and sporting are twin brothers. One of the twins may be more gambler than sportsman; the other more sportsman than gambler. But a pocketbook fan isn’t quite as pure a brand as the real amateur, which means lover. Without the enthusiasm which you supply, there’s nothing doing. When a Persian Prince at the THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SPORT 223 ~ Derby—the great horse-race event of England—was asked how he liked it, he said that he always knew that one horse could run faster than another. If you go to a horse race in that state of mind, you won’t get anything out of it. The fan in a popular sport has a big advantage; he is one of a crowd. They keep each other warm. Fans love crowds where all the birds of the same feather get to- gether. And the bigger the stake, whether a pennant or a purse, the bigger the excitement and the crowd. The champion is the fan’s hero; there is a streak of hero- worship in all of us. Fans spend huge piles of money, and often have nothing to show for it but the thrill; but it’s worth it. We’re not human machines; or if we are, the only thing that can wind us up is enthusiasm. It’s a fine thing to have a hobby and keep up the habit of joy-thrills. It keeps the emotions, like the muscles, in good working order. A fan goes to his game to be wound up. Some of that zest stays with him when he gets back to his job. Why You Are A Good Mixer This is the day of get-together clubs, the lunch-hour of joiners and mixers. Humans, like birds, go in flocks, and birds of a feather flock together. The city man gets to feel lost and lonely out of a crowd. But it takes some- thing more to make it your crowd, your bunch of good fellows. We organize for pleasure with even greater zest than for business. Much of our best work we must do alone; but we play best together. This fine streak in human nature is responsible for Ro- tarians and Kiwanians, for executives’ and advertising and city clubs, the tribes of Shriners and Boosters, the Lions, 224 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Elks, Buffaloes, Moose and many another order of the human menagerie. They bring together congenial spirits. They form the grand army of “Gregarians”—millions strong. Whatever a Gregarian may be in his office, he is most human at his club. Buying or selling, making or distribut- ing, serving or directing, we are all held together by the ties of supply and demand. Business is industry and com- petition. In all that we are under some pressure and the strain of looking out for No. One and the One-lets. We are often reminded that “business is business,” or that “a man isn’t in business for his health”; and that, in a way, is a pity. It would be far better if more people could find joy and health in their work. Big corporations pro- vide welfare as well as employment. They establish bonds among their employees in recreation and in getting to- gether for mutual aid. The more human relations you can inject into business the better for both. The Gregarian in every man craves an outlet. People will work better together if they eat together and sing to- gether, and get enthusiastic and humane together. We can do things together that we cannot do separately. In union there is the strength of fellowship. Gregarians arouse public spirit. They make their common interests of value to themselves and to the community. Gregarians pool their interests. Gregarians are democratic. They find a place for all sorts of Toms and Dicks and Harrys. They meet on the best side of Main Street. A good many of them are wise birds, and many not so wise. One of the wisest democrats we ever had was James Russell Lowell who played a fine part in American literature and American politics. He said that the test of democracy is in the leadership it will accept. Gregarians pave the way for the best leadership. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SPORT 225 A Gregarian is expressing his social nature in sound democratic fashion. If you expect him always to be wise, you are not very wise in human nature. One of the advantages of being with a bunch of good fellows is that you can be a little foolish without being conspicuous. The Gregarian wants a place to unbend, to lose the restraint of business, and feel the touch of humanity. And when it’s time for action, he’s all there. He is ready to cheer when the gang’s all here; and he’s ready to do his share, because a Gregarian is a shareholder in the public welfare as well as in the special interests of his clan. He is a better business man for being a better citizen. A Gregarian is a man with the urge to grow. Tennis and Temperament It doesn’t matter where you tap the stream of human nature, you get the same varieties of behavior; it may be sermons, it may be sport,—the performers carry their personalities into the product. This is from the sporting page: “Guarding the one side of the court will be the unemo- tional Miss Wills and the dignified Eleanor Goss. Protect- ing the other half of the rectangle will be the volatile Mrs. Mallory and the pugnacious Helen Jacobs. The Wills- Goss team probably will commit fewer errors, but their opponents likely will supply most of the fireworks. Miss Wills will win hearty applause by her hard hitting and Miss Goss by her perfect execution, but Mrs. Mallory and Miss Jacobs will win the hearts of the spectators by their spirit and daring.” One might have thought that hitting a ball with a racket over a net within whitewashed lines was a matter of skill; 226 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT it is. But skill, like business or poetry, or music or poker, or politics or finance, or courtship or teaching, or any sufficiently complex human enterprise that you put your mind and your heart into, is a matter of temperament. That’s the uncertain but ever-present quality that de- termines the product. There is unemotional tennis, a calm poise and a steady hand, never forgetting that the game is a strategy ; there is pugnacious tennis, tense, hard hitting in the fight; there is dignified tennis, true to form and the correct finish of the stroke; there is volatile tennis, brilliant and taking chances, but with chances of error, too. And there is the temperament of the spectator that likes fireworks and the spectacular. You could take four preachers and by proper selection apply the same adjectives to their sermons; and four heads of industry and do the same to their methods and systems. Temperament is universal; it comes out dif- ferently in human occupations as they offer different in- vitations to its exhibit. You needn’t change the terms much if you apply them to courtship or friendship or family life. Temperament is a convenient name for the balance of qualities of head and heart, of the thinking and the feeling “you” that goes into your work and no less into your play. It is a social as well as a personal reaction; and those four players will respond differently to the presence and the cheers of the gallery. Personality is temperament plus. Every person and every animal above an oyster has temperament. The peo- ple we call temperamental have more of it or have it nearer the surface of their behavior. Perhaps the best test of temperament of those players and of all the rest of us who play in one or another of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SPORT 221 the games of life, is what kind of winners and particularly what kind of losers they or we make. The psychologist cannot say precisely what is the basis of temperament. He places most of it in original disposition, and he calls character the result of your training of what temperament supplies. Children are strong in temperament and especially in showing it, and weak in character. Character is temperament under con- trol. Temperament is close to the emotions, how you feel and take things; it is also the emotional support of your work, whether mind work or muscle work. It supplies the zest for doing what you decide to have your mind and muscles do. You must be excited enough but not too much excited to do it, and do it at your best. That tennis tournament is a contest of temperaments as well as skill. The great difference between a game like tennis and many another contest is that in the former there are fixed rules for keeping the score. But you cannot divide the competitions in which all of us enter for recognition and success, into games and sets, nor are there love sets and deuce sets, easy and close winnings. There are so many ways of judging and no fixed rules. Sometimes you think you have won, and the public doesn’t, and withholds rewards and trophies; and sometimes you get applause when, as your own sternest critic, you believe you are not entitled to it. Some can work steadily and others have their ups and downs. Temperament is your mental climate. Take a Relaxative! There is a common type of mental unfitness, and many of those who suffer from it may be given the same advice: “Take a relaxative!” 228 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT You won’t find relaxatives made up in drug stores, nor even find the word in the dictionary. But it’s a good pre- scription none the less, that you have to make, take and sometimes shake yourself. Case No. 1.—“There isn’t much the matter with me, but I seem to be a walking machine going through the motions of living—commuting to my office, handling the mail and the daily grind, getting back home, reading a dull book, going to bed. Once in a while I get a bit snappy, but it doesn’t last. How do you get out of this state of mind 7” Reply: Take a relaxative! Case No. 2.—*I have lost my appetitie, not for food but for life. Everything seems stale and flat and not worth while. Since I came back from the war I seem to have been running down, though my bank account has been going up. But I don’t get the kick out of that any more than out of anything else. Doing things makes me so tired. I prod myself on the daily rounds and going to bed seems the best thing going. I am not as young as I was, but isn’t there some way to make life worth living? Or is it my liver or my glands, or my insides generally? It seems to me to be my outsides.” Reply: Take a relaxative! Case No. 3.—“That pretty sign on the billboards tells you: ‘Stay young with your daughter.” But how can you when staying up with your daughter makes you limp the ‘next day, and you can’t get any fun out of it? Is there any way of making yourself care for things enough to pay for the work of getting them? Every woman wants to grow old gracefully if she can, but how do you grow old happily even if you’re not graceful? No mere man will understand this.” THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SPORT 229 Reply: Take a relaxative! Cases Nos. 4, 5 and 6 are adrift in the same boat, and the last just wants a book to read and find the solution. The book is Dr. Myerson’s “When Life Loses Its Zest,” and I add a case of his, also a returned doughboy who, “when he went to France, could eat anything, anytime, anywhere, slept the moment he hit the hay and up next morning like a 2-year-old ready for the pasture. I could enjoy things so—people, good times, the girls, music and books, and even the grind of hikes and drills. Now, no sleep, no appetite, no glad hand, nothing. I hate to look at myself or anybody else. Even a pretty girl is a curved radish with a fluffy-haired top. I feel like a mechanical doll with sawdust for insides, and would swap places with any ditch laborer.” For so serious a case it took a long course of sprouts to bring back the gay old self, which peeps through even in his despair. But the thousand and one cases are just mild slumps, sliding down hill and losing zest; they need a relaxative to bring them back. A relaxative differs from “a relaxation in that you have to do the thing for your- self as part of your zest diet. Relaxations are all to the good when they are of the right sort; they don’t take the place of relaxatives. Pleasure-seekers seeking relaxation often wear themselves out. Too much movies, jazz, caba- rets and late hours just add to the pace that tires. Look- ing and listening are all right in their place, and certainly good music and good books ease the strain of job work and bring relief to tense minds. They relax and take you out of yourself. But everybody should have a vocation, which is his Job, and an avocation, which is his relaxative; and it must be along a different pattern. “Bridge” is right enough for 230 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT people who use it rightly, but it may be too near the pat- tern of your daily strain; and the gambler isn’t relaxing. For some, golf is the prime relaxative; they don’t look at others playing, as do football and baseball crowds (also in its way a relaxation), but are set on the zest of their own performance. Fishing is a great relaxative, for it is such a complete change of scene and activity, and soothing withal. Col- lectors have a good deal of fun pursuing their relaxatives and getting the zest of finds as they go. The great army of tinkers, gardeners, craftsmen, designers, photogra- phers, have steady relaxatives at their command and the joy of creating as well. Traveling brings change of scene and new interests, but only so far as you have a zest for it. Motoring might be a relaxative, but hardly on a crowded thoroughfare with a constant sense of strain. One of the best and most human relaxatives is playing with children; that’s grandfather’s and grandmother’s favorite indoor sport. Each must choose and make up his own prescription. Plenty of relaxatives taken in time prevent loss of the zest of life. We need it all the more as life becomes tense and the pace rapid. It’s the strained mind that loses zest, sleep, appetite, and in their place finds the demons of depression, fear and fatigue. When you go hard, take a relaxative as you go! VIII READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER Telling Character by Appearance OnE of the questions which every psychologist is asked again and again is the meaning of a word that has an in- teresting explanation. It is the word “correlation.” It refers to what things go together. We are all tremendously interested in a great many kinds of correlation. We would like to be able to detect signs of mental ability or of any other accomplishment or power that we value. If, for example, tall people were more intelligent than short peo- ple, there would be a correlation between height and in- telligence ; and if this relation were a very close one, we could measure a person’s intelligence by measuring his height. But everyone knows that this is not true. There could be no worse method of selecting people for intelligence than doing so according to size. And that gives a hint as to why it is so difficult to find out what things in nature, and in human nature particularly, go together. The hope of doing so has led to all sorts of fanciful schemes for reading character. There is the common notion that blondes have one set of qualities and brunettes another. There is a notion that people with a certain shape of chin are firm and decided, and people with a different shape of chin are weak in 231 232 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT character. These are all attempts at correlation. But in- stead of finding proofs of these relations, the authors of ; these schemes rush to conclusions, in which perhaps there is a very slight and confused bit of relation, but not | enough to support any such system. There are many elements in the human make-up that are naturally closely correlated. There is an obvious re- lation between height and weight; so that the average weight of a hundred tall people would certainly be greater than of a hundred short ones. But you couldn’t predict absolutely John Smith’s weight from his height alone, nor his height from the weight alone. There is a common method of determining what size stockings you wear by taking the sole of the stocking and folding it around the closed fist until heel and toe just meet. That is your size of stocking—so definite is the re- ‘lation between the size of your foot and the size of your hand. But when it comes to many of the qualities in which we are most interested, such as how intelligent people are, whether they have musical ability, whether they would make good salesmen, or good mechanics or good social workers, there is no ready way of deciding by any signs, because there are no signs that are closely enough corre- lated with these abilities. It is because human beings are so complex and vary so much in so many respects that count, that we have to rely on a great variety of judg- ments. It would be a much simpler world to live in if things were more closely correlated, and if it were easier to find out which were related to which. So correlation is a matter of slight or close relation. When there is no correlation at all, things or events are related accidentally only. For example, suicides and rain- fall. There are neither more nor fewer suicides when the READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER 233 rainfall is high than when it is low. But suicides vary with the season of the year, so there is some relation or corre- lation. And, of course, some things are in part oppositely related, such as speed and strength in horses. Fortunately good mental ability is an all-round matter in the sense that anyone good in one thing is apt to be good in many another, but not in all others. We have special as well as general abilities. That is why it is so hard to find out what things go together. All this has given rise to the scientific study of correla- tion. By making many measurements on many people of what they can do, we have accumulated a large amount of information as to what things, both in mind and body, go together. When you are dealing with large numbers certain general tendencies appear. We have differences of race, differences of men and women, differences in our family heredity, all of which enable us to do a certain amount of predicting as to a man’s future from his an- cestry and his past performances. This has an important practical side because we are interested in the problem of what we are good for, and by accumulating a lot of records showing how achievement in later life is related to early performance, we are beginning to direct people into those employments in which they best fit. We can suggest a calling in which success corre- lates well with the abilities that we can test. Are You A Poor Judge of Yourself? The general impression is that you have a better opin- ion of yourself than the world in general shares. Or to put it the other way about, that you are more critical and more accurate in judging others than in judging your own qualities. 234 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Whether that is true or not, can be tested. Prof. Hol- lingworth, of Barnard College, made such a test. He asked each of twenty-five women students who knew one another very well, to arrange their friends in order in regard to certain qualities, beginning, let us say, with neatness. Each girl went over the list and selected for No. 1 the girl in the group whom she thought neatest, then put the next as No. 2, and so on, to No. 25 for the least neat, or the most untidy, each girl also placing herself where she be- longed. The same was done for intelligence, for sense of humor, for conceit, beauty, vulgarity, snobbishness, re- finement, and sociability. In this case common impression is confirmed by test. You do judge others better than yourself. Mary’s opinion of Anna’s, Bertha’s, Cora’s and Dora’s places in the scale of intelligence or beauty, conceit or sociability, hits nearer the average and therefore the actual place than does Mary’s view of her own beauty or intelligence, conceit or sociability. Judgment of yourself is considerably less re- liable than your judgment of a friend, when we take the average verdict of a friendly jury as the standard. Next, a close-up of Mary as she registers an opinion of her own looks, or intelligence, or conceit, or snobbish- ness. Whether it is complimentary to Mary or not, it ap- pears that she does flatter herself a little. In all desirable qualities she rates herself too high. Particularly, Mary thinks she is much more refined, and has a better sense of humor than her friends are able to discover. Mary thinks herself just a little brighter and a little more sociable than she is voted to be by her college chums. And it is saying the same thing to say that Mary thinks herself less vulgar and less snobbish than others rate her. In which of Mary’s qualities does Mary judge herself most fairly and see herself nearly as others see her? Well! READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER 235 it’s the view she gets in the mirror. Mary has no illusions about her own beauty ; she places herself just right, which means that there are as many Mary’s who overestimate their attractions as there are those who underestimate them. But there are four times as many who overrate as underrate their refinement. Why? Because, though pref- erences differ, the face is there, it is objective; while re- finement and vulgarity have to be inferred from com- plicated signs of it in manner and behavior. You will tend to exaggerate the good points and underestimate the bad points of people you like and do just the reverse for people you don’t like. Next to beauty comes neatness, which again can be seen, and conceit which cannot be seen, but can easily be inferred from talk and manner. There is a further interesting question. If you stand high in a quality, are you a better judge of it in others than if you lack it? You are. Refined girls can judge re- finement in others better than can the average girl. In- telligent girls can judge intelligence better. This kind of test affords a psychological mirror in which you can see yourself as others see you. A little flattery as you take your own picture seems natural and does little harm; it may afford something to live up to. To be too distrustful or too hard on yourself might incline you to think your- self inferior, and that gets in the way of your proper self- assertion. Think well of yourself, but not too well,—and then live up to your estimate! How Friends and Strangers Judge Y ou When you apply for a job, you may be excited be- cause you feel that so much depends upon first impressions. If that employer weren’t a total stranger to you, you might not be so much in the dark as to how to impress 236 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT your good points and gloss over your weak ones. You may get some consolation from the fact that he feels the same way about you. Interviews are usually appointments with strangers; you don’t need to interview your close friends. If you get the job, do you change your opinion, or he his, on further acquaintance, and for the better or the worse? Whatever may be the case with love at first sight, employment at first sight is very common and often neces- sary; and while there is an engagement period in both cases, it should hardly be entered upon without serious intentions. So it is interesting to learn how much better you can judge persons whom you know; how much better your friends judge you than do strangers; and what you go by on first and on better acquaintance. Prof. Cleeton had twenty men students and twenty women students rated by their close friends on such mat- ters as how each stood in intelligence, in good judgment, in frankness, in determination, in leadership, in original- ity, in impulsiveness, in making friends. Then he had these same persons interviewed and rated by principals, em- ployers, all strangers, but used to dealing with people and engaging them. Speaking generally, the ratings of the stranger judges agreed fairly well among themselves; and the ratings by friends agreed fairly well among themselves. But the two ratings did not agree with one another, with the advan- tage in favor of the judgment by friends. So the judg- ment based on close acquaintance is superior to that of the first impression. The hardest thing to judge is frank- ness ; on that the rating is most variable, and next to it is the ability to make friends. Naturally, strangers and friends go by different signs. The looks and manner which count largely with the READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER 237 stranger are taken for granted by the friends, and one is more at home and natural among friends. The judgment of strangers tends to shift rapidly; so that two or three interviews are better than one, especially to see whether the impression grows more favorable or less so. The several judges vary very much in their power to hit it right. Some judge well in three out of four cases, and others judge badly three out of four times. So that this test also tests how good a first-impression judge you are. Women form judgments more rapidly than men, but the men, though more deliberate, are just as accurate. Then there is a third way of judging people that the fake readers of character employ, going by the shape of the head, by the slim and stout, the blond and brunette. So far as these could be applied, they proved to be just hit or miss. They enter into the total impression, but by themselves they fail. Judging by behavior, expression, gesture, manner, posture, speech, voice and the entire con- versation, which often tells more than the words say, has a far greater value than judging by looks. The actual basis of an impression is so complex that few of the judges, even the good ones, can tell how they decide. When you are judging for one special quality, the matter may be just as difficult. How does a credit man in a large department store know when to give credit or when to cash a check? As the world is run, we shall often rely on first impressions. It is worth finding out how ac- curate they are and how to make them more so. What You Can’t Tell From Handwriting It is hard to say which of the many attempted short cuts to the reading of character is the most worthless. 238 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT It may be palmistry, which goes by the lines that nature put in your hand, or graphology, which goes by the lines the school teacher taught your hand to write. They are foolish and vain for so many reasons that one doesn’t know which to put first. If these systems stopped with rough- and-ready guesses or estimates or classification of types, they might not be so misleading. It is their insistence upon details which gives the folly of the system away. The “handwriting” books, like the dren books or palmistry books or fortune-telling books that keep them company, tell you such nonsense as this: “If you write with an upward slope, it shows that you have ambition or pride, want to get up in the world; if you write with fine strokes, it shows that you are of a fine, sensitive nature, timid, shy; or, if your m’s and n’s are narrow, you, too, are sort of narrow in character, shrinking and drawn into yourself; if you write with heavy bold strokes and cross your t’s with a heavy bar, you are forceful ; and if that bar is long, you keep at things long or are per- severing ; if you leave your a’s and o’s open, you are open- hearted or generous, and if you close them you are close.” That sort of reasoning will do well enough for a joke, but as science it is ridiculous. Yet so many people believe this, or something like it and just as baseless, that it seemed worth while for some- body to get out his microscope and measuring scales and go to considerable trouble to test the belief. For it is just the man from Missouri, or any other State, who says “Show me” in most things, who falls for this sort of sham science. Prof. Hull and Mr. Montgomery, of the University of Wisconsin, got each of seventeen students of medicine who knew each other well to rate his sixteen companions ac- READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER 239 cording to these qualities: how ambitious or proud each was; how shy, how forceful; how persevering; how reserved or generous. Then the average rating of each man was arrived at. For samples of their handwriting they all copied the same paragraph. Next, with minute care, the slope, the width of the line, the heaviness of the stroke, the openness of the letters were measured, under a magnifying glass,—measured to the nearest one-fiftieth of an inch! Now these students were arranged in one column in the order in which their companions rated them as ambitious, shy, generous, and so on; then the handwritings were arranged in the order in which the writing showed those “signs” that the books mention. If the two orders agreed, or even fairly agreed, it would prove that there was some- thing in the “handwriting” sign business. If, for example, the two or three men who were rated highest in generosity were also those whose a’s and o’s showed most “openness,” and so on, down the list, the “system” would be proved. ‘What was the result? Absolutely no agreement whatever. You could just as well write the names of these students on slips of paper and draw them out of a hat, and say that the first name drawn is the most ambitious or shy, and you would be right as often as by judging their hand- writing ; or you could go by the size of their shoes or of their hats, and have just as good a system of character- reading. Here you have the result of one laborious scientific test. Will this proof have any effect on those who “believe” in “handwriting”? Answer for yourself. Now this doesn’t mean that handwriting is altogether meaningless and shows nothing at all. Handwriting, like everything else, is an expression of your make-up; but it will not support this detailed, far-fetched, unscientific analysis. Such false 240 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT notions flourish because they sound pleasantly true, if you don’t stop to think about them, or because the book says with such cocksureness that Prof. Unknown has read the hands or handwriting of crowned heads or hundreds of movie stars all over the world, but has kept away from any laboratory test. It may do for church bazaars, where nobody takes it seriously. Can You Judge from Photographs? Many believers in systems of character-reading, profes- sionals and amateurs, believe they can. Whether they are right or all wrong is very easy to determine. Since photographs are so often required of applicants for jobs, Prof. Laird, of Colgate University, who is an expert student of this modern science of testing fitness, wanted to know how well an average jury could judge. For his photographs he collected seventy pictures of students whose intelligence-test scores he knew, and se- lected from these five men and five women representing widely varying intelligence, so that he knew what their real order was. For judges he chose about seventy-five students, and some thirty men and women from all classes and grades of education. All the judges had to do was to take the ten photographs and arrange them in the order of in- telligence as he or she could read the signs of that quality in the faces before them. The result is easily arrived at. For each of the more than one hundred judges you calculate by how many points he misplaced each photograph and average that, and then get the average misplacement for the group. All this elaborate judgment of intelligence proved to be just guesswork. No one had a perfect score, and most had misjudged so many of the pictures that their arrange- READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER 241 ment would show one or two right, three or four nearly right, the rest badly off. Nor did the students judge other students any better than did the miscellaneous jury. It seems just a little easier to judge the intelligence of men than of women, perhaps because one is less distracted by other considera- tions ; and there is no clear difference between the judging powers of men judges and of women judges, though the women rated four of the five pictures of women too high. To make the matter as simple as possible, just a pair of photographs were submitted, and you had only to say which of the pair had the more intelligent face. Of course, you had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, and that is exactly what the results showed. You might as well choose the photograph with your eyes closed, and it made no difference whether, of each pair, both were men or both women or a mixed double. This is all very damaging to those who profess to read not only intelligence but every other sort of quality from real faces or from photographs. It doesn’t mean, of course, that you cannot tell anything about a person from a photograph. You get a total mixed and vague im- pression of an equally mixed and vague set of traits. As between extreme intelligence and extreme stupidity, one would have a strong chance of being right. But most of the differences that we are called upon to judge are slight, and occur among persons in the great middle group of a little more or a little less than average intelligence; and there’s the rub. The character readers pretend to read all your traits, either in your face or in your handwriting; and that is as far away from what faces or handwriting tell as you can get. The trouble with character readers or character- reading systems is that you expect too much of them, and 249 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT they rise to your expectation. The still more serious trouble is that they are based on fanciful notions that have no science about them. Slowly, however, we are building up a body of knowl- edge based upon careful observation of all the complex elements that go into the making of a human character. It will never be an infallible system, and it will always be modest in what it offers. What Do You Tall: About? What you choose to talk about reveals your interests and enthusiasm. Men talk “shop” or “golf”; women talk “clothes” or “gossip.” The psychologist has become an eavesdropper. He listens in on your talk in the street, in restaurants, at the theatre. He notes whether you were talking as man to man, as woman to woman, or as woman to man, or man to woman, and what it was about. By taking notes in London and New York, he compares the English and the American mind. Ready communication has done much to make the world alike; and nature long before that made men like men, and women like women, in whatever place or station. One is prepared to find that the main topics of interest are the same on Oxford or Regent Street as on Broad- way, and not so different on Main Street. The range 1s rather limited. First, there is Money and Business; sec- ond, Men; third, Women; fourth, Sport and Amuse- ments ; fifth, Clothing and Decoration. With it all there is a good deal of talk about yourself overlapping the other topics, and the “everything else” column is also large. This holds for London as for New York, and among college men and women in Columbus, Ohio. But there are READING AND JUDGING CHARACTER 243 interesting differences, showing differences of interest and convention. “Business” or shop-talk leads, and in New York or Columbus makes up half of all the conversations from man to man, but only a third in London. American men fre- quently talk to women about business ; Englishmen never. But women will occasionally talk to men about business to meet the masculine interest. Except in a college group, and there not much, women do not talk among them- selves about sport, having more personal matters at heart; but American women play up to men by talking about sport. American women talk more about “clothes” than do English women, and New Yorkers more than college girls. The favorite topic of American women is “men,” and much more so in New York than in Columbus; and they talk to men about “men” also to interest or flatter them. English women talk more about women. Dress plays a larger part in New York than in London; and London has a greater variety of conversation than New York. Men do not talk much about women, at least not on the street. : The Englishman, when talking to a woman, adapts the talk to her interests; the American woman plays up to the man. Women share men’s interests and the general interests of the world more freely in England than in this country, and more freely in New York than in Columbus ; which is about what we mean by saying that Columbus is more provincial. All this shows that men and women differ decidedly in their interests, mainly because they are different and have different parts to play in life as nature made it and as “man” remade it. Tradition plays a large part but 244 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT also follows the clue of nature. Women’s interests are clearly more with the personal side of life, with people and their intimate relations, including what they wear; and men’s interests just as clearly with objective and outside activities and larger affairs. The effect of tradition or custom is both to modify and to suppress natural interest. Nature determines the fundamental interests; convention determines how free we are to express them. Despite our democracy, tradition is more at work here than among our British cousins, and more at work in college than in the metropolis, despite the free fling of modern youth. Men and women talk together with far more restraint than do men to men, or women to women. Englishmen do most of the adapting of talk to the other sex; in America the women do the adapting. So far as talk tells, American men do not pre- fer blondes, so much as American blondes or brunettes cater to the preferences of such men as they prefer. Such are some rough-and-ready conclusions of a psychologist who employed the painless method of the questionless interview—just listening in on the popular wave-lengths of common talk or gossip. It’s a good enough method to bring out contrasts. Whatever the re- sults, they are likely to be challenged by whatever party comes out second best in the comparison. We no more like to hear ourselves as others hear us, than to see ourselves as others see us. But there is always one ready consola- tion: while these conclusions do not apply to you and your friends, they hold for everybody else! IX CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB Are You Social or Mechanical? WHEN you take a once-over of the field of human occu- pation, you find by far the largest number of people work- ing with things; doing things, making things by hand, tending machines that make things. People good at this are handy; if very good they are mechanically inclined. The other great human occupation is handling not things but people. Teachers, managers, clerks, salesmen all have to meet and do business with people, influence them, wait upon them. Those good at any occupation in which the personal element is strong are socially inclined. Mrs. A. as wife and mother may be better at the per- sonal and social side of the home than at the housekeeping end of it; and Mrs. B. may be the other way. Mr. A. may be a better shoemaker or watchmaker than a home- maker, and Mr. B. may be better as husband and father than at his job. Everybody must learn to handle things and people; but many are quite decidedly inclined one way or the other. We might add a third group, those who are best at handling ideas. Some thinking and plan- ning goes into handling things and men, but each of these requires a special sort of knack, or what is called technique. By and large, you are social or mechanical; which are you? 245 246 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Dr. Max Freyd, whose profession it is to find out what kinds of qualities different occupations require, compared a group of thirty seniors in a College of In- dustries as the “mechanicals” with thirty men from a school of life-insurance salesmanship as the “socials.” Their choice of study showed their own view of their bent. He then tried by test to see how the two groups differed. He found that the mechanically minded were in fact better at things that depended on close observation and control of their muscles, such as checking items in a list, telling whether a statement about a picture is true or false, writing in as small a space as possible or as slowly as possible. Though these “things to do” are like a clerk’s tasks, the mechanical did better at them than the in- surance students. The insurance men were better in dis- guising their handwriting and copying another’s hand- writing, were quicker and more conventional in their thinking, better at telling stories, had a wider range of personal interests, read more, went in more for the lighter side of life. The mechanically inclined were more given to thinking about serious things, for themselves. Fitness for the job life and the home and social life is real and important, though it isn’t easy to bring it out by tests. The biggest of all jobs is the job of finding your right place in life; and a fundamental question is: Which can you do better, handle things or people? Insurance agents are just one class who deal in human relations. Actors must certainly be drawn from the socially inclined ; and men of affairs, keen on making the wheels go round and often impatient with workmen who refuse to be treated as things, show the mechanical bent of mind in another direction. Recognizing the social element in the relations of labor to capital means adjusting the laborer’s job, as far as CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 247 can be, to his social needs. Men are not machines, how- ever mechanically inclined. Human nature came before the job; it must be considered in the job. Head Work or Muscle Work? The muscles are the servants, the intelligently trained servants of the mind. The directors of big business are called executives though they leave the execution of what they direct to others; unless executed their orders, how- ever wise or important, would have no effect. A man might be a genius, but if his muscles were all paralyzed, the world would never know it. He must write or paint or carve or speak or command through his muscles. The greatest minds no less than the ordinary ones are judged by what they do. Whatever you do, you do with your muscles, particu- larly with your hands. But there is head work behind all muscle work. The ‘general build of your body and its muscles is called physique; your mind has its “physique” also. The build of your mind determines what you are best fitted to do with it, no less than the build of your muscles affects what you can best do with them. A jeweller and a blacksmith, a surgeon and a butcher, all work with their muscles, but not with the same set or pattern of muscle work. The jeweller and the surgeon do fine, delicate work, but not the same order of work; the blacksmith and the butcher use large muscles in coarser operations. Their mind work is as different as their muscle work, and more so. The surgeon would be as helpless in repairing a watch as the jeweller in setting a bone. The butcher and the surgeon alike know something about anatomy, but what the surgeon knows is of a wholly different order. They have gone through entirely different trainings on the basis of a different fitness of muscle and mind. 248 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Possibly, if rightly started as boys, the jeweler or the butcher might have been made into a surgeon, and per- haps the jeweler more readily than the butcher. The chances are that the one became a jeweler and the other a blacksmith because the one always liked fine work and was built for it, and the other coarse heavy work and was built for that. Training makes you better equipped to do what by nature you are good for. But there is muscle work and mind work in every job; the only question is what kind and how much. The market talks of skilled and unskilled labor. Skill is in mind as well as in hand. It is the same in play as in work. When a pitcher makes a fine throw to third to catch a man on base, you say he has a good eye or a good arm; but when and when not to try it, shows a good head, good judgment. When he throws wild, he loses his head as well as his skill. In the wholesale districts you see a sign: “Hands Wanted.” But the employer would be disappointed if the hands came without their heads. In some jobs the sign should read: “Heads Wanted.” Many jobs are rated by their head work. The manager, the foreman, the designer, the head mechanic get their places because they can combine good head work with muscle work. Reducing work to routine reduces the head work. The power machine has simplified labor. It provides a useful place for armies of men and women who will find content- ment in just such occupation. There are thousands of others who won’t; some because it is too monotonous, others because that particular kind of work doesn’t suit them. Working at any job well brings the satisfaction of getting along and earning your living; but there is a special satisfaction in a job that you like because it suits your kind of mind work and muscle work. When you find so many women taking to shorthand CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 249 and typewriting and the housekeeping side of office work generally, it must mean that this sort of work suits the bent of a woman’s mind and muscles. They take to teach-~ ing because they have capacity for dealing with children. Boys take to mechanical toys; young men run the more complicated and the bigger-muscled machinery of the world. The typewriter wasn’t invented to give jobs to women, but that is what it has done. The auto has done the same for many men. There is a lot of mind work in both. It is worth while to look at your job and see how you can improve the mind work and the muscle work that you put into it. There are few jobs so simple that you can do them well unless you put your mind on your work. Are You Too Bright for Your Job? The favorite question to ask the small boy is: What are you going to be when you grow up? Perhaps “car- conductor” or “fire chief” would be the favorite answer. But when you ask nearly grown-up boys, the question be- comes more real as the need for decision approaches. When hundreds of young men who already had a job but went to a bureau for further advice were questioned, the remarkable fact appeared that only a third of them could tell what they wanted to make of themselves. The answers of 100 men who had some ideas on the matter were put down, and the callings that they had in mind were placed in a scale from the most ambitious, dif- ficult and responsible positions with corresponding in- comes, to ordinary good jobs and down to unskilled labor. Next the intelligence of these men was tested. Then in each case intelligence was compared with ambition. Forty- four of them were looking for jobs that just about suited 250, KEEPING MENTALLY FIT their intelligence; forty-one were really fitted, so far as intelligence went, for better jobs than they were looking for; and fifteen had ambitions beyond their intelligence. How many of these, if they were to find what they were looking for, would be happy and competent in their work, and how many would be misfits, because either too good or not good enough for their jobs, it is hard to say ; certainly a good many of them. Perhaps the intelligent group set their ambitions low for lack of spunk or “go” to go out and get something higher. They might have been afraid that they wouldn’t make good in anything better. Perhaps a little of that feeling brought them to the bureau to find a change of job. The smaller group might have been those who seek advice because of a sense of failure in what they have attempted. They rated themselves too high. When the same idea was applied to college students, asking them to think back to their grade-school days, and then to their high-school days and now in college, and put down what were their ambitions then and now, the result was similar. About the same number know pretty well what they are fitted for and have chosen something within their reach ; these are the fair, normal, average, and more of them come to this right idea of themselves in college than in high school and more in high school than before. Naturally, the younger you are, the less accurate is your idea of what you are to be, as based on your actual abil- ities. It is more a wish than a judgment. We say that in the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as fail. But the idea or the fear of failure seems to be in their minds. It is hard to say why so many have more intelligence than ambition. The few who attempt things beyond their powers may be candidates for what, when you assemble them for all causes, becomes a large CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 251 army of failures and misfits. Do so many set their am- bitions low because they realize how slight a chance they have to attain much more than what is readily within reach? Just how shall you take Emerson’s advice to “hitch your wagon to a star”? You must keep the wagon wheels on earth: the star is your ambition. Certainly the young man facing the world has two questions: What am I fitted for? What may I hope for? The problem is to adjust hope to fitness ; for that is the key to contentment. Taking stock of yourself, by tests or otherwise, is a good idea. Overcoming Handicaps It is consoling to find cases of great men who made a bad start, even though the general rule is that good physical health and good mental health go together. The Roman ideal was “a sound mind in a sound body”; and the Greeks put body culture on a par with mind culture. Their hero—their young Lindbergh—was the champion of the Olympic games open to all comers. The great Newton, who showed that an apple falls and the earth revolves about the sun by the same force, how sunlight breaks up into the rainbow colors, and made many other discoveries, was so small and frail at birth that they might have put him into a “quart cup.” But he had good health in manhood and lived to be 85. Victor Hugo, the great French writer, was another weakling whose life was despaired of. He worked hard and lived to an old age. Daniel Webster, the great statesman, was another example of a weak infant becoming a strong man. If these cases occurred today, we should know more of what these infants suffered from, and how they were re- leased from their handicaps. 252 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT In modern psychology there is a new idea by way of explanation. If you have a handicap, it may act as a spur to conquer it. It is said that as a boy Demosthenes had a speech defect. In his resolve to overcome it, he became the greatest orator of all Greece. Byron had a club-foot and despite it, or as we should now say, in overcompensa- tion for it, he became the best swimmer in all England, and a good rider as well as a famous poet. Our own Roose- velt sought the open spaces of the great West to over- come his physical weakness, and became the Colonel of the Rough Riders, a strenuous President, a hunter of big game in Africa. It’s the fashion now to call this an inferiority complex. When you make a proper compensation, you go along the line of Demosthenes, Byron and Roosevelt. But if your handicap embitters your life and sours your disposition, because you are crippled and not like other folks, it may distort your character as well as your career, and invite failure. The mental side of an inferiority handicap may be even more distressing than a body defect. A blemish that in- terferes with your looks is a social not a physical handi- cap. It is almost worse to be disfigured than to be crippled. Or if you belong to an unpopular race or are otherwise the victim of social prejudice, it may induce a sense of inferiority, of not having a fair deal, of being discrim- inated against, which cripples effort and affects life-aims and happiness. In the case of minor handicaps like stutter- ing, it is quite intelligible how they interfere with a normal mental and social life. There is one class of the handicapped for whom it is a particularly difficult task to rise above their bodily weak- nesses, because they are largely mental ones—the nerv- ously handicapped. There was Herbert Spencer, a re- CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 253 former in philosophy, with a shelf of weighty books to his credit, an invalid all his life, often working only fif- teen minutes at a stretch, yet reaching a good old age. Much of his difficulty could have been relieved by wise treatment. The great Darwin had to take care of himself and did so wisely to the great benefit of the world, through the works of himself and his family of famous sons. Bee- thoven kept on despite illness and a deafness that toward the end prevented him from hearing the music he composed. Kant, the great German philosopher, had a strong mind in a frail body; and Heine, the German poet, suffered a living martyrdom of the flesh, while his mind produced immortal songs. The overcoming of handicaps must be common among those who make a moderate success in life; we know more about the great ones. Whether they learn to bear their cross and make the best of it, or really overcome a defect, the gallery of fame of those who belong to this class should cheer others who have a like problem. Ups and Downs of the Day's Work When you pay a man by the hour you might well consider which hour as well as which man. The night’s sleep winds a man up or “fuels” him for the day. But the mind-machine doesn’t run like clockwork. It takes time to get it going, which is the warming-up process; and not so long after the mind-machine strikes its pace fatigue sets in and it begins to run down hill. Then comes the noon-day stoking and the steam-gauge of energy slowly rises until again the peak of efficiency is reached, to be followed by the end-of-the-day growing fatigue. That is the typical daily curve registered on the energy-clock for most men. So far as possible we 254 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT should adapt the day’s work to the day’s work rhythm. Here is one piece of evidence that reveals the ups and downs of a day’s work. Students were tested for every hour of the day from 8 in the morning until 5 in the evening, except at noon. They were tested with rather simple mental work, the output of which could be easily measured. They repeated numbers read to them; they memorized numbers flashed on a screen; they learned a sort of code; they tried to recognize which of a group of diagrams they had seen before; they filled out miss- ing words in sentences requiring simple reasoning. And their score on this program was tallied each hour. These are all bits of mental work that are hard enough to re- quire attention and yield an output that you can meas- ure both in how much is done and how many mistakes are made. ; Counting as par, or 100, the output at 8 o’clock, the efficiency goes up promptly to 104.3 at 9 o’clock; it reaches its peak at 10 o’clock, 106.6, then drops slightly at 11 o’clock, 105.6. But at 1 o’clock, when work is resumed after the lunch hour, you have the low- est efficiency of the day, 98.7. By 2 o’clock there is a little recovery, 100.6 (about where you started at 8); at 3 occurs the afternoon peak, 105.1; at 4 it is still 104.2, but at 5 it has gone down sharply to 100.4, which means that you are as good, though not as fresh, as when you started. The noon hour is partly a physiological matter. After eating the blood goes to the stomach and away from the brain. Animals go to sleep after eating, and many hu- mans feel like doing so. The sleepiness shows in the work and must wear off before the work-curve rises. You might suppose that you would start at your best in the early morning, and perhaps some persons CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 255 do so; but most need warming-up practice, as all trainers know. You cannot strike your best pace at once. It would be well in factory work and other work to go easy after the noon meal, not to expect so much for the first hour, and to count on making it up later. Two points may be added. This curve of efficiency of the day’s work isn’t quite the same for all kinds of work. This typical chart applies to simple, partly routine tasks, while complex ones have a more variable and ir- regular schedule. Secondly, it varies with individuals. We vary in our work-patterns. For a considerable num- ber of persons the hardest time is in the morning; they rarely wake up fully rested and take time to get going. Children are generally best in the morning; nervous peo- ple worst. There is a morning yawn in trying to wake up, as well as the more common evening yawn in trying to stay up. Yawning is a peculiar and not very simple process, but is a pretty good sign that you are no longer fit for the day’s work. The rule of efficiency is to do your best work at the best time, when you are in the best condi- tion, and to adopt a schedule that will keep you mentally fit for the whole stretch of the day’s work. The eight- hour day is a convenient unit for industry. But nature breaks it up according to the working of the human organism. As usual there must be some compromise be- tween human beings as they are and what, for the work of the world, they must be trained to become. And putting all this together, we have to give a large part to habit—the adoption of a routine and holding to it. The nervous system is plastic enough to adjust to the requirements of our artificial kind of life. The night workers have to learn to sleep by day. Many have to work under pressure, and there are rush hours and 256 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT rush seasons. We cannot afford to become mere ma- chines. But still more important becomes the quality of the work when we leave the simpler occupations where we can keep score on the output, for the more and more complex ones where quality counts and quantity is quite secondary. There is no economy in doing poor work when in poor condition and having to do it again. In the more re- sponsible callings it is more important to choose the periods of best condition for the most taxing work. Crea- tive work is the most exacting. Many are engaged on jobs on which they can do their best only when mentally most fit. To force that kind of work into the groove of routine is mental waste. Civilization has forced most of us into the eight-hour-a-day working habit. It is well to remember that much of the most important work is not done by the hour. Cutting Down the Leaks If we could make every stroke of work count, a day’s job wouldn’t be exhausting, and most people wouldn’t have to work many hours a day. It is the leaks that count. It doesn’t take long for a little leak to make a great waste. But there is no sense in urging a counsel of perfection. Human beings will never be perfect. Waste is inevitable—the only problem is to reduce it. You cannot avoid waste by working all the time. The way to avoid waste is to work a short time at your best and be sure that there are no leaks. But that, again, is almost impossible. All we can do is to control the leaks as best we can. Ten minutes of working under difficulties is more exhausting than an hour’s work under good con- ditions. Taking a holiday often seems like wasting time; CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 257 ~ but it is profitably spent if it makes the human machine run better when it runs. The human machine is a mighty complex one, and the most complex part of it is the mind. The mind-ma- chine is an emotional one also. It works well under good emotional conditions. The mind needs interest in the work—that is the oil that keeps the machine going. Without it there is much friction—a constant grind. The state of mind that’s best for work is the state of mind that’s best for everything, and the name for it is happiness. To be happy you must work with the grain, not against it. You must run freely, free of care, free of - disturbance. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a pretty good three-in-one to live by. Unrest, discon- tent, chafing, add to your mental waste. Anything done unwillingly is not only done badly but wastefully. There are as many different ways of spend- ing energy unwisely as there are sides to human nature. Everybody must work out his own plan of reducing waste, as of pursuing happiness. It is a good idea to keep a ledger of your waste. To increase your output, stop the leaks. Worry is so exhausting because there is a constant leaking of energy ; more goes into emotional waste than into work. Mind-health depends upon reducing waste and using the efficiency which means the smooth running, the purr of content, that comes from good adjustment, when the mind-machine goes with the right hum. When you work, make a noise like a happy man. When a thing is easy, we call it child’s play. Play is easy and pleasant because it lets the energy go where it will. It is spontaneous. But a game, though it has the zest of play, requires some concentration—keeping your 258 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT mind on the game, your eye on the ball. Work, unless it is all routine, demands an effort of concentration. Noise is a great disturber because we can’t close our ears; we can only close the mind. Distraction pulls you one way when you are bent on another. Attention is the signal for concentration. As you grow tired, it become harder to attend. Distraction means that something else bids for your attention. There is ri- valry and conflict of interest, and that means waste. It isn’t all a matter of training. It is also a matter of how we are built. : Complex machines have to be more carefully adjusted than simple ones. We can keep on with routine work when we are too tired for close work. Railroads never let engi- neers run locomotives for many hours at a stretch. There is too much at stake if there is a leak in attention. Change of work is almost a rest in itself. There is no simple rule for avoiding waste. You must know your mind-machine and run it according to its con- struction and the grade of work you have to do. The Secret Nobody Knows Like the man or the book or the job that nobody knows, the secret nobody knows is merely what everybody knows, but knows only imperfectly—the secret of how to concen- trate. “Nearly everyone has difficulty in concentration of at- tention. Brain-workers in business and industry, students in high school and college, and even professors in uni- versities, complain of the same difficulty.” That is how one writer begins his chapter on concentration. Concentration refers to the fine cutting-edge of the mind ; but it takes good steel to take a good edge. First, CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 259 coarse shaping and grinding and then fine honing must be done before your edge is fit. You can’t skimp anywhere, and you must start with the right material. The most familiar support of concentration is a good memory. Another writer starts out thus: “A good mem- ory depends upon a good digestion, a good logic, and a good conscience.” It all depends upon how far back you go in laying the foundations for good concentration. Oli- ver Wendell Holmes said that one most important choice in life is to choose the right kind of grandparents. Con- centration goes back to your heredity. But the practical job of concentration that most of us have to face is to do the best with what material our heredity provides, and get what help we can in training it to a cutting edge. Most of us are not hopelessly dull, but many of us keep on hacking away with dull mental tools because we haven’t learned the art of sharpening our wits to what edge they will take. Because so many believe that the secret of concentra- tion is one that somebody knows, they are ready to listen to the claims of anyone who shouts loudly enough that he has it and has it to sell. I haven’t examined all of these claims, but I have gone through enough of them to advise you not to buy or even steal the secret. You buy the key and then find it doesn’t fit your mental lock. And many another adviser on concentration who hasn’t anything to sell, and is really eager to help bright Tom and average Dick and dull Harry to concentrate, and talks fairly sound psychology as well, doesn’t get much beyond jollying you or exhorting you to brace up and go to it. They only scatter little pennies of sound enough advice: Attend to one thing at a time, and do it well; don’t leave ragged edges in your work; empty your mind of everything else; tighten your intention to work; and 260 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT have faith that presently you will have a balance in the bank of concentration. Now all this is true within limits; but learning to con- centrate correctly, like learning to walk correctly, is a matter of correcting all sorts of little deficiencies and bad habits. It may be a little job or a big one. What the adviser needs is a plaster-cast of your mind as one might need a plaster-cast of your foot to build the right sup- port for you. And that is what the psychologist is work- ing at. But he has very little hope that some fine morn- ing he will wake up and discover the secret and patent it and make a fortune. A student of a course on the “Secret of a Good Mem- ory” said that he might have derived more benefit if he hadn’t so often forgotten to go to the lessons. And yet even such courses help for the reason that they induce the student to take the matter seriously enough to get his money’s worth if he can. Like New Year’s resolutions, the courses go finely early in January, and a few stal- warts hold out to February, but then the resolutions drib- ble away. The people who really keep such resolutions are the ones who don’t have to make them. Now all of this is intended not to discourage the learn- ing of concentration, but to emphasize the importance of it and to show what kind of job it is, and why the remedy won’t come in the form of a secret or a prescription to be taken so many times a day. Learning to concentrate better means re-educating your entire habits of mind; it means a readjustment of your attitude to your work. Mr. Arnold Bennett has a right view of the problem from a different angle in his “How to Live on Twenty- four Hours a Day.” It’s a case where the reaction of the patient is as important as the skill of the doctor. You can do a lot to improve your mental work-habits by going CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 261 after your weak points both earnestly and intelligently, and that is something that nobody but you knows. Don’t ask or expect a cure for poor concentration, but set yourself the task of improving your all-around mental fitness as you would your bodily fitness. You wouldn’t write to a doctor and say: “I'm not feeling well ; please send me a remedy for it.” You can no more write to a psychologist: “I’m not thinking well; what is your remedy?” Not all of it, but much of the remedy lies in what nobody but you yourself knows. Hindrances to Concentration Concentration applies to many ways of the mind. At- tention lets in and it shuts out. If your mental gates are always ajar, you are like the child, easily distracted. You can’t help letting in much that you would like to shut out; but, unlike the child, you really want to shut it out. The gates of the mind are the special senses and the gen- eral stream of bodily feelings of comfort and discomfort. You cannot concentrate if your tooth is aching, or your shoe is pinching, or you are chilly or hungry, or the ventilation is bad. Work assumes freedom from these body distractions. Nor are we often distracted by tastes or odors. There remain, then, sights and sounds. It is usually easy to shut out distracting sights, just as it is easy to turn out the light and close the eyelids when you want to go to sleep. But you have no way of shutting your ears except the mental way of not listening. Noises are the greatest distractors. A rackety factory, a clicking office, a madly bustling department store, a shouting quick-lunch counter, all on streets deafeningly noisy with clanging, tooting, rumbling traffic—are as dis- tracting to an individual’s work as the sounds are wear- 262 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT ing to his nerves. Yet what can’t be cured must be en- dured. Your first lesson in concentration is to shut out sense-distraction if you can, disregard it if you must. The most persistently distracting noises are those carrying meaning. It is harder to work with others talk- ing in the room than with the hum of a machine. It’s harder not to try to listen. For really concentrated work you want to be alone. But privacy and quiet are the most expensive luxuries of modern life. Buy them if you can; endure their absence if you must. A greater source of distraction comes from inside you. One part of your mind distracts the other. In the back of your head are other ideas and interests; you want to be doing other things; you have worries and hopes and disappointments on your mind. It’s easier to say: “For- get them,” than to do it. Or one little thing goes wrong, and the day is completely spoiled. So the distraction of other interests and your inside emotional distractions in- terfere with the concentration on your work. It is in the nature of the work and the demands it makes that we meet the various types of concentration. Greatest contrast in type is found between the wide-angled and the narrow-angled. The former has eyes and ears everywhere; the latter focuses on one small area alone. A good hostess at a dinner-table hears and sees everything, notices whether courses are properly served, which guests are interested or even flirtatious, who is bored, who is slighted. And the waiters have pretty wide-angled attention, too, to their part of the dinner. Floor-walkers seem to do nothing in particular, but they are observing much in general. A surgeon must be capable of intense concentra- tion and have assistants and nurses equally concentrated on their part of the operation. Vocations differ widely in their demands on one or the CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 263 other type of concentration. We do well to choose a call- ing that suits our preferred type. There are, however, so many occupations and situations in our daily lives which call now for one and now for the other type of attention that we must learn to do fairly well at both. Your job should be suited to your best type of attention. Next is the important time-factor. Almost everyone can attend sharply a little while; the trouble comes in keeping it up. Whatever your type, your endurance counts. If your attention-habits are elastic and you can shift from one thing to another without much distraction, you'll make a good foreman or office-manager, answering within an hour a dozen different questions and turning to a dozen different details for keeping the work going,— and in any free five minutes attending to your own affairs. That kind of job would be impossible to one no less able, but who works well on only one thing without interrup- tion. Equally important is the long-range time factor. How soon are you going to get tired of your job? Much of the hiring and firing and still more of the quitting and flitting is due to the short-shift mental habits of workers. They can “concentrate” for a month, not for a year. On the other hand, an inventor may tire of one problem be- cause he has solved the knottiest part of it, and turn to another because he wants to continue concentrating on something hard. Then there is the ability and the will to respond to the summons whenever and however it comes—not giving in too easily to circumstances or mood, but overcoming in- ertia and answering the challenge of duty. And through it all runs the shift from one kind of mental habit to an- other as we grow in interests and responsibilities. 264 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Bigger Men and Bigger Jobs There is a general impression that physique counts in getting on and in making an impression. If so, the bigger men will be the better men, or leaders will exceed sub- ordinates in physique. Yet nothing would be more foolish than to select men for “big” positions by their size. Mr. Gowin in his book on “The Executive” has collected some interesting facts about 1500 leading men from suck classes as presidents of railroads, banks, insurance com- panies, corporation directors, presidents of universities, labor, fraternal and religious organizations, Chief Jus- tices, Senators, Mayors, Bishops, publishers, merchants, sales managers; and also included others of compa- rable station, drawn from a wider range of occupations. Size takes account of height (tall men), and weight (heavy men), and their combination (big men). That police, fire or traffic chiefs should be men of selected phy- sique is natural, but the work of most executives and leaders might be done as well by a short as by a tall man; by a light as by a heavy one. As a matter of fact, execu- tives who have made good and occupy prominent positions prove to be “bigger” men. Taken as a whole and com- paring them with ordinary good life-insurance risks, they are much taller. The topnotch executives are nearly three inches taller ; the minor executives are only one inch taller; but all considered together they measure two inches above the common man. The bigger the position, the bigger the man. But when these leaders of men are separated into classes, there is one group of creative men, not executive in the sense of managing men, such as artists, authors, psychologists, philosophers, lecturers, preachers, who are of average height, and decidedly lighter even than the CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 265 lesser executives and much lighter than the others. These are the lightweight leaders. It is the high-up executive who is the heavyweight of the order; but he owes that distinction to weight more than to height. Speaking roughly, intellectual leaders (other than this creative group) and political leaders, and business leaders, are all of a height and rather tall; and they are heavier as you pass from intellect to politics to business. But the labor leaders are the heaviest of all. The picture of the executive dealing with practical affairs and with men in an authoritative relation as physically a big man is correct. Creative intellectual work, rather than intellectual management, doesn’t demand bulk. Presumably it goes by quality. There are some further sidelights pointing in the direc- tion of greater vigor among the markedly executive group. They come from larger families than the average, and they themselves have larger families than the average. Also they are better joiners and mixers, belonging to more associations. What this all means is pretty clear. To get to the top, you must have a good physical equipment. You must be able to work hard and long, stand the strain, assume the major obligations of life and carry them well, and live long enough to reap the fruit of your labors. The big executives are a select class of men, most of them cer- tainly making their way by their brains, but well sup- ported by vigor of body. Such physique impresses other men and eases the road to leadership, especially in a democracy where advancement is so generally by election by one’s peers. The advice is simple, especially for those seeking executive callings. If you want to keep mentally fit, keep physically fit. You’ll find the executives on the golf course. 266 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT Do You Make Things Hard by Thinking They Are? Is difficulty, like trouble or worry, largely of your own making? A good share of it is; but it isn’t easy to prove it. Here is a very striking case, and its lesson is just as sound today as in 1890, when the story begins. The 1890 census was the first to use electric tabulators. They were simple machines, but new, and no one could tell how clerks would take to them, nor what should be considered a fair day’s work. The job consisted in trans- ferring the records of sex, age, color, married or single, nationality, occupation, language, schooling, to a card by punching a hole in the right place for each reply. When these cards, properly punched, were fed into the tabulat- ing machine, the totals appeared as on a cash-register. But first you had to learn a lot of symbols, such as Ad for farmer, Kd for merchant. There were as many as 250 holes in the punching machines and you had to know most of them by heart. About ten holes had to be punched in each card. To get ready for the millions of records, an instructor took charge of every twenty clerks and gave them five weeks to practice. It was two weeks before any reached what was set as a day’s job, 550 cards. Then they tried to speed things up a bit; they posted a daily honor roll and everyone tried to break the record. Records of from 650 to 1500 were made. But the strain began to tell. The clerks complained; the honor roll was stopped and each clerk did what he could without rushing. So much for Chapter I. These clerks were given the impression that this card-punching was a hard job. Then comes Chapter 2. Two hundred green clerks were scat- tered in among those already trained. They knew nothing of the schedules ; they had never seen the machines. What CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 267 they saw was a lot of clerks fast at work punching hun- dreds of cards as though it were an easy job. They had no training, but also no suggestion that the work was hard. In three days several of them had done 500 cards and in a week nearly all had done so, with the average still rising. Under the easy suggestion they did in one week what under the “hard” suggestion took five weeks; and there was no strain. One of these temporary clerks broke the record by doing 2230 cards in a day, four days’ work in one. In the first month clerks often went home sick after do- ing 700 cards. Later some of them punched twice that num- ber and were not worn out. It’s a striking proof that think- ing things hard makes them so. That is the power of sug- gestion, the same kind of suggestion that makes you afraid when others are afraid, that makes your aches plainer when you think of them, that makes people sick when they have doubts whether the mushrooms they gathered and ate were the right kind or poisonous. And it’s collective suggestion, suggestion in a crowd; it’s not wholly conscious suggestion. The new clerks weren’t told that the job was hard or easy; they just saw others doing it and went at it with the idea that what others could do they could do, too. The lesson of this story will not apply to everything in life ; some things are really hard, or at least they are easy only for those who are naturally good at them. But the moral holds: Don’t make things hard by thinking them so. Imaginary stumbling blocks act like real ones. The Urge of Incentives The place of incentives in human behavior is a large one. Their psychology is important, their part in maintaining 268 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT mental fitness no less so. The body-mind machine is run by urges; they drive from within. The urge for air, for food, for rest, for mates, stand as their type, with strong body feelings to enforce them. The urge for excitement, occupa- tion, adventure, fun, companionship, contest, domination, admiration, fall in the mental circuit, and are more com- plexly organized. Incentives are added spurs to action. If the coquette, when the attentions of one suitor are waning, favors his rival, she counts on the incentive of jealousy to quicken his interest; and it acts just so far as the object of the scheme is susceptible to jealousy as an incentive. Incentives are the pacers on motorcycles to urge the bicycle racers to keep up with them. They are the bundle of hay held by the driver’s whip at the head of a donkey. Incentives become more indirect and more complex as the intricacy of human motives increases under the stress of the social system of rewards and punishments. Your char- acter appears in the range of incentives to which you respond. Most of us work under pressure. The urge to do would not be strong enough without incentives—not to do what we must to live and get on. How much would be done if none of us were required to do anything? Gaining a living, which we may call economic pressure, and winning esteem and position, which we may call social pressure, are ever acting upon us, holding out riches and reputation as a re- ward, and poverty and disgrace as punishment. Does re- ward or punishment—heaven or hell—play the larger part in the world of incentives? The two form a single team, the one urging you to forge ahead, the other not to fall back. Some attempt has been made to find the answer in ex- periment. As a test a person was told to press a key as soon as he got the signal, or to press the right key for the CHOOSING AND HOLDING YOUR JOB 269 right signal. The time was measured to the hundredths of a second. By practice each subject soon was trained to ap- proximately his lowest record of quick response. Then the incentive was added by asking each subject to do his ut- most to break his record. As a consequence, there was a lowering of the reaction time, on the average of 6 per cent. Then the subject was told that if he didn’t react quickly, enough he would get an electric shock. As a fact, no mat- ter how quickly he reacted he got the shock. And this slight punishment lowered the average time by 16 per cent. So here it is 214 to 1 in favor of punishment as against reward. But both act as incentives. When these incentives were removed, the reaction time lengthened to the ordinary record. But experiment is one thing and the incentive that operates in daily life is another. When we work under pressure, we do a bit better; but do we pay too much for our efforts, which at time cause strain and worry? Yet without the good of incentives, work becomes dull, and many get bored and loll and loaf and drowse. If the work is such that we can get little “kick” out of it, we have the incentive; if it lacks it, somebody else has to administer the kick to keep us going. Unquestionably we need both kinds of incentives; but the pressure of work-or-starve, sink-or-swim, is pretty drastic ; and men should not be slaves, either to their own passions or to the will of a taskmaster. With your system of proper incentive once estoplisied, you should be able to drive yourself. The individual disposition enters. For most of us, rou- tine work at regular hours and steady pressure of need is best; we need the flywheel of regularity to overcome a native inertia. Putting things off until we feel the urge is a difficult program because it requires more discretion and 270 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT less laziness than many of us possess. Things must be done on time, yet our time-clock schedule of life is certainly no part of the original dispensation. We just have to adopt it and fit into it as we can or must. But necessity is the least valuable member of the ancient and honorable order of incentives. Ambition, the desire to stand well with our fellow-beings, the rewarding feeling of accomplishment, of duty done and a task well faced, the esteem and love of those whose opinions we value— these incentives make the world go round and keep us in our orbits and progress. Not too far in the background stand the fears of failure, the sorrows of hopes deferred, the widening gap between promise and fulfillment, and the wolf at the door. If you have your incentives and your responses to them well in hand, you are on the highway of mental fitness. : CHAPTER X “PERSONAL”: A FEW TYPICAL CASES Puzzling Failures “I am a mind-doctor in this sense; that practicing in a small town where there are few specialists, we are all general prac- titioners: but cases with some mental feature are apt to come to me because it is known that I am interested in dealing with them. Serious cases I have to refer to a neurologist in a nearby city. But it so happens that I have been consulted recently in regard to a number of cases; and I can’t make out what is the essential trouble. I call them puzzling failures. They ,are all young men who fail to make good. They are mostly good students, and they do better at studies than in life. They may like the student life so much that they go ahead as graduate students with some idea of getting into professions. But they drift and they seem to lack prac- tical sense; they are known to be queer; they can’t keep their clothes in order; they don’t seem to have ambition enough to buckle down; they may want to get married, but just seem to wait until some girl captures them, and they have nothing. in the way of income to marry on. They don’t know what they want to do, how to go about finding a job, and when they find one, they do what they are told and no more, and everybody wonders why they don’t get along. Then they ask me, and I don’t know, either. What is wrong with this type of person? “M. D. (which means Mind-Doctor).” THE one thing no doctor and no psychologist wants to do is to frighten young men who are suffering from some handicap in mental make-up by hinting that there is some- thing seriously wrong; that they were born that way, and there is nothing to do but accept the situation. Yet in order to get at the cases that can be helped and saved— 271 212 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT and they are the ma jority—one must recognize the minor- ity of cases in which what proves to be an early arrested mental development begins just as described. So the doctor is not only puzzled; he is anxious. He knows, as many a social worker knows, that he must be on the lookout for these cases of young men and young women who seem to be normal enough until they reach the age of manhood and womanhood, and then instead of going on stop or go backward ; they fail to develop mature ways of facing jobs and responsibility and marriage; and they become more and more peculiar, until at length it must be recognized that they are disposed to go only so far before they stop or drop back, go down and out. The mind-doctor has a name for this form of mental trouble, but there is no use in troubling the lay reader with it. It is enough to know that it exists. But there are many more cases, perhaps not altogether unlike this as you ob- serve them, which are unlike it in that under proper di- rection, the patients may be set back on the road to such success in life as is within their reach. These are the puz- zling failures, or likely to be failures; and they need a salvation army of a very different type to bring them within the fold of the mentally fit. What can be done for them must begin by way of un- doing. It all comes pretty late. Some of these cases have been allowed, even encouraged, to go too long on the wrong road. The best hope is to detect these cases early and insist on steering them toward practical things, outdoor inter- ests,—most of all, doing things. Often it doesn’t matter so much what it is so long as they get thoroughly absorbed in doing, making, tinkering, collecting, and, if possible, earn- ing. They usually do not tend that way of their own account. They don’t play enough, not hard enough; don’t take on fads and become fans, don’t throw themselves into “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 273 something, don’t get into the game, the game of living. Their minds and energies grow inward instead of outward. They dream and read and absorb and take on mannerisms, are often shy, and get clogged and stuck in their mental works. Of course, they shouldn’t be kept from studies and dis- cussions; but they are likely to go too much that way. They need to have their minds turned outward. They need independence, too, and the ability to take care of them- selves. They must be taught to observe and to do and to manage, to be neat and orderly and care about appear- ance, and to realize that this is a world full of respon- sibilities and jobs and tasks, and not merely an interesting world to live and dream in, and be taken care of. All this, which seems to come naturally to the normal boy, will not be as easy and natural for them. So they need special help, and the earlier the better. Part of the trouble in catching these cases young enough, is that many boys pass through such a stage and come out all right. It is a critical period in life when a man finds himself, strikes his pace and comes into his own. Many cannot do this without being made over. They need help early and often. If they don’t get the right sort, they become puzzling failures. A Tragedy of Complexes “Since early childhood I have made enemies, consciously and un- unconsciously. I brood over things and magnify them. Toward every circumstance in which I have found myself I have been destruc- tively critical, at the same time being conscious of lack of the neces- sary will or character to change things. I have really feared and hated everything I have gone into, including marriage, never having been able to endure criticism on the part of others toward me, and my husband is critical and unsympathetic. You see, I can analyze without being able to help myself. My lack of adjustment 274 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT toward uncongenial surroundings antedates my marriage, to which I had to look forward as a solution of my complexes. Instead, my husband, being different in race, creed, upbringing and ideals of life, and similar to me in passionate anger when aroused, I fear for us both. I want to be the one to change. I have tried the method of ‘affirmation’ taught by so-called ‘applied psychology,’ and have seemed to impress upon myself just the opposite of what I was trying to achieve. Now, I have always felt that hypnotism, under competent hands, would be marvelous in the treatment of nervous people, and I have even wondered why it was not used in insane asylums. “I might add that I visited the Institute a few years ago, and after an hour’s talk with one of their physicians, was told that there was nothing the matter with me, and was dismissed. But I seem since to have less emotional control than ever, and I am afraid. Whom shall I go to? My upsets seem to come in cycles. “DESPAIR.” Here we have a complex, a general emotional instability, something of fear and suspicion, anger, resentment and a touch of superiority. The whole constitutes a barrier to happiness. It is a youthful type of complex, and its counterpart may be observed in many a difficult child. She has in a sense not completely outgrown the complexes, the emotional attitudes of a high-strung child. The anger, the antagonism, the destructive criticism, the incapacity to adapt to those of different views, the strong desire to change but inability to do so, are all characteristic of childhood difficulties. One cannot go back and re-educate; but if my diagnosis is correct, one may speak to “Despair” rather positively from the point of view of re-education. “Despair” under- stands her condition well enough to take several impor- tant steps in understanding it better and with more favorable chances for control. So first about hypnotism; forget it. It is a useful pro- cedure in certain types of cases, not in yours. Second, as for “affirmation” or “new thought” or “applied psy- chology,” you have given it all the trial it needs. Cer- ne “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 275 tainly you yourself have to do the biggest part of getting yourself out of your mental web; but you are not likely to succeed by just struggling, with no other plan than a con- viction that you are to be set free. Again, I should say forget it, since your attempts to overcome it by that route failed. You rubbed your troubles in instead of out. Your plan is not to dwell on your troubles and ponder over ways to get out of them, but neglect them as far as you can and get absorbed in something else. For this you need help ; you have little to be cured of, much to be steered away from. It won’t be done in a day or a month, and you need mostly to be started in the right road. What that road is depends on too many circumstances to be con- sidered here. Yours is not a tragedy, but has the makings of one; and there are hundreds of cases of persons who have learned to live through their complexes, or with them, and keep mentally fit. Your tone of despair is unjustified, though it may be that you need help pretty badly. You and the many others in your class cannot expect to uproot in a season what has been growing wrongly for many seasons. Some psycho- analysts would question that. They would do so because they recognize in some cases one special complex, one dominant source of conflict, that if relieved resets the life- adjustments to a normal course. It may be so; it seems to me more likely that your difficulties are rooted generally in a difficult temperament not adequately directed in earlier days. In either case, you have a favorable chance to make good. A Difficult Daughter “I have a daughter 11, years of age. Up to a year or so ago I considered her normally trained. Now I am much perturbed over the situation. My child is unusually bright, strong-willed and fears - 276 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT her father, who considers himself a disciplinarian. I am more sub- missive, speak kindly to her; and, when correcting her, she re- torts: ‘No one can force me to do anything” At camp in the summer she is considered a 100-per-cent camper; also at school. The fact that she evidently does not show the proper amount of respect for me almost worries me into a nervous state. Sometimes I wonder ir» the rod would be a corrective measure. Her father is contemplating sending her to a year-round school. I may also add that she takes a deep interest in religion. PF. 8.PY This case, like many another, presents points that are typical and points that are special. The most typical is that most children, boys more commonly than girls, re- spond to a group discipline better than to a direct control by the parent or parents. Camp and school thus have a peculiar value for them. Why? Because in submitting to a school or camp rule, the child feels less keenly the yielding to another; he or she is sharing in a common discipline, not something invented and directed against him or her personally. That is one of the reasons why the only child is apt to grow up spoiled or self-willed. What is not so typical is that this refractory behavior started only a year or so ago. You suggest that the fact that father and mother are at odds about the matter (this lack of unity is always bad though often unavoid- able) may be in part responsible; for your older daughter, who grew up before this difference was so marked, escaped this attitude of rebellion. As a rule, children who obsti- nately oppose discipline show it much earlier and quite constantly, and by the time they reach the age of 11 or 12 are already well on the road to improvement. As between control by fear and control by kindness and understanding, my vote is all for the latter. If the child- parent bond of love can be saved, that is the precious thing ; and real respect is more apt to grow out of love, though the show of it may be imposed by fear. You are quite right in expecting respect of a child of that age, “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES Rai which can hardly be expected of a younger child. Yet respect at no age can be commanded or demanded ; it must be built up on a natural feeling. It is part of a larger bond. Some parents value frank companionship above respect. But your problem is one of the most constant and seri- ous that arise. The core of the situation is that certain types of sensitive children react negatively to discipline. They are not really bad. If too often crossed, they get worse. It simply makes them violently rebellious and un- happy to be “bossed” as they put it. You must somehow establish your right to the authority; and it takes endless patience and fine diplomacy to do it. You can, and per- haps in some cases you must, use rougher methods and just override the child’s will ; but you may pay the cost. You must also consider that this trait is not all to the bad, though terribly inconvenient and irritating. It takes almost a saint of a parent to cope with it. The director of a school for boys remarked to me of a boy who behaved like your daughter: “That boy’s unwillingness to submit to discipline has an element of leadership about it; yet he will be a bully and never a leader unless he learns to sub- mit.” I repeat that the test of all discipline is how it is taken. This kind of mental medicine works not according to what is in it but how the patient reacts; and that is also a factor in all medicine. Making a child submit outwardly while remaining rebellious inside doesn’t help much. You will also notice that there are some persons, often most kindly disposed, like an aunt or uncle or friend of the family, who bring out all the rebellious traits of a child, and others who bring out the good ones. In your case the all-year school seems the best way out. The child is old enough, has shown that she reacts well to group discipline, and presumably would make a good ad- 278 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT justment. But consider this, also. Is she willing to go? Will she feel that she is being sent away, or that this is one of the normal and good ways to get an education? I hope it is the latter. No school can replace a home. But experience shows that many children are more happy at schools that suit them. Instead of discipline, let us speak of normalizing. The good normalizer conceals his art, for he is an artist. Your child is aggressive in type; is she sensitive also? Occasionally you have to break a bone to reset it properly. Breaking a child’s will is just as unfortunate a necessity; it should be avoided unless it is a last resort. School may establish a general emotional stability ; for with each year other traits may be appealed to to induce submission. Why not try school? Sea-Consciousness “Would you kindly not disclose my name, and send me a few words of help in getting the right outlook on life? T’ll tell you what is troubling me. “It seems to me I'm getting awful prudish, and the truth is I seem to be afraid to be natural with men at times, and I don’t know why. Some people have told me I think about myself too much, and I'm trying not to now, by belonging to a club, and go- ing swimming a couple of times a week. It seems to me other girls don’t act as silly as I do, and I wish I could overcome it. 1 sometimes think I’m depraved when men are concerned. I haven’t done anything wrong, but maybe you could suggest to me how I can overcome some of this foolishness. I seem to feel cleaner minded, ete., since I’ve gone swimming, but it does not seem to help entirely. ‘Another thing, I seem to have a sneaky tendency to glance at any- one’s boy friends, and wish I could overcome it, as I don’t want to give the wrong impression and have people think me question- able. I guess you will think I'm obsessed with that one idea and mentally deranged. To tell you the truth I get awful headaches and maybe it’s because I'm too serious abou everything. It’s awful to be that way. J.B “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 279 This troubled yet frank letter opens a most important topic, that of sex-consciousness. For many young persons are more sex-conscious than self-conscious. The two are closely fused. For many purposes of life we may think and speak of ourselves as human beings. Strictly speaking there are no human beings, only men and women. Sex-consciousness starts early, not in infancy, but in early childhood. But the sense of sex, like the sense of honesty, or the sense of humor, passes through different stages. We call childhood the age of innocence, which is correct, but no more so than it is the age of ignorance. Childish sex-consciousness plays about the different likes and capacities of boys and girls, all much affected by cur- rent notions. One of the earliest boyish discoveries is that girls can be teased, and perhaps girls make the same dis- covery in regard to boys. The teasing takes on a bit of the flavor of flirting and the merry game is on. We have to recognize that with the coming of the spring- time of life in the teens, a profound transformation of the boy’s psychology and the girl’s takes place. It’s the same boy and the same girl; only the emphasis changes markedly. What was light or mild in the emotional nature becomes deep, and the boyishness and the girlishness change their style. The sheik and the flapper come forward. Take a boy of 10 to the movies, and when the love- scenes are flashed on, he says or thinks: “Cut that out!” A few years later that becomes part of the thrill. To the 10-year-old the foolish thing about the fine cowboy who risks his life in wild adventures, is that he does it for a silly girl; to the 15-year-old, the girl is already the fitting reward of the brave. As you grow up, you grow in all manner of sex rela- tions, and how you take on your interest in the opposite 280 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT sex becomes an essential part of your mental fitness. In that relation we find the same two factors or attitudes that we meet in so many psychological relations. The one is the too aggressive type—too absorbing, too obsessing, oversexed. The other is the retreating shyness of fear, the inability to let yourself go, to appear natural, to be at home and at ease in the presence of the sex element. Pre- sumably, there is more suffering from sex shyness and sex repression than from sex ardor; yet each type of sufferer may regard his own or her own as the worst. It would take a wise man to advise J. B. or any other similar “case” how to overcome this “foolishness”; or perhaps any man who undertook to do so would be foolish. A man can have only the man’s sense of this sex relation, and he sees nothing in other men to get excited about. He isn’t blind to the fact that women find men attractive, and he tries to see some compliment in it to himself; he doesn’t get much farther than recognizing it is an amiable weakness of women. J. B. has the right solution; aim to be “natural” and generous and try to make an asset of this sex liability. The world is more interesting for being composed of men and women, and to grow up wholesomely in this relation is a vital part of life itself. When Youth Breaks Down “I have been suffering terribly for many years from neurasthenia. Lest you think I have adopted this ailment, I must tell you that it is only recently, on reading Dr. Beard’s old book on the subject, that I learned the name of the disease. I understand that the old notion of being organic has gone by the board, and the current expla- nation is one of disassociation of personality. That’s all I know about it, nor have I the energy to read up on the subject: nor have I the money to see a psychoanalyst; nor am I free to commit suicide. I shall not annoy you with a detailed history of my case, but shall just touch a few of the high spots. “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 281 “The chief symptoms—the feeling of exhaustion, brain-fag and de- pression—you know about. I am now 25 years old, and in my senior year at college. I was a healthy, vigorous, normal boy, and there is no sign of the neuropathic taint in my family. I showed exceptional scholastic ability in my first few years at high school. After graduating I had a number of good jobs, but depression and the lassitude and enervation which developed, made me go from one to the other. At the age of 20 I entered college; the de- pression, enervation, brain-fag and self-preoccupation remained. I accordingly invented for myself a fantastic disease known as nicotine poisoning. I then had a thorough physical examination by a doctor. He told me I was O. K. except for exaggerated re- flexes; that my trouble was mental. I assumed that my trouble was hypochondria. I looked up the subject at the library and ac- cepted Dr. Sadleir’s statement that the only cure for hypochondria is mental occupation and time. I tried novels and mathematics, and the results were slightly beneficial. By the way, I had reached the stage where I could not walk five blocks without being ex- hausted, but on reading Boris Sidis’ description of fatigue fear, I set my teeth and accustomed myself to long walks. However, the general enervation, brain-fag, etc., remained. “That I have managed to struggle through college thus far (I dropped out two terms) amazes me; by a great effort I man- aged to ‘cram’ in my good moments. I believe strongly that hav- ing a mate would cure me. My depression and lassitude prevent me being good company, and seeking the necessary contacts; so I sup- pose all I can do is to drag along and hope for luck. “B. BY A victim’s own story shows how the case looks to the case’s mind. To him it isn’t a “case,” but the one crushing reality of his life. This all too familiar “nervous break- down” is a haunting terror of the world of “nerves.” To help chase it away, you must turn the clear light of day upon it. The victim sees a more terrifying monster than exists. He knows enough to consult books, but not enough to use them wisely. His account has as much error as truth in it. A little knowledge is nowhere so dangerous as in handling one’s own mental unfitness. 282 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT We don’t know all we should like to know about what we have agreed to call neurasthenia ; but we know enough to make plain several things. There is first, original disposi- tion. That doesn’t mean that you are born doomed to a nervous breakdown at some time in life; it means that if so disposed, it will not take much to bring it on. Some per- sons have nervous systems so hardy that they can weather any storm of hardship, trouble or tragedy that life may bring. Others will capsize in every squall; but if properly treated they will come back, ready to carry on. The earlier in life the symptoms appear, the stronger is the evidence of a disposition in that direction ; but youth has all the advantage of vigor. Many of these breakdowns occur in the thirties and forties, when responsibilities are heavy. The leading symptom is fatigue; it is flanked by fear and depression. An extreme susceptibility to fatigue is the keynote of the typical neurasthenia ; and probably no one but a neurasthenic knows what it is to be tired, so intensely exhausted as to be more dead than alive. It may be that he is poisoned by the fatigue-products of his own system. Then there is the constant health-worry which is called hypochondria. There is often sleeplessness, and all vari- eties of incapacitating pain. So there is the six-headed monster at his worst : fatigue, fear, depression, health-worry, insomnia, pain. The at- tacks come in periods of weeks, months, even years. Some doctors speak of false neurasthenia when there isn’t any real state of exhaustion; but it’s all a matter of degree. Under wise treatment most neurasthenics, not too severely handicapped, may learn to lead a useful, practically nor- mal life. To the case in hand as to many another, one may give “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 283 definite advice. You, as a neurasthenic, must learn to stand on your own feet. You may have had a hard time to get through college, but don’t pity yourself. There are others and worse. You must learn to live within your income of energy. You have to put up a fight for mental fitness, and stop worrying because others are mentally fit without that constant and harassing struggle. You need help but not crutches. Go as far as you can without them and in- crease your excursions as you go. Stop reading books about nervous disorders. You know enough to know that the mental trouble is the main thing, and that is in your own hands. Most of all find the right kind of doctor, who is as much of a big brother as a physician, and will haul you over the coals when you need it. Let him be your guide, philosopher and friend. You have hardly done the right thing by yourself. You have indulged yourself in ways that have made matters worse. A neurasthenic must have higher standards of living than the average man. You think a mate will cure you. A proper marriage helps many a man and may make him if he can make himself worthy of it. But there is no reason why any girl should sacrifice her life to ease yours. Prove your worth first. Yours is one of the many cases of moderate neurasthenic disposition, which require a steady régime of well-regu- lated occupation, and a bracing discipline of gradual conquest of symptoms. Slumps will come, but they will also go; and with each attack you will get a surer sense of control. For the rest, you must go to a wise counselor for putting this prescription into action; and you must trust him and live strictly up to his program. And no in- dulgence except as a reward for progress made! 284 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT An Inferiority Complex “For a great number of years I have been plagued by a certain (what I consider) physical deformity. It has had a deleterious ef- fect upon my mental capacities to such a degree that I have given up a professional career, even after I was told I had brilliant possi- bilities. I am taking the liberty of writing you, feeling you are pre- eminently equipped (and I hope you will also be kind enough) to express an opinion. To elucidate: I was always constitutionally well. Graduated high school. Entered law school. After attending a while and doing very well I came upon a book discussing the offspring of first cousins. Being an issue of such a marriage I seemed to be af- fected by the contents of that treatise, particularly so when the author showed the majority of the offspring to be either physically or mentally imperfect. “After that I was a different person. The idea seemed to take a tenacious hold. I was continually thinking of that book. Some time later a prominent psychiatrist discussed certain types of mentally disabled. In his discussion I found that he dwelt upon the shape of human hands and their relation to the mind. Being rather sensitive, I studied the shape of my hands and found them to be very small. While I am 5 feet 7 inches, weigh 180, and have very good shoul- ders, I have the hands of a little girl. This fact is continually brought to my attention by others. While at times I am able to forget what my friends call foolishness, and am able to go along with my daily routine sometimes reaching the heights of brilliancy in all my endeavors, when I begin thinking of those other matters, particularly my small hands, I lose all interest and drop to the depths of mediocrity. I trust you will find time to peruse this long nar- rative and express an opinion, which will be highly regarded. “H.1.W” This well-told tale shows the writer’s ability; yet this very opinion of his ability may explain part of his emo- tional upset. A sense of inferiority may at times cover over a more real sense of superiority. The sense of handi- cap is so strong because the person affected cannot stand even a slight suggestion that he is not superior. For a man in H. I. W.’s position advice may be simple and direct. He is much too sensitive to feelings of in- feriority. If he were not disposed to take things that way, “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 285 he wouldn’t be so affected by reading that the offspring of first cousins are likely to be inferior. Weak traits may be bred in by marriage of kin and so may strong traits. Only a few persons whose parents were cousins would be disturbed by reading such a statement, and they would be pretty sensitive to see the signs of inferiority on such slight provocation. The small hands make a slightly different story; they cannot be denied, but they can be ignored. They en- croach upon a naturally sensitive section of self-conscious- ness. We all want to look and feel normal, and on a par with others if not above par. Every man wants to be a full he-man. Women have small hands; any suggestion of effeminacy is unwelcome. The compensation factor above indicated comes out in this relation also. Many a young fellow, not particularly robust, swears and drinks and boasts of exploits just to show how manly and worldly he is—nothing weak or effeminate about him! It is partly put on to hide a smothered suspicion that he isn’t quite all he would like to be. He is trying to be superior by way of compensation. It affects some that way by making them feel and act “big”; and it makes others feel and act “small.” Having small hands is a little thing, and doesn’t in the least stand in the way of doing big things with them and the brains behind them. Others will pass them by with as slight attention as the owner will pay to the matter, when he takes it naturally and sensibly. The artist, Whistler, being endowed with a sense of his own significance—in his case well justified despite his eccentricities—took pride in a white lock in his otherwise dark hair. A man with an overstrong sense of inferiority would have had it dyed or have been disturbed that he wasn’t just like other people. Small hands are not deformities, and even real deformities 286 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT may be accepted and not interfere with the development of a normal personality. There is a good deal of real inferiority in the world, difficult to manage; and there seems to be even more of an unnecessary sensitiveness in the same direction that causes useless worry. In cases like this one, one may say with strong assurance that the advice can be and will be followed: “Forget it!” A Family Conflict “I know that if my family knew that I was writing to you, they would say it shows how ungrateful I am. Yet I am out of tune with my family. I hear nothing but business and money and jobs; and the only thing I really care for is music. The family wants me to go to work; they think playing the violin in a cheap orchestra is a pretty poor job; but that’s all I can get just now. I dream of better things which I might get if I went to a conservatory of music. Would you advise me to strike out for myself? I am just 20. I can’t keep on at home, because they look down on my playing; you can’t play if you are out of sorts all the time. Otherwise, we are just an ordinary family. The rest seem to get along well enough, but I am out of tune. “MUSICIAN.” This is rather a mild type of letter revealing a bit of family psychology. Most of these letters are too personal for publication, and even in this I have omitted some inti- mate details. It will take wiser persons than psychologists to solve the many varieties of family conflicts. And one cannot offer advice where so much depends upon the close personal relations and conditions. Freud started family psychology by holding that many cases of nervous disorder arose out of the conflicts in- herent in the family circle. Many boys, he held, were over- devoted to their mothers, developed a mother-image, and this later stood in the way of their marrying, because no girl was like mother. Daughters, he said, had a father- “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 287 fixation and met a like fate. Then, again, the son turned against his father and was even jealous of his father’s place in the mother’s affections; or he turned in rebellion against a too-severe father. Other psychoanalysts went Freud one better and wrote the whole tragic story of human failure in terms of the family relation. Now we need not subscribe to all or to much of it while still recog- nizing the great importance of the family relations in developing character and preparing the way for mental fitness or unfitness. The family is the setting in which childhood is spent, in which all the important starts are made, and in which the habits are set and the interests in control are ac- quired. We are molded for life by our early training. Espe- cially in those important emotional relations that make for happiness does much depend upon finding the happy at- mosphere of a well-adjusted family life. That is the real working unit of human nature, the most intimate world we live in. If we could give every child a happy childhood, half the problems of life would be solved—and the other half would assume a less serious form. But family ties, however strong, must be broken, and the preparation for it must be started long in advance. It is when the break is near that the conflict of parents and children reaches an acute stage. It is hard for a young man or a young girl in this position to know to whom to turn when the natural adviser offers the problem. Some have even suggested that our Courts of Domestic Rela- tions and Juvenile Courts would have less to do if there were an advisgr earlier in the game, before the conflicts took serious turns. Whether we shall ever have specialists in family psychology it is hard to say; social workers often act in that capacity now. But the typical conflict is more like the case of the 288 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT musician, for which all this may seem a round-about intro- duction. But it isn’t, for it means that to advise wisely one would have to have an insight into the entire family relations through the twenty years. It is the end-stage of a situation, but it is rarely the whole story. The parents want assurance that this taste for music is strong enough to furnish the basis for a career; the boy properly hesitates to break away and run the risk of being unsettled, rooted nowhere, drifting. No one can do good work when out of tune, and it is rather late to say that the getting out of tune should have been prevented by considering for each child what it most needed for its best development. Little frictions grow into big ones, and then comes the great divide. Nobody can save anyone from such decisions, and it would be an unwise psychologist who would suggest that his science held any formula for meeting such cases. Like all human institutions, the family has its great assets and its great liabilities. Considering all the dangers and all the benefits of the family life, the psy- chologist finds in it one of the very fundamental settings for adjustment to the best that life can offer. The com- plete man is a family man, not swamped by family, but settled and steadied by accepting its relations. But one’s career must be an individual decision. Perhaps the most critical test of family psychology is the preparation it gives for leaving its sheltering guidance, unless it be that this sheltering guidance shall never seem a prison. Eventually every man must play his own tune. A Tragedy of False Accusation “There was a man of the highest ideals in thought and life, one who would scorn to do a mean thing, and one who never touched a dishonest dollar, yet he was called upon to make ‘restitution’ of “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 289 many thousands of dollars which he never took, or knew anything about; was called by innuendo a thief, with the implied threat of imprisonment—was the victim of a refined ‘third degree’ operation. He was absolutely innocent of any wrong-doing whatsoever. There- after, this apparently healthy man rapidly declined in mental and physical health—lost much weight, became morose and melancholy, becoming inefficient in his work, so that he was threatened with discharge and refused a raise in salary that had been promised him, and became thus prejudiced in the eyes of his employer. He had been making splendid progress in life up to the time of the false accusation, but thereafter failed to apply himself in study and work, becoming slack, careless and filled with fear. Somewhat im- proved in health, a few years passing, he opened his own office. After some success at first, he fell again into his former apathetic state and showed marked symptoms of fear and melancholy, and failed to maintain his hitherto high standard of ideals. “Subsequently he developed serious antisocial qualities, and finally became a recluse, avoiding people and living quite within himself. How do you account for his reaction to this terrible experience— the phenomena which I have endeavored to state? Of course, his trouble had its inception in the original mental shock. Had he been left strictly alone, he would, no doubt, have maintained a straight path to his goal, and, of course, he is now suffering from what should never have come into his life. “HOPEFUL INQUIRER.” This is a typical tragedy of the mind, that sets one to thinking how much of it is due to fate, how much to original disposition. Sensitiveness to emotional upset goes back to something in original nature. We can’t say what it is, but it varies from man to man; makes one type go through life hard as nails, indifferent to the finer emo- tions, insensitive to the world’s opinion,—makes another quiver and shrink to every shame, every unkind word, every unjust reproach. What this fineness or coarseness of texture of our emo- tional life may depend upon cannot be determined. But, account as we may for its presence, we know that it is subject to cultivation. There is something in our make-up that renders us sensitive to pride and shame; but what we 290 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT take pride in and what we are ashamed of are the result of our upbringing. You and I are both ashamed of being thought or called a thief. But the degree of humiliation, the measure of upset which results from a serious loss of esteem, may be very different for you and for me. If I do not really care much what people think of me, and you do; if I wouldn’t mind very much being a thief in fact, and to you it would be a terrible degradation, the resulting shock of a false accusation would be vastly different. But there is a further factor, also imbedded deep in original nature, that determines how you and I would react; how this sense of shame will show itself, and what resources we have for staging a “come-back.” One of the greatest tragedies of false accusation of recent times is that of Captain Dreyfus. Stripped of all his military rank, degraded in the eyes of the world, sent to a lonely island in a sort of living death, his mind held out through years of this tragedy. Eventually his friends established his inno- cence, and he was restored to rank and honored as a martyr. How few men have the physical as well as the mental constitution to face such an ordeal of years, and come back sane and sound! In the case described the disposition shows through. This man was not built for tragedy, and it is presumably true that if he had been spared so severe a strain, he would have lived a normal life. We all have our limits of endur- ance, and when we fail and shrink to less than our possible growth, the manner of our failure follows the lines of our weakness. Calamity brings out the recluse, the neuras- thenic, the unsocial streaks, which under favorable cir- cumstances would have been repressed. Captain Dreyfus comes back from a far more serious charge; this man does not. Would an exoneration have saved him? “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 291 Equally important is the acquired sensitiveness that we call character. Honor and shame get to mean as much and more than the satisfaction or deprivation of the physical needs. These social values become the staff of life. If honor is lost, all is lost. Disgrace and shame make as real tragedies as loss of material goods. Injury to your good name hurts more than sticks and stones. And were this not so, society could not maintain itself. The finer grained man is sensitive to these values ; the coarser man is not. Character is formed upon disposition and training. Thus it comes about that our original sensibility to phys- ical punishment is transferred to mental punishment ; and the shock of injured honor becomes a tragedy of the mind. Yet how the man of sorrows, the victim of an un- kind fate, responds, depends upon his mental type and the strength of his original defenses. Strain brings out the inherent weaknesses as a garment rips at the seams. Heroes are built of stern stuff. Unfortunately, we can’t all be built that way. Mental Injections “I am a girl of 22. Ever since I was a very young child I have had such sensations at times that I imagine I am going to die. I know this is only mental, but I haven’t got the will power to over- come this terrible weakness. “I am going to a doctor at present, and he is giving me injections in the arm. He says this is to quiet the nerves. So far I have had five injections, but feel no improvement. Now what I want to know is will these injections help me? The doctor says I need about fifteen. Is it just a waste of time and money going to him? Any advice you will give me will be greatly appreciated. “W. D2 The practice of medicine is making strong efforts to free itself from quacks and pretenders. Until the good work is complete, even psychologists are likely to receive 292 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT inquiries about injections for mental symptoms. Doctors use injections for legitimate purposes; and it happens to be a drastic method of treatment that impresses the patient. It has been a favorite in the hands of quacks. Injections in the arm to quiet nerves, and fifteen of them with a fee for each, is a sufficiently suspicious treat- ment to arouse distrust. The patient is wiser or franker than the doctor, for she recognizes the mental nature of the occasional distressing sensations to which since child- hood she has been subject. It would require a careful examination of symptoms and life history to determine the nature of this “nervousness,” and in the light of that to suggest a rational treatment for its relief. But without that one may safely and firmly advise that all such treatment be promptly discarded and a competent physician with a knowledge of nervous conditions be placed on the job. The theories back of quackery are variously interesting, though the practice of quackery arouses mainly pity for the dupes and contempt for the practitioner. Yet both statements are subject to some modification. No one who hasn’t been through a long hard course of suffering, with apparently no benefit and growing despair over one treat- ment and another, can fully understand how readily one grasps at every straw of hope and thinks it at least worth a trial; how even the wise, when sick, are willing to try foolish remedies to get well. The truth is that few minds can bear illness, especially illness with vague and complex but alarming and dis- tressing symptoms, and keep mentally fit while bodily unfit. The apprehension and the “nervous” state com- plicates as in the susceptible it dominates the disease. That is the reason why for many patients it takes a long time for them to get well after they have been cured. “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 293 They may form the invalid habit, and never quite return to the right attitude toward their condition indispens- able to mental fitness. And as for the questionable practitioners, some few of them may be sincere but de- luded, and still further muddled or consoled by. finding that the delusion pays. All this must be taken into account in understanding that branch or type of what Dr. Fishbein calls the “Medi- cal Follies,” that deals with nervous and mental cases. The idea of an injection is just vague enough and im- pressive enough to combine a touch of mystery with an art of mastery. One must be very wise to discover an element that once under the skin transforms your nerves and dissipates your fears, and one must be very competent to administer it and know that it must be done fifteen times before the charm works, provided the magician’s palm is touched with gold. It is this mental injection administered by suggestion rather than the physical injection administered by syringe that induces the patient to take the treatment; and if it works—and no quackery is so hopeless as not to work or seem to work some of the time—the cure may be attributed to the same process. Suggestion is mental injection. The theories back of quackery that make their preten- sions plausible and attract the victims are many and strange. Some of them are outworn heritages from the past, like magnetism or a medical astrology; others novel theories again patterned upon earlier stages of medical knowledge, and yet others are challenges or protests against medical procedure as too materialistic, too unnatural. Yet the largest class of all are those that imitate (in reality parody) the scientific support of medical theory, 294 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT and so, like patent medicines, advertise directly or by implication that this “system” is a new discovery of a great unknown medical celebrity as yet unrecognized because of professional jealousy, but moved by philan- thropic motives to offer his discoveries and his skill to the suffering poor who can afford to pay. Such are “mental injections.” There is an apparatus, electric or magnetic or in- jectional or vibrational or chemical or polaric or what- ever may approximate some recent procedure in medical practice, and there is assurance and verbose explanation and testimonials and flourishes of degrees and decorative symbols of learning. Compared with all this panoply, simple wholesome advice, encouragement and rational regimen seem too intelligible a procedure to require an adept specialist. Yet in this enlightened day the notion that people like to be fooled in matters of health may be discarded. They don’t; they are just trapped into folly by their despair and the network of pretentious systems that flourish like parasites on the advances of medicine, including the medicine of the mind. “Domestic” Psychology “It has been such a pleasure to have your articles, and as an admirer I long for your advice. I am 28 years old, married at the age of 19 in 1919, when there wasn’t so much smoking and bridge among females. I have two daughters, and my home quite contents me. Recently we moved from the city to the suburbs and I find myself totally out of harmony with the type of man and woman of the suburbs. As I fail to adjust myself, and finding my husband very much at home with them and their ways, I have decided to write you asking for help. At times I have felt like leaving my home if I would be happier—as I am miserable this way. I like company to dinner and lunch, music, theatre, movies—anything but jazz and bridge. I have a fine memory in anything at all but “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 295 cards, and cannot go out among these people, as I only play a fair game. My children, nursing and medicine (I once registered for a nurse—overruled by my parents) I love—and I feel now we are not in harmony at all. “RB. G> This letter is one of many that raise the question whether psychology can contribute to the adjustment of domestic relations. Church and State have had a share in it, joining together man and maid as husband and wife, and determining how and when they shall be put asunder if they fail to live happily thereafter. But so much of this adjustment of one personality to another is so intimately personal that no one aspect of regulation of human affairs can offer a solution. We may have our courts of domestic relations and our church clinics to help tide over the rough places in personal con- flict, but there always will be personal clashes of tastes and temperaments, of ideas and customs, and it is idle to hope that psychology or sociology or any other “ology” will ever formulate laws or principles for their adjustment. Psychology, it is true, has wisely taken into its realm the important play of conflict not only in the breeding of nervous troubles but in shaping the impediments and obstacles to successful living. One cannot live in a state of conflict and live happily and adequately; and conflict includes the large range of antagonistic situations from slavery and abject fear, to protest and rebellion, and shades off into disagreement and incompatibility and just drifting apart and the thinning away of the strands that once held two souls together. There is no science that can set up rules and recipes for making a marriage, whether companionate or ‘until death do us part,” companionable at all stages of the journey. The psychologist will do well to avoid the 296 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT suggestion that he is in a position to give advice to the love lorn or the love worn; or that he has any formula for regenerating waning emotions, or avoiding the hazards in the course of domestic relations. While the reasons for this caution are adequate and obvious without specification, it is worth adding that the decisive reason in most cases, as in the one cited, is that only those intimately acquainted with all the circum- stances are in a position to give advice. Should one ven- ture it, he may find himself in the position of a politician who made what he believed was a fine speech on a great occasion; he asked a shrewd Quaker what he thought of the effort. “Well, friend, it was a good speech, but a wiser man would have made a better speech, and a still wiser man would have made no speech at all.” Most of all is this true of the many cases, like the one cited, in which the clash or disagreement is limited in scope, however unfortunate in consequence. Couples can- not be equipped with either compass or chart to steer their way among the complicated thoroughfares of marital venture. Wisdom and mutual forbearance are pretty old-fashioned instruments, but they have not been superseded. It is hardly fair to expect psychology to give directions for meeting all the ills that married life is heir to. Common sense, good judgment, tact, and all the homely diplomacy of human relations are peculiarly indispensable in the domestic relations. The old saying “Know Thyself” may well be enlarged to “Advise Thy- self” in many of the relations that constitute the problem of living, either alone or together. Subconscious Habits “I read somewhere, I think it was in Stanley Hall’s writings, that we learn to swim in winter, and to skate in summer; that the “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 297 ~ habits get set during the period of disuse. So we are surprised each winter that we haven’t forgotten how to skate. I wonder how far this principle holds? I have charge of a private school for small children. I question whether I get the best results in habit-forming by insisting upon drilling until the right habit is formed. Does this give time for the habit to sink into the subconscious? What is the truth about this? Do we learn subconsciously? “KINDERGARTNER.” This question opens a large inquiry. In the first place, what we mean by the subconscious is nothing mysterious. We haven’t two minds—a conscious mind and a sub- conscious mind—as some who pretend to be psychologists insist, but our minds are so organized that part of our learning is and remains deliberate, intentional, conscious, and other parts fall back into the effortless, less inten- tional, subconscious pattern. There is no sharp line be- tween them ; behavior is partly one, partly the other. The practical part of the problem is that of using this relation for habit-formation. It is safe to say we do not learn anything without some effort. Nature doesn’t give us anything for nothing. Nobody expects to wake up some fine morning to find that he can play the violin or sew or run a car or use a typewriter. Some hopeful persons have suggested that you might give students a lot of information when half-asleep, and it would sink in as a sort of learning by subconscious suggestion. It is a vain hope. ~ The dose of truth in all this is that there comes a point in trying when the effort is too great to pay. When you are trying to think of a forgotten name and can’t get it, you find that it comes to you when you’re not trying. Brain-centers need rest; you recall in the morning without effort what you failed to recall with it at evening. But that is typical of a mature mind or- ganized on a complicated plan after much experience. 298 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT For children all this proceeds on a simplified plan. Principles of habit-formation are best studied in children; we have no evidence that there is any real “sinking in.” We do know that a little practice under good rested conditions, accompanied by a real effort, has a better effect than continued practice under increasing fatigue and waning interest. When effort is continued there operates a law of diminishing returns. There is also a law of diminishing loss in forgetting. You lose most in the first few minutes or hours; there is surprisingly little difference in the loss after a day or after a week. The fact about skating or swimming is that you ex- pected more loss through disuse than you find. You for- get so little more after a year than after a month, and the year seems so much longer, that you were misled into believing that you acquired something, as though it were interest in the bank of the subconscious. The true state- ment is that there isn’t as much discount through disuse as you expected. The next point is in the technique of effort. Children, being emotionally sensitive, are easily discouraged and upset by failure. The directions for teachings boys how to spin a rope in cowboy fashion contain two important points, just as applicable to much other learning. First, “Take it easy”; second, “Don’t get ‘mad’ or lose your patience.” Rope-spinning is attractive; it would be fun to do it. But putting clothes away neatly is a dull pro- cedure. Hence it must be worked into a habit-system differ- ently. You have somehow to arouse interest in it as a desirable procedure. I know that what “Kindergartner” has in mind is a different and more personal habit-field, the little habits of submission and falling into routine that schools, how- “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 299 ever informal, must require. In such habits you meet with resistance, and resistance is the central difficulty in habit formation. If instead of resistance you meet with support, your course will go smoothly; the teacher’s art lies in avoiding resistance. Resistance is set up by the habits already formed, by natural tendencies and by the strong desire for self-direc- tion. So the easiest, most natural, most satisfying way of doing things is the one that becomes habitual, gets the right of way, and the problem is to replace it by a more desirable habit. In teaching the violin, some in- structors insist on the right position of violin and bow from the start; others are content with a nearly right position and improving it after a little playing gives satisfaction. The gradual method seems to work best in most cases. Learning is a constant relearning, and habit-forming is no exception. Social Timidity “I am 19 years of age and a stenographer. I am good-looking, in- telligent, and do my business work exceptionally well. I am liked by all who come in contact with me, but there is one thing that I cannot understand about myself, one thing which worries me so much that there will be dire consequences if some help does not come soon. Here it is: “Whenever I happen to meet some one whom I have known, but have not seen in a long time, upon at first meeting them I am overcome by a certain nervousness and a sort of a funny stab in the heart, that I do not know what to say, and usually say things which are quite out of place, but at the same time cannot help myself. After I have spoken with the person for a few minutes, I become all right, even witty, but the first few minutes are awful. This also shows itself physically by a sort of trembling of the face especially when I laugh, and a sort of sinking sensation around the heart. This does not show itself, however, upon all occasions. Some- times when I am introduced to people or meet them I am myself, but on other occasions my malady comes to the surface. It seems to 300 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT me that it is created in me by reactions to certain people. For in- stance, I am always in a constant state of nervousness with my boss, and if he happens to speak to me on the most casual subjects or on business, I always get that sinking sensation around the heart and that nervousness which causes my face to tremble. For this reason, I hate to go visiting people, and am in constant fear that it will show itself and make people wonder. This has made me terribly timid. “I have suffered from this for the last two years. I am always having a constant fight with myself, telling myself that I must stop being that way, and if I act that way again, I don’t know what I'll do; but it’s no use, it comes upon me without asking me and I cannot help myself. I have been to doctors and had myself ex- amined, but they all say that it is nothing but a delicate nervous system. However, be that as it may be, I am beside myself and must have help. I cannot understand it, and always seem to be under a cloud, and never happy on account of it. I suppose you might say that it is an inherent inferiority complex, although I see no reason why I should be afflicted with one; but whatever it is, I am always in a state of mental hell and torture. Is there anything I can do to help this condition? What is the meaning of it? Can I be helped or must I go through life with it? I am very much worried, and would be ever so thankful if you could. “WORRIED.” This letter describes in some detail symptoms shared by many less able or less inclined to describe them. The “worried” family is a large one and the branch to which this writer belongs—the “social timidity” group—is prominent in society and out of it. I have on various occasions explained that the two orders of nervous tendencies that comprise so large a part of the nervous population are known as neurasthenia and hysteria. The former compose the fear clan, the latter the anger clan; that is, fear is the chief of the one clan and anger the chief of the other. The clans have long inter- married and there are traits common to the two. In an- other connection I called them the recessives and the aggressives. The worriers are recessives. Social timidity is the natural reaction of recessives, “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 301 and becomes a major symptom in early youth when the social relations dominate. Recessives, just like other people, want to make a good impression, but are over- concerned with the fear that they won’t. Hence the most common feeling is embarrassment and confusion, always most acute at the outset, when the social situation must be faced. Some localize this sensation either in the throat or, as here, in a facial twitch or a sinking at the heart, or a blushing or flushing, or a contorted smile or a false laugh, or a cold perspiration. It strikes the small mus- cles and the circulatory and secretory systems as emo- tionally sensitive. All these symptoms may be dismissed as of no special significance; we all have our weak spots and nervousness brings them out. We are more nervous in the presence of persons whose position overawes us or whom it is especially important to please. I was told of a young man, otherwise robust, who fainted when he met the Prince of Wales. By dwelling upon them recessives develop their embarrassments into inferiority feelings. “Worried” is taking it all very seriously, while in fact she has only an ordinary case of social timidity. She is making high tragedy of an embarrassment. There are many like her and far worse. She merely shrinks from visiting ; but a “case” I know leaves the room when more than three or four strangers are present; she goes to the theatre only at a Wednesday matinee and takes a seat near an exit in a not too crowded part of the house. Another “case” can work only when alone. The victims of social timidity are hard to advise, but easy to encourage, though you must tell them that mostly they must help themselves. They are not cowards; they often face ordeals well. One of the worst cases of social timidity I knew was a young man who made a good record 302 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT in the World War, but on his return took a teaching position and had to give it up: he could not face his pupils and colleagues. It was easier to face cannon-fire, for that was not a social situation. “Worried” makes a better story of her social timidity because she has the ability to do it. Not that she is ex- aggerating; far from it, nor even dramatizing, though “torture” and “hell” are dramatic emphases. These symptoms are devilishly real and carry all the sense of tragedy, because of the conflict they arouse between what the subject feels she can and wishes to make of her- self and what her handicap imposes. She feels disqualified, yet knows she could qualify, if those unruly nerves would only get out of her way. Well! they will; not all at once, and not without paying her several farewell visits after they have said good-by. She will accept the situation with increasing resigna- tion and be herself so generally that the breaks will be but interludes in a normal life. But all that has to be fought for and at times as an uphill fight. The socially timid have to pay high for what others get at little cost. i The Conquest of Fear “I am suffering from a nervous breakdown, due in some degree to my mental attitude. I am of a melancholy brooding type. I get depressed very easily. I shun friends or diversion when in this attitude. Since suffering from this nervous trouble I have con- tracted a fear of remaining alone at home or elsewhere and of go- ing out alone, also. When I get this feeling it makes me cowardly and instinctively my nerves tend to make me dizzy and nervous. This has caused me much worry and nervousness. Will you please tell me how I can overcome this attitude and calm my nerves? Sep BY “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 303 If the number of letters on my desk on the subject of fears is a fair sample of the part this ancient bogy plays in spoiling lives, it might be well to revise the prayer to read: “Relieve us this day of our daily fear and de- liver us from dreads.” Or we might revise the slogan that Coué made popular: “Day by day in every way I am getting less scary and shaky.” I select this letter as the simplest statement in my daily batch. It points directly to the root-source in the type of. mind that is inclined to be beset with fears which restrict freedom, warp the outlook and interfere with mental fitness. An original fear is a state of nervous un- easiness in an actual situation—such as looking down from a height; the anxiety and worry and anticipation of disaster (which is an imaginative variety) may be called dread. Fears and dreads shade into one another. They are of one family, though in treatment they may require different prescriptions. Fears begin in infancy, and in the infant are simple fear states. The infant does not imagine; it lives in the present moment only. It displays a certain type of un- easiness when you remove its sense of support. When the same uneasiness appears in the dark or when taken up by a stranger, it is a fear on the way of becoming a dread. Few children escape night terrors, and all are prone to fears; hence the importance of anti-fear training in early childhood. Many (not all) phobias in grown-ups are hang- overs of childish frights, for an excessive fright is a se- rious nervous shock. With increasing control children out- grow fears. The first clue to fear lies in child psychology. The second clue takes us to fatigue states. Timidity is part of the exhaustion complex. We are all more prone to fear when tired. Courage comes with rest and 304 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT food, and can be stimulated by drug action,.just as the anxiety state can in part be relieved by a quieting sedative. To lessen fear, avoid fatigue. But don’t substitute a fear of getting tired for whatever fear you have, or you will let in another devil as fast as you cast one out. Another member of the exhaustion complex is depres- sion. When sad you brood ; when you brood you shun com- pany. All of this is true to type; so also in the situation factor—the fear of being alone, going out alone, the tendency to lean on others. The case of L. F. is thus a model pattern of a simple fear state, but a mild one. For prescription; First, take lots of rest and all that makes for bodily fitness. When are the symptoms worst? In the morning? How far does occupation relieve them? Isnt it time for a change of scene? Is there some congenial friend who can act as com- panion on a pleasure tour, best of all a sea voyage, calm and restful, yet invigorating? Is there some special domes- tic circumstance that irritates? Is there financial worry? Does a bit of good news dispel the gloom? Does the right visitor brighten the scene and the wrong ome darken it? Do the attacks of worry come in periods of days or weeks? Rest on the down grade; stimulate and seck diversion on the up grade. Take comfort in the thought that you have had the attacks before and gotten over them. With each proof that they are not as serious as they seem, you'll meet the next with better courage. There will be no sudden cure, but a gradual increase in calm and an increasing power to dismiss the dread. Avoid strain, rest frequently; avoid the invalid habit. Don’t think of yourself as nervous, but just like other people, only a bit more so. Lean on others until you can stand up by yourself. Others have come through; so will you. “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 305 The Tyranny of Nerves “ “Touching off the complex is a good title. Is it normal to have the effect last for ten years? To realize with one’s moral mind that ‘la guerre est fini and at the same time to be back in the mess for the fraction of a second when a tire pops or a searchlight is seen suddenly or chloride or lime or iodine is smelled, is embarrassing. “Before the war I thought that ‘nerves’ were what the dentist hurt, and had no interest in them at other times. Since the war I feel that all the non compos mentises you write about are brothers of mine. It is silly not to be able to control that very temporary but vivid flash-back. The joke is that in three years’ service with the Canadians at Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Arras, etc, I was able to swallow down my fears and control the trembling and go on with what I was doing, and after the whole show was over I was ‘ga-ga’ for a moment or two whenever anything reminded me of it sud- denly. “That dippiness lasted about a year, and at this late date I should prefer to control my memories than to have scenes pop back at me. “FLANDERS.” This is a vivid and frank acount of the discovery of nerves by one who naturally supposed himself immune to their tyranny. His immunity would have held through any ordinary trial; but war is war, and war is hell, and plays havoc with nerves no less than with other human possessions. In terms of nerves, war is shock. The burst- ing of a shell, a moment of injury, the tensity of great danger, are but accents in the constant wear and tear that break down resistance. It wasn’t only shell-shocked soldiers who were war-shocked. The breakdown of the shell-shocked was the more com- plete because with no other stimulation than the constant memory of the long ordeal their nerves couldn’ believe the war was over; they could not resume. Most of these men of Flanders resumed, readjusted to peace promptly and successfully when the armistice was sounded. They recovered with a wild exhilaration of relief. But some points of susceptibility remained. 306 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT The sensory side of the reminder that sets off the old but not wholly forgc.ten complex is interesting. So much of the bombardment of war is in a shock by way of the ears, and the ear is by nature the alert sense of alarm, that a sudden explosive sound both by nature and by experience has the open road to nervous upset. We're all built that way, but the bombardment of war intensified it for the soldier. A flash will do it, even an odor; but the mechanism here is more indirect, more acquired by as- sociation, not so much built in with the original nervous system. Even a flash of lightning is startling mainly through association with the crash of thunder which gets on the nerves. It is natural for so robust and sane-minded an individual as this man of Flanders to regard with half a smile this failure of his nerves to forget the war, as a weakness. I: is not; it is one of the many indications of sensitive or- ganization, rare as war is rare, and inconvenient for one so perfectly normal that even this reminder seems out of place in his make-up. He is so little accustomed to losing his head even for a moment, that a momentary lapse seems to him an attack of dippiness. It is all far more a tribute to his normal sanity. As for the duration of this liability of a complex to be touched off, we had no large experience to go by before the war. The deeper the shock, the longer it lasts. “Flanders” had nothing else to recover from, I gather from his silence on the point. He came to after the war and resumed his old self. But he couldn’t wholly leave that experience behind him in the fields of Flanders, because he went there and returned with the same nervous system, and his Flanders self lives not only in his memories, which pre- sumably he cherishes and passes on in tradition to his children, but lives on all but suppressed in that delicate “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 307 mechanism—*“that very temporary but vivid flash-back” —that pops back the scenes when a tire pops. “Is it normal to have the effect last for ten years?” Evidently it is, not in all but in some nervous organiza- tions, on which that war experience with its terrific moments made a deep impression. That is the mental scar, but subject to an occasional throb when exposed. While the war was on, it was all too compelling, too exciting, to permit the nervous system to relax. The days were tense, the duty of the hour absorbing; excitement kept one going. The shock comes forward in the period of relaxation, with the relief of strain, quite as a head- ache throbs more violently when the sufferer begins to rest. We realize how tired we are when we lie down. The longer the resistance, the refusal to yield to the call of nerves, the more likely the collapse when the strain is released. : The true neurotics, the nervously weak, suffer from their memories far more constantly; their complexes never slumber or sleep so lightly that they intrude into waking life and distort its even tenor. The nervously strong but sensitively organized note the vestiges of a terrific exposure with a mingled sense of uneasiness and amusement. They would like to send a message to those recently discovered nerves of theirs that the war is over. Illness on the Mind “Some time ago I had an examination and was informed that I had no physical ailments or defects, but was highly sensitive and nervous. I suffer from a taut sensation across the back of my head between the ears, also a creepy and dopy feeling all over my head, preventing me giving my attention to business or things in gen- eral. To remedy this condition I took treatment from an osteopath and while the taut sensation has left me, an ache now appears to have concentrated in one spot about the base of the brain. 308 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT “I am writing to ask whether you can recommend a phrenologist who could perhaps tell me whether those treatments are benefiting or not, as I cannot satisfy my own mind that they are, as so many different symptoms and aches follow each treatment. “C. W. 8.” “Do you believe that a nervous stomach is imaginary? As I have been through a thorough examination there is nothing organ- ically wrong with me whatsoever, but I am very much troubled with this constant quivering feeling in the stomach which has brought me into a nervous state of mind as well. I fear being alone but feel quite calm when in company of another person, but I am certain that this nervousness of the stomach has brought on this fear. “Ww. N.” “I am a young lady twenty-seven years of age. I had an unhappy childhood as my parents were too busy earning a living to give me attention and are temperamentally unsuited to raise a child. “I was graduated from high school with honors, including a scholarship, and attended college for about two years. A so-called inferiority complex was present all through this period, I'm afraid, for I was unhappy and didn’t make the friendships I needed. “I had an attack of influenza at this time and, coupled with the effects of a fall off a street car a few years before (these are the causes I believe), I became quite nervous and mentally ill. All this happened about nine years ago and since then I have gone from doctor to doctor. At the present time I am taking implantations of bacteria supposed to relieve intestinal toxic disorders. «I suffer from hysteria and although I was psychoanalyzed it has not helped me much. I have a muscle defect in my eyes coupled with a high degree of myopic astigmatism. I believe this is causing some of my trouble. I have béen advised to have this muscle operated on, but as I have also been advised against this course, I don’t know what to do. I feel my home environment is a primary cause as I have a somewhat erratic father. “B. AY What is common to these three cases, selected from many times three, is the combination of physical and mental ills and the troubling questions as to which pro- duces or induces which. There is no doubt that a bodily difficulty, whether a weak stomach, or eyesight, or the after effects of illness or accident, all lower the mental re- sistance to physical ills in those thus disposed. How much illness can you stand without getting illness on your “PERSONAL”: A FEW CASES 309 mind? And if you are ill, how quickly can you recover and get back to a normal attitude toward your health- self? That really is the decisive question. The difficulty in the many varieties of these very differ- ent situations and personalities is that the patients have a very poor mental resistance against disease of any kind. They get illness on the mind, perhaps have always had it, and so do all sorts of things, some wise and some fool- ish, in seeking relief. They diagnose themselves constantly and wrongly. They have been wise in going through a thorough examination; they come through with the re- port that there is nothing organically wrong, or, if there is, it is of a minor order that need not worry or incapaci- tate. But the symptoms keep on and make a troubled state of mind. “I am certain this nervousness of the stomach has brought on this fear.” “Is a nervous stomach imaginary ?”’ The answer is that if you have illness on the mind it’s going to settle on the weak spots of your makeup; if you have digestive weakness it will assume that form. If you have general neuralgic tendencies youll get taut sensa- tions and if an osteopath chases it out (or you think he does) from one spot it settles in another; and then you ask about a phrenologist, although “so many different symp- toms and aches follow each treatment.” All this is foolish, for it fixes illness on the mind; and so long as people have these wrong attitudes toward their illness, the tribe of practitioners who live on these weak- nesses will reap a rich crop of victims. The third case introduces a newer variety of illness on the mind. Since it has become known that mental situ- ations, such as family conflicts, inferiority complexes, shock, disappointments, play a part in disease, these are brought in along with one’s share of bodily ills, in- 310 KEEPING MENTALLY FIT fluenza, “fall from a street car,” intestinal trouble, astig- matism, to compose the tale of woe. All these misfor- tunes contribute, no doubt; but the primary source is not any of them, but the tendency to have illness on the mind. To bear illness rationally is one of the severest tests of mental fitness. We used to call this hypochondria, which is too formid- able a name, and the French call it imaginary illness, which it is not. It is a type of wrong health attitude, and mental hygiene is directed to giving people right health attitudes of mind. The “quivering feeling on the stomach,” “the creepy and dopy feeling” in the head, the “muscle defect in the eye,” and the “inferiority feelings” and “erratic father” must be dismissed. It cannot be done completely, but these symptoms or “causes” may be reduced to their proper places and a right mental attitude toward health replace them. Sound medical treatment will help, running from one “ologist” to another will not. The wise practitioner, it doesn’t matter what he calls himself, will direct all efforts toward bringing the patient into a right attitude to his condition. He will get illness off the mind. INDEX Absent-mindedness, 169 Actions, which give us away, 164 Adler, Dr. Alfred, 134 Aggressiveness, 121 “Almosts,” definition of, 143 Ambition, and intelligence, 249 as an incentive, 270 Anger, 32 a code for, 40 and swearing, 110 and hysteria, 157 Appearance, telling character by, 231 Attractiveness, 206 psychology of, Beauty, psychology of, chap. VI, 206 ff. the cult of, 208 “Blues,” curing the, 51 Bore, psychology of the, 115 “Bottled lightning,” 48 Boys, minds of, compared with girls, 70 how they choose their chums, 72 Cankers, mental, 194 Cases, a few typical, chap. X, 271 ff. Character, reading and judging, chap. VIII, 231 ff. Child training, chap. II, 66 ff. child mind, 66 how to keep children happy, 76 a mental code for every child, 95 Children, gifted, 82 are they weaklings, 87 are city children brighter, 93 Chums, how boys choose, 72 Circle, veering in a, 200 Cleverness vs. goodness, 63 Clinging vines, is there a cure for, 140 Clothes, as expression of per- sonality, 206, 211 Coffee, why we drink, 119 Collecting, mania for, 192, 222 Complexes, 42 varieties of, 178 a tragedy of, 273 inferiority, 252, 284 Concentration, 144, 169, 257 “the secret nobody knows,” 258 hindrances to, 261 Correlation, meaning of, 231 Cousins, marriage of, 131, 284 Credulity, 101, 126, 151, 152 Criminal, if you were a, 103 Crooks, psychology of, 149 Curiosity, and fear, 162 Custom, 198 Depression, 51 Discipline, of children—a dif- ficult case, 275 Discomfort, effect of, on mental fitness, 175, 261 Dreams, meaning of, 138 Efficiency, at various hours, 253 stopping the leaks, 256 313 314 Emotions, high-powered, 31, 36, 40 of children, 76 and swearing, 110 and hysteria, 157 Environment, 68 Exaggeration, the jazz of, 160 Expression, 29 of personality, 206 Failure, fear of, 134, 250 puzzling cases of, 271 False accusation, a tragedy of, 288 Family conflict, a, 286 Fan, the “why” of the, 221 Fashion, psychology of, 211 Fatigue, 46, 51, 53 in children, 85 and “making good,” 118 effects of, 183 and efficiency, 253 in neurasthenia, 282 Fear, 25 the fear bogy, 27 fear complex, 42 and curiosity, 162 Fellowship, 223 Fool-proof, are you, 152 Freud, 30, 109, 140, 165, 286 Gambling, 219, 222 Generosity, 117 Girls, minds of, compared with boys, 70 Glands, the truth about the, 135 “Gregarians,” the grand army of, 224 Habits, of children, 75 of adults, 255, 260 Handicaps, overcoming, 251 Handwriting, as a revelation of character, 237 Happy, art of being, 19 “Hard-Boiled Club,” 55 INDEX Heredity vs. environment, 68 Hobbies, 192 Hollingworth, Prof., 82, 120, 234 Honesty, 145 Hunger, 180 Hysteria, 156 Important, desire to feel, 128 Incentives, as spurs to action, 267 Inferiority, sense of, 133 complex, 180, 252, 284 Intelligence, and goodness, 63 tests, 65, 78, 81 quotient (I. Q.), 78, 81 and practical sense—do they go together, 101 pride in, 142 and stupidity, 189 judging, by appearance, 232, 235; by photographs, 240 and ambition, 249 “I. Q.,” what is an, 78 value of, 81 James, William, 48, 56 Jazz age, 61, 160 Job, adjustment to the, 112 choosing and holding your, chap. IX, 245 ff. Judging character, chap. VIII, 231 ff. Judgment, good and poor, 101 Kissing, psychology of, 214 Kleptomania, 148 Lips, psychology of the, 214 “Making good,” 112 choosing and holding your job, chap. IX, 245 ff. Mechanical bent, 245 Memory training, 124, 259 Mind-cures, 194 Mind-health, meaning of, 21 Mood, and performance, 178, 189 INDEX Myerson, Dr. Abraham, 229 Neurasthenics, 52, 280 Noises, distracting, 261 Normalcy, of mind, 23 Occupation, see Job. Patches, mental, 38 Performance, effect of mood on, 173 Personality, expression of, 206 in sport, 226 Petting, 35 Phobias, 27 Photographs, as a means of judg- ing intelligence, 240 Physique, and leadership, 264 Poise, 50 Posing, 107 Powder-patch, cleverness of the, 216 Privacy, 59 Prodigies, the truth about, 91 Quiet center of life, 61 “Relaxative, take a,” 227 Repression, 29, 33, 99 complexes, 179 Reserves of energy, 36 Right, turning to the, 198 Running wild, 99 Sensitiveness, 57 of emotional temperament, 289 Sex, 30, 35 sex glands, 137 and stealing, 148 complex, 179 appeal of personality, 207 consciousness, 278 Sleep, 46 a code for, 47 effects of losing, 185 Social bent, 245 Solitude, the lost paradise of, 59 315 Spanking, 97 Sport, psychology of, chap. VII, 219 7. sporting instinct, 219 Staring, 171 Stealing, 145 how can it be cured, 147 Stupidity, cultivated, 189 “Suggestibility,” 152 Suggestion, power of, in creating difficulties, 266 Superstitions, 106, 196, 220 Suppression, 33 Swearing, 110 Talk, as revealing interests, 242 Temperament, in work and play, 226 Temptation, safeguards against, 145 Tender-minded, 56 Tennis, and temperament, 225 Testimony, psychology of, 154 “Thobbing,” 105 Thrills, 33, 163, 223 Thyroid gland, 135 Tightwad, the “why” of the, 117 Timid child, the, 85 Timidity, 42, 121, 163 Tough-minded, 56 Tricks, of the mind, chap. IV, 160 of the conjurer, 166 Waste, avoidance of, in mental work, 256 Weather, effect of, on mental fitness, 176, 187 ‘Whims, of children, 75 Will, strength of, 44 Witness, reliability as a, 154 Work, when do we do our best, 178, 175, 253 Worry, getting a strangle-hold on, 53 and dreams, 138 RETURN EDUCATION-PSYCHOLOGY LIBRARY ro > as Tolman Hall 642-4209 LOAN PERIOD 1 |2 MONOGRAPH | 4 5 5 | ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 2-hour books must be renewed in person Return to desk from which borrowed DUE AS STAMPED BELOW IF JOC 27 99H SUBJECT 70 RECAIlL ~~ =p DP =D JUNT?2 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY BERKELEY, CA 94720 FORM NO. DD10 Wa C(D29323840 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY