Health Through Will Power

CHAPTER III

HABITS

Dreads are brakes on the will, inhibitions which prevent its exercise and make accomplishment very difficult and sometimes impossible. They represent mainly a state of mind, yet often they contain physical elements, and the disposition counts for much. Their counterpart in the opposite direction is represented by habits which are acquired facilities of action for good or for ill. Habits not only make activities easy but they even produce such a definite tendency to the performance of certain actions as to make it difficult not to do them. They may become so strong as to be tyrants for ill, though it must not be forgotten that properly directed they may master what is worst in us and help us up the hill of life. Acts that are entirely voluntary and very difficult at first may become by habit so {43} natural that it is extremely difficult to do otherwise than follow the ingrained tendency. Nature's activities are imperative. Habitual actions may become equally so. When some one once remarked to the Duke of Wellington that habit was second nature, he replied:

"Oh, ever so much more than that! Habit may be ten times as strong as nature."

The function of the will in health is mainly to prevent the formation of bad habits or break those that have been formed, but above all, to bring about the formation of habits that will prevent as far as is possible the development of tendencies to disease in the body, Man probably faces no more difficult problem in life than the breaking of a bad habit. Usually it requires the exercise of all his will power applied to its fullest extent. If there is a more difficult problem than the breaking of a bad habit it is the formation of a good one late in life because of the persistency of advertence and effort that is required. It is comparatively easy to prevent the formation of bad habits and also easy to form good habits in the earlier years. The organism is then plastic and yields itself readily and thus becomes grooved to the habit or hardened against it by the performance of even a few acts.

All the psychologists insist that after the period of the exercise of instinct as the basis of life passes, habit becomes the great force for good or for ill. We become quite literally a bundle of habits, and the success of life largely depends on whether these habits are favorable or unfavorable to the accomplishment of what is best in us. More than anything else health depends on habit. We begin by doing things more or less casually, and after a time a tendency to do them is created; then almost before we know it, we find that we have a difficult task before us, if we try not to do them.

To begin with, the activity which becomes the subject of a habit may be distinctly unpleasant and require considerable effort to accomplish. Practically every one who has learned to smoke recalls more or less vividly the physical disturbance caused by the first attempt and how even succeeding smokes for some time, far from being pleasant, required distinct effort and no little self-control. After a time, the desire to smoke becomes so ingrained that a man is literally made quite miserable by the lack of it and finds himself almost incapable of doing anything else until he has had his smoke.

Even more of an effort is required to establish the habit of chewing tobacco, and it is even more difficult to break when once it has been formed. Any one who has seen the discomfort and even torments endured by a man who, after he had chewed tobacco for many years, tried to stop will appreciate fully what a firm hold the habit has obtained. I have known a serious business man who almost had to give up business, who lost his sleep and his appetite and went through a nervous crisis merely by trying to break the habit of chewing tobacco.

In the Orient they chew betel nut. It is an extremely hot material which burns the tongue and which a man can stand for only a very short time when he first tries it. After a while, however, he finds a pleasant stimulation of sensation in the constant presence of the biting betel nut in his mouth; he craves it and cannot do his work so well without it. He will ever advert to its use and will be restless without it. He continues to use it in spite of the fact that the intense irritation set up by the biting qualities of the substance causes cancer of the tongue to occur ten times as frequently among those who chew betel nut as among the rest of the population. Not all {46} those who chew it get cancer, for some die from other causes before there is time for the cancer to develop, and some seem to possess immunity against the irritation. The betel nut chewer ignores all this, proceeds to form the habit, urged thereto by the force of example, and then lets himself drift along, hoping that it will have no bad effects.

The alcohol and drug habits are quite as significant in shortening life as betel nut and yet men take them up quite confident in the beginning that they  will not fall victims, and then find themselves enmeshed. It is probable that the direct physical effects of none of these substances shorten life to a marked degree unless they are indulged in to very great excess, but the moral hazards which they produce, accidents, injuries of various kinds, exposure to disease, all these shorten life. Men know this very well, and yet persist in the formation of these habits.

Any habit, no matter how strong, can be broken if the individual really wishes to break it, provided the subject of it is not actually insane or on the way to the insane asylum. He need only get a motive strong enough to rouse his will, secure a consciousness of his own power, and then the habit can be broken. {47} After all, it must never be forgotten that the only thing necessary in order to break a habit effectively is to refuse to perform a single act of it, the next time one is tempted. That breaks the habit and makes refusal easier and one need only continue the refusal until the temptation ceases.

Men who have not drawn a sober breath for years have sometimes come to the realization of the fools that they were making of themselves, the injury they were doing their relatives, or perhaps have been touched by a child's words or some religious motive, and after that they have never touched liquor again. Father Theobald Mathew's wonderful work in this regard among the Irish in the first half of the nineteenth century has been repeated by many temperance or total abstinence advocates in more recent generations. I have known a confirmed drunkard reason himself into a state of mind from which he was able to overcome his habit very successfully, though his reasoning consisted of nothing more than the recognition of the fact that suggestion was the root of his craving for alcohol. His father had been a drunkard and he had received so many warnings from all his older relatives and had himself so come to dwell on {48} the possible danger of his own formation of the habit that he had suggested himself into the frame of mind in which he took to drink. I have known a physician on whom some half a dozen different morphine cures had been tried—always followed by a relapse—cure himself by an act of his own will and stay cured ever since because of an incident that stirred him deeply enough to arouse his will properly to activity. One day his little boy of about four was in his office when father prepared to give himself one of his usual injections of morphine. The little boy gave very close attention to all his father's manipulations, and as the doctor was hurrying to keep an appointment, he did not notice the intent eye witness of the proceedings. Just as the needle was pushed home and the piston shot down in the barrel, the little boy rushed over to his father and said, "Oh, Daddy, do that to me." Apparently this close childish observer had noted something of the look of satisfaction that came over his father's face as he felt the fluid sink into his tissues. It is almost needless to say that the shock the father received was enough to break his morphine habit for good and all. It simply released his will and then he found that if he {49} really wanted to, he could accomplish what the various cures for the morphine habit only lead up to—and in his case unsuccessfully—the exercise of his own will power.

The word "habit" suggests nearly always, unfortunately, the thought of bad habits, just as the word "passion" implies, with many people, evil tendencies. But it must not be forgotten that there are good passions and good habits that are as helpful for the accomplishment of what is best in life as bad passions and bad habits are harmful. A repetition of acts is needed for the formation of good habits just as for the establishment of customs of evil. Usually, however, and this must not be forgotten, the beginning of a good habit is easier than the beginning of a bad habit. Once formed, the good habits are even more beneficial than the bad habits are harmful. It is almost as hard to break a good habit as a bad one, provided that it has been continued for a sufficient length of time to make that groove in the nervous system which underlies all habit. We cannot avoid forming habits and the question is, shall we form good or bad habits? Good habits preserve health, make life easier and happier; bad habits have the opposite effect, though {50} there is some countervailing personal element that tempts to their formation and persistence.

Every failure to do what we should has its unfortunate effect upon us. We get into a state in which it is extremely difficult for us to do the right things. We have to overcome not only the original inertia of nature, but also a contrary habit. If we do not follow our good impulses, the worse ones get the upper hand. As Professor James said, for we must always recur to him when we want to have the clear expression of many of these ideas:

"Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain processes at all and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law."

It must not be forgotten that we mold not {51} alone what we call character, but that we manifestly produce effects upon our tissues that are lasting. Indeed it is these that count the most, for health at least. It is the physical basis of will and intellect that is grooved by what we call habit. As Doctor Carpenter says:

"Our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterwards into the same identical fold."

Permitting exceptions to occur when we are forming a habit is almost necessarily disturbing. The classical figure is that it is like letting fall a ball of string which we have been winding. It undoes in a moment all that we have accomplished in a long while. As Professor Bain has said it so much better than I could, I prefer to quote him:

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the {52} right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition under any circumstances."

This means training the will by a series of difficult acts, accomplished in spite of the effort they require, but which gradually become easier from repeated performance until habit replaces nature and dominates the situation.

Serious thinkers who faced humanity's problems squarely and devoted themselves to finding solutions for them had worked out this formula of the need of will training long ago, and it was indeed a principal characteristic of medieval education. The old monastic schools were founded on the idea that training of the will and the formation of good habits was ever so much more important than the accumulation of information. They frankly called the human will the highest faculty of mankind and felt that to neglect it would be a serious defect in education. The will can only be trained by the accomplishment of difficult things day after day until its energies are aroused and the man becomes conscious of his own powers and the {53} ability to use them whenever he really wishes. There was a time not so long since, and there are still voices raised to that purport, when it was the custom to scoff at the will training of the older time and above all the old-fashioned suggestion that mortifications of various kinds—that is, the doing of unpleasant things just for the sake of doing them—should be practiced because of the added will power thus acquired. The failure of our modern education which neglected this special attention to the will is now so patent as to make everyone feel that there must be a recurrence to old time ideas once more.

The formation of proper habits should, then, be the main occupation of the early years. This will assure health as well as happiness, barring the accidents that may come to any human being. Good habits make proper living easy and after a time even pleasant, though there may have been considerable difficulty in the performance of the acts associated with them at the beginning. Indeed, the organism becomes so accustomed to their performance after a time that it becomes actually something of a trial to omit them, and they are missed.

Education consists much more in such {54} training of the will than in storing the intellect with knowledge, though the latter idea has been unfortunately the almost exclusive policy in our education in recent generations. We are waking up to the fact that diminution of power has been brought about by striving for information instead of for the increase of will energy.

Professor Conklin of Princeton, in his volume on "Heredity and Environment", emphasized the fact that "Will is indeed the supreme human faculty, the whole mind in action, the internal stimulus which may call forth all the capacities and powers." He had said just before this: "It is one of the most serious indictments against modern systems of education that they devote so much attention to the training of the memory and intellect and so little attention to the training of the will, upon the proper development of which so much depends."

Nor must it be thought that the idea behind this training of the will is in any sense medievally ascetic and old-fashioned and that it does not apply to our modern conditions and modes of thinking. Professor Huxley would surely be the one man above all whom any one in our times would be least likely to think of {55} as mystical in his ways or medieval in his tendencies. In his address on "A Liberal Education and Where to Find It", delivered before the South London Workingmen's College some forty years ago, in emphasizing what he thought was the real purpose of education, he dwelt particularly on the training of the will. He defined a liberal education not as so many people might think of it in terms of the intellect, but rather in terms of the will. He said that a liberal education was one "which has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards which nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties." And then he added:

"That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order, ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great {56} and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who is no stunted ascetic but who is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

"Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature."

This is the liberal education in habits of order and power that every one must strive for, so that all possible energies may be available for the rewards of good health. Details of the habits that mean much for health must be reserved for subsequent chapters, but it must be appreciated in any consideration of the relation of the will to health that good habits formed as early as possible in life and maintained conservatively as the years advance are the mainstay of health and the power to do work.

CHAPTER IV

SYMPATHY

A great French physician once combined in the same sentence two expressions that to most people of the modern time would seem utter paradoxes. "Rest," he said, "is the most dangerous of remedies, never to be employed for the treatment of disease, except in careful doses, under the direction of a physician and rarely for any but sufferers from organic disease"; while "sympathy", he added, "is the most insidiously harmful of anodynes, seldom doing any good except for the passing moment, and often working a deal of harm to the patient."

With the first of these expressions, we have nothing to do here, but the second is extremely important in any consideration of the place of the will in human life. Nothing is so prone {58} to weaken the will, to keep it from exerting its full influence in maintaining vital resistance, and as a result, to relax not only the moral but the physical fiber of men and women as misplaced sympathy. It has almost exactly the same place in the moral life that narcotics have in the physical, and it must be employed with quite as much nicety of judgment and discrimination.

Sympathy of itself is a beautiful thing in so far as it implies that suffering with another which its Greek etymology signifies. In so far as it is pity, however, it tends to lessen our power to stand up firmly under the trials that are sure to come, and is just to that extent harmful rather than helpful. There is a definite reaction against it in all normal individuals. No one wants to be pitied. We feel naturally a little degraded by it. In so far as it creates a feeling of self-pity, it is particularly to be deprecated, and indeed this is so important a subject in all that concerns the will to be well and to get well that it has been reserved for a special chapter. What we would emphasize here is the harm that is almost invariably done by the well-meant but so often ill-directed sympathy of friends and relatives which proves relaxing of moral {59} purpose and hampers the will in its activities, physical as well as ethical.

Human nature has long recognized this and has organized certain customs of life with due reference to it. We all know that when children fall and even hurt themselves, the thing to do is not to express our sympathy and sorrow for them, even though we feel it deeply, but unless their injury is severe, to let them pick themselves up and divert their minds from their hurts by suggesting that they have broken the floor, or hurt it. For the less sympathy expressed, the shorter will be the crying, and the sooner the child will learn to take the hard knocks of life without feeling that it is especially abused or suffering any more than comes to most people. Unfortunately, it is not always the custom to do the same thing with the children of a larger growth. This is particularly true when there is but a single child in the family, or perhaps two, when a good deal of sympathy is likely to be wasted on their ills which are often greatly increased by their self-consciousness and their dwelling on them. Diversion of mind, not pity, is needed. The advice to do the next thing and not cry over spilt milk is ever so much better than sentimental recalling of the past.

Many a young man who went to war learned the precious lesson that sympathy, though he might crave it, instead of doing him good would do harm. Many a manly character was rounded out into firm self-control and independence by military discipline and the lack of anything like sentimentality in camp and military life. A good many mothers whose boys had been the objects of their special solicitude felt very sorry to think that they would have to submit to the hardships and trials involved in military discipline. Most of them who were solicitous in this way were rather inclined to feel that their boy might not be able to stand up under the rigidities of military life and hoped at most that he would not be seriously harmed. They could not think that early rising, hard work, severe physical tasks, tiring almost to exhaustion, with plain, hearty, yet rather coarse food, eaten in slapdash fashion, would be quite the thing for their boy of whom they had taken so much care. Not a few of them were surprised to find how the life under these difficult circumstances proved practically always beneficial.

I remember distinctly that when the soldiers were sent to the Mexican border the mother of {61} a soldier from a neighboring State remarked rather anxiously to me that she did not know what would happen to Jack under the severe discipline incident to military life. He had always gone away for five or six weeks in the summer either to the mountains or to the seashore, and the Mexican border, probably the most trying summer climate in the United States, represented the very opposite of this. Besides, there was the question of the army rations; Jack was an only son with five sisters. Most of them were older than he, and so Jack had been coddled as though by half a dozen mothers. He was underweight, he had a rather finicky appetite, he was capricious in his eating both as to quantity and quality, and was supposed to be a sufferer from some form of nervous indigestion. Personally, I felt that what Jack needed was weight, but I had found it very hard to increase his weight. He was particularly prone to eat a very small breakfast, and his mother once told me that whenever he was at home, she always prepared his breakfast for him with her own hands. This did not improve matters much, however, for Jack was likely to take a small portion of the meat cooked for him, refuse to touch the potatoes, and eat marmalade and toast with {62} his coffee and nothing more. No wonder that he was twenty pounds underweight or that his mother should be solicitous as to what might happen to her Jack in army life at the Border.

I agreed with her in that but there were some things that I knew would not happen to Jack. His breakfast, for instance, would not be particularly cooked for him, and he might take or leave exactly what was prepared for every one else. Neither would the Government cook come out and sit beside Jack while he was at breakfast and tempt him to eat, as his mother had always done. I knew, too, that at other meals, while the food would be abundant, it would usually be rather coarse, always plain, and there would be nothing very tempting about it unless you had your appetite with you. If ever there is a place where appetite is the best sauce, it is surely where one is served with army food.

I need scarcely tell what actually happened to Jack, for it was exactly what happened to a good many Jacks whose mothers were equally afraid of the effects of camp life on them. Amid the temptations of home food, Jack had remained persistently underweight. Eating an army ration with the sauce of appetite due to prolonged physical efforts in the outdoor {63} air every day, Jack gained more than twenty pounds in weight, in spite of the supposedly insalubrious climate of the Border and the difficult conditions under which he had to live. It was literally the best summer vacation that Jack had ever spent, though if the suggestion had ever been made that this was the sort of summer vacation that would do him good, the idea would have been scoffed at as impractical, if not absolutely impossible.

Homer suggested that a mollycoddle character whom he introduces into the "Iliad" owed something of his lack of manly stamina to the fact that he had six sisters at home, and an Irish friend once translated the passage by saying that the young man in question was "one of seven sisters." This had been something of Jack's trouble. He had been asked always whether he changed his underwear at the different seasons, whether he wore the wristlets that sisterly care provided for him, whether he put on his rubbers when he went out in damp weather and carried his umbrella when it was threatening rain, and all the rest. He got away from all this sympathetic solicitude in army life and was ever so much better for it.

It is extremely difficult to draw the line {64} where the sympathy that is helpful because it is encouraging ends, and sentimental pity which discourages begins. There is always danger of overdoing and it is extremely important that growing young folks particularly should be allowed to bear their ills without help and learn to find resources within themselves that will support them. The will can thus be buttressed to withstand the difficulties of life, make them much easier to bear, and actually lessen their effect. Ten growing young folks have been seriously hurt by ill-judged sympathy for every one that has been discouraged by the absence of sympathy or by being made to feel that he must take the things of life as they come and stand them without grouchy complaint or without looking for sympathy.

This is particularly true as regards those with any nervous or hysterical tendencies, for they readily learn to look for sympathy. The most precious lesson of the war for physicians has been that which is emphasized in the chapter on "The Will and the War Psychoneuroses." There was an immense amount of so-called "shell-shock" which really represented functional neurotic conditions such as in women used to be called hysteria. At the {65} beginning of the war there was a good deal of hearty sympathy with it, and patients were encouraged by the physicians and then by the nurses and other patients in the hospital to tell over and over again how their condition developed. It was found after a time that the sympathy thus manifested always did harm. The frequent repetition of their stories added more and more suggestive elements to the patients' condition, and they grew worse instead of better. It was found that the proper curative treatment was to make just as little as possible of their condition, to treat them firmly but with assurance—once it had been definitely determined that no organic nervous trouble was present—and to bring about a cure of whatever symptoms they had at a single sitting by changing their attitude of mind towards themselves.

Some of the patients proved refractory and for these isolation and rather severe discipline were occasionally necessary. The isolation was so complete as to deprive them not only of companionship but also of reading and writing materials and the solace of their tobacco. Severe cases were sometimes treated by strong faradic currents of electricity which were extremely painful. Patients who insisted that {66} they could not move their muscles were simply made to jump by an electric shock, thus proving to them that they could use the muscles, and then they were required to continue their use.

Those suffering from shell-shock deafness and muteness were told that an electrode would be applied to their larynx or the neighborhood of their ear and when they felt pain from it, that was a sign that they were able to talk and to hear if they wished, and that they must do so. Relapses had to be guarded against by suggestion, and where relapses became refractory and stronger currents of electricity to ear and larynx were deemed inadvisable, the strict isolation treatment usually proved effective.

In a word, discipline and not sympathy was the valuable mode of treating them. Sympathy did them harm as it invariably does. The world has recognized this truism always, but we need to learn the lesson afresh, or the will power is undermined. Character is built up by standing the difficult things of life without looking for the narcotic of sympathy or any other anaesthetizing material. These are "hard sayings," to use a Scriptural expression, but they represent the accumulation of wisdom of human experience. Sympathy can be {67} almost as destructive of individual morale as the dreads, and it is extremely important that it should not be allowed to sap will energy. In our time above all, when the training of the will has been neglected, though it is by far the most important factor in education, this lesson with regard to the harmful effect of sympathy needs to be emphasized.

For nervous people, that is, for those who have, either from inheritance or so much oftener from environment, yielded to circumstances rather than properly opposed them, sympathy is quite as dangerous as opium. George Eliot once replied to a friend who asked her what was duty, that duty consisted in facing the hard things in life without taking opium.

Healthy living to a great extent depends on standing what has to be borne from the bodies that we carry around with us without looking for sympathy. It has often been emphasized that human beings are eminently lonely. The great experiences of life and above all, death and suffering, we have to face by ourselves and no one can help us. We may not be, as Emerson suggested, "infinitely repellent particles", but at all the profoundest moments of life we feel our alone-ness. The more {68} that we learn to depend bravely on ourselves and the less we seek outside support for our characters, the better for us and our power to stand whatever comes to us in life.

Physical ills are always lessened by courageously facing them and are always increased by cringing before them. The one who dreads suffers both before and during the time of the pain and thus doubles his discomfort. We must stand alone in the matter and sympathy is prone to unman us. Looking for sympathy is a tendency to that self-pity which is treated in a subsequent chapter and which does more to increase discomfort in illness, exaggerate symptoms, and lower resistive vitality than anything else, in the psychic order at least.

Suffering is always either constructive or destructive of character. It is constructive when the personal reaction suffices to lessen and make it bearable. It is destructive whenever there is a looking for sympathy or a leaning on some one else. Character counts in withstanding disease, and even in the midst of epidemics, according to many well-grounded traditions, those who are afraid contract the disease sooner than others and usually suffer more severely. Sympathy must not be allowed to produce any such effect as this.

CHAPTER V

SELF-PITY

The worst brake on the will to be well is undoubtedly the habit that some people have of pitying themselves and feeling that they are eminently deserving of the pity of others because of the trials, real or supposed, which they have to undergo. Instead of realizing how much better off they are than the great majority of people—for most of the typical self-pitiers are not real subjects for pity—they keep looking at those whom they fondly suppose to be happier than themselves and then proceed to get into a mood of commiseration with themselves because of their ill health—real or imaginary—or uncomfortable surroundings. Just as soon as men or women assume this state of mind, it becomes extremely difficult for them to stand any real {70} trials that appear, and above all, it becomes even more difficult for them to react properly against the affections of one kind or another that are almost sure to come. Self-pity is ever a serious hamperer of resistive vitality.

A great many things in modern life have distinctly encouraged this practice of self-pity and conscious commiseration of one's state until it has become almost a commonplace of modern life for those who feel that they are suffering, especially if they belong to what may be called the sophisticated classes. We have become extremely sensitive as a consequence about contact with suffering. Editors of magazines and readers for publishing houses often refuse in our time to accept stories that have unhappy endings, because people do not care to read them, it is said. The story may have some suffering in it and even severe hardships, especially if these can be used for purposes of dramatic climax, but by the end of the story everything must have turned out "just lovely", and it must be understood that suffering is only a passing matter and merely a somewhat unpleasant prelude to inevitable happiness.

Almost needless to say, this is not the way of life as it must be lived in what many {71} generations of men have agreed in calling "this vale of tears." For a great many people have to suffer severely and without any prospect of relief—none of us quite escape the necessity of suffering—and as some one has said, all human life, inasmuch as there is death in it, must be considered a tragedy. The old Greeks did not hesitate, in spite of their deep appreciation of the beauty of nature and cordial enthusiasm for the joy of living, even to emphasize the tragedy in life. They were perhaps inclined to think that the sense of contrast produced by tragedy heightened the actual enjoyment of life and that indeed all pleasure was founded rather on contrast than positive enjoyment. One may not be ready to agree with the saying that the only thing that makes life worth while is contrast, but certainly suffering as a background enhances happiness as nothing else can.

Aristotle declared that tragedy purges life, that is, that only through the lens of death and misfortune could one see life free from the dross of the sordid and merely material to which it was attached. His meaning was that tragedy lifted man above the selfishness of mere individualism, and by showing him the misfortunes of others prepared him to struggle {72} for himself when misfortune might come, as it almost inevitably would; and at the same time lifted him above the trifles of daily life into a higher, broader sphere of living, where he better realized himself and his powers.

For man is distinctly prone to forget about death and suffering, and when he does, to become eminently selfish and forgetful of the rights of others and his duties towards them. The French have a saying, consisting of but four words and an intervening shrug of the shoulders, that is extremely illuminating. They quote as the expression of the usual thought of men when brought face to face with the fact that people are dying all around them, "On meurt—les autres!" "People die—Oh, yes (with an expressive shrug of the shoulders), other people!" We refuse to recognize the fact that we too must go until that is actually forced upon us by advancing years or by some incurable disease. As for suffering, a great many people have come almost to resent that they should be asked to suffer, and character dissolves in self-pity as a result.

Instead of the constant, continuous reading of what may be called Sybaritic literature—for it is said that the Sybarite finds it impossible to sleep if there is a crushed rose leaf next {73} his skin—instead of being absorbed in the literature which emphasizes the pleasures of life and pushes its pains into the background, young people, and especially those of the better-to-do classes, should be taught from their early years to read the lives of those who have endured successfully hardships of various kinds and have succeeded in getting satisfaction out of their accomplishment in life, despite all the suffering that was involved. These are human beings like ourselves, and what mortal has done, other mortals can do.

There was a school of American psychologists before the war who had come to recognize the value of that old-fashioned means of self-discipline of mind, the reading of the lives of the saints. For those to whom that old-fashioned practice may seem too reactionary, there are the lives and adventures of our African and Asiatic travelers and our polar explorers as a resource.

War books have been a godsend for our generation in this regard. They have led people to contemplate the hardest kind of suffering—and very often in connection with those who are nearest and dearest to them— and thus made them understand something of the possibilities of human nature to withstand {74} trials and sufferings. As a result they have been trained not to make too much of their own trivial trials, as they soon learned to recognize them in the face of the awful hardships that this war involved. What Belgium endured was bad enough, while the experiences of Poland, Servia, Armenia were an ascending scale of horrors, but also of humanity's power to stand suffering.

Life in the larger families of the olden times afforded more opportunities for the proper teaching of the place of suffering than in the smaller families of the modern time. Older children, as they grew up, had before them the example of mother's trials and hardships in bearing and rearing children, and so came to understand better the place of hard things in life. In a large family it was very rare when one or more of the members did not die, and thus growing youth was brought in contact with the greatest mystery in life, that of death. Very frequently at least one of the household and sometimes more, had to go through a period of severe suffering with which the others were brought in daily contact. It is sometimes thought in modern times that such intimacy with those who are suffering takes the joy out of life for those who {75} are young, but any one who thinks so should consult a person who has had the actual experience; while occasionally it may be found that some one with a family history of this kind may think that he or she was rendered melancholy by it, nine out of ten or even more will frankly say that they feel sure that they were benefited. There is nothing in the world that broadens and deepens the significance of life like intimate contact with suffering, if not in person, then in those who are near and dear to us.

As a physician, I have often felt that I should like to take people who are constantly complaining of their little sorrows and trials, who are downhearted over some minor ailment, who sometimes suffer from fits of depression precipitated by nothing more, perhaps, than a dark day or a little humid weather, or possibly even a petty social disappointment, and put them in contact with cancer patients or others who are suffering severely day by day, yes, hour by hour, night and day, and yet who are joyful and often a source of joy to others. Let us not forget that nearly one hundred thousand people die every year from cancer in this country alone.

As a physician, I have often found that a {76} chronic invalid in a house became the center of attraction for the whole household, and that particularly when it was a woman, whether mother or elder sister, all of the other members brought their troubles to her and went away feeling better for what she said to them. I have seen this not in a few exceptional instances, but so often as to know that it is a rule of life. Chronic invalids often radiate joy and happiness, while perfectly well people who suffer from minor ills of the body and mind are frequently a source of grumpiness, utterly lack sympathy, and are impossible as companions. An American woman, bedridden for over thirty years, has organized by correspondence one of the most beautiful charities of our time.

Pity properly restricted to practical helpfulness without any sentimentality is a beautiful thing. There is always a danger, however, of its arousing in its object that self-pity which is so eminently unlovely and which has so often the direct tendency to increase rather than decrease whatever painful conditions are present.

Crying over oneself is always to be considered at least hysterical. Crying, except over a severe loss, is almost unpardonable. {77} It is often said that a good cry, like a rainstorm, clears the atmosphere of murk and the dark elements of life, but it is dangerous to have recourse to it. It is a sign of lack of character almost invariably and when indulged in to any extent will almost surely result in deterioration of the power to withstand the trials of life, whatever they may be.

Professor William James has suggested that not only should men and women stand the things that come to them in the natural course of events, but they should even go out and seek certain things hard to bear with the idea of increasing their power to withstand the unpleasant things of life. This is, of course, a very old idea in humanity, and the ascetics from the earliest days of Christianity taught the doctrine of self-inflicted suffering in order to increase the power of resistance.

It is usually said that the principal idea which the hermits and anchorites and the saintly personages of the early Middle Ages, of whose mortifications we have heard so much, had in inflicting pain on themselves was to secure merit for the hereafter. Something of that undoubtedly was in their minds, but their main purpose was quite literally ascetic. Ascesis, from the Greek, means in its strict {78} etymology just exercise. They were exercising their power to stand trials and even sufferings, so that when these events came, as inevitably they would, seeing that we carry round with us what St. Paul called "this body of our death," they would be prepared for them.

Practically any psychologist of modern times who has given this subject any serious thought will recognize, as did Professor James, the genuine psychology of human nature that lies behind these ascetic practices. Nothing that I know is so thoroughgoing a remedy for self-pity as the actual seeking at times of painful things in order to train oneself to bear them. The old-fashioned use of disciplines, that is, little whips which were used so vigorously sometimes over the shoulders as to draw blood, or the wearing of chains which actually penetrated the skin and produced quite serious pain no longer seems absurd, once it is appreciated that this may be a means of bracing up character and making the real trials and hardships of life much easier than would otherwise be the case.

Not that human nature must not be expected to yield a little under severe trials and bend before the blasts of adverse fortune, but {79} that there should not be that tendency to exaggerate one's personal feelings which has unfortunately become characteristic of at least the better-to-do classes in our time. Not that we would encourage stony grief, but that sorrow must be restrained and, above all, must not be so utterly selfish as to be forgetful of others.

Tears should, to a large extent, be reserved, as they are in most perfectly normal individuals, for joyous rather than sad occasions, for no one ever was supremely joyful without having tears in the eyes. It is when we feel most sympathetic to humanity that the gift of tears comes to us, and no feeling is quite so completely satisfying as comes from the tears of joy. Mothers who have heard of their boy's bravery, its recognition by those above him, and its reward by proper symbols, have had tears come welling to their eyes, while their hearts were stirred so deeply with sensations of joy and pride that probably they have never before felt quite so happy.

CHAPTER VI

AVOIDANCE OF CONSCIOUS USE OF THE WILL

Doctor Austin O'Malley, in his little volume, "Keystones of Thought", says: "When you are conscious of your stomach or your will you are ill." We all appreciate thoroughly, as the result of modern progress in the knowledge of the influences of the mind on the body, how true is the first part of this saying, but comparatively few people realize the truth of the second part. The latter portion of this maxim is most important for our consideration. It should always be in the minds of those who want to use their own wills either for the purpose of making themselves well, or keeping themselves healthy, but above all, should never be forgotten by those who want to help others get over various ills that are manifestly due in whole or in part to the failure to use the vital energies in the body as they should be employed.

Conscious use of the will, except at the beginning of a series of activities, is always a mistake. It is extremely wasteful of internal energy. It adds greatly to the difficulty of accomplishing whatever is undertaken. It includes, above all, watching ourselves do things, constantly calculating how much we are accomplishing and whether we are doing all that we should be doing, and thus makes useless demands on power partly by diversion of attention, partly by impairment of concentration, but above all by adding to the friction because of the inspection that is at work.

The old kitchen saw is "a watched kettle never boils." The real significance of the expression is of course that it seems to take so long for the water to boil that we become impatient while watching and it looks to us as though the boiling process would really never occur. This is still more strikingly evident when we are engaged in watching our own activities and wondering whether they are as efficient as they should be. The lengthening of time under these circumstances is an extremely important factor in bringing about tiredness. Ask any human being unaccustomed to note the passage of time to tell you when two minutes have elapsed; {82} inevitably he will suggest at the end of thirty to forty seconds that the two minutes must be up. Only by counting his pulse or by going through some regular mechanical process will he be enabled to appreciate the passage of time in anything like its proper course. When watched thus, time seems to pass ever so much more slowly than it would otherwise.

It is extremely important then that people should not acquire the impression that they must be consciously using their will to bring themselves into good health and keep themselves there, for that will surely defeat their purpose. What is needed is a training of the will to do things by a succession of harder and harder tasks until the ordinary acts of life seem comparatively easy. Intellectual persuasion as to the efficiency of the will in this matter means very little. The ordinary feeling that reasoning means much in such matters is a fallacy. Much thinking about them is only disturbing of action as a rule and Hamlet's expression that the "native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" is a striking bit of psychology.

Shakespeare had no illusions with regard to the place of the will in life and more than any English author has emphasized it. I have {83} ventured to illustrate this by quotations from him under each chapter heading, but there are many more quite as applicable that might readily be found. He knew above all how easy it was for human beings to lessen the power of their wills and has told us of "the cloy'd will that satiateth unsatisfied desire" and "the bridles of our wills", and has given us such adjectives as "benumbed" and "neutral" and "doting", which demonstrates his recognition of how men weaken their wills by over-deliberation.

The mode of training in the army is of course founded on this mode of thinking. The young men in the United States Army want to accomplish every iota of their duty and are not only willing but anxious to do everything that is expected of them. There were some mighty difficult tasks ahead of them over in Europe and our method of preparing the men was not by emphasizing their duty and dinning into their ears and minds how great the difficulty would be and how they must nerve themselves for the task. Such a mode of preparation would probably have been discouraging rather than helpful. But they were trained in exercises of various kinds in an absolutely regular life under plain living in the {84} midst of hard work until their wills responded to the word of command quite unconsciously and immediately without any need of further prompting. Their bodies were trained until every available source of energy was at command, so that when they wanted to do things they set about them without more ado, and as they were used to being fatigued they were not constantly engaged in dreading lest they should hurt themselves, or fostering fears that they might exhaust their energies or that their tiredness, even when apparently excessive, would mean anything more than a passing state that rest would repair completely.

If at every emergency of their life at war soldiers had to go through a series of conscious persuasions to wake up their will and set their energies at work, and if they had to occupy themselves every time in presenting motives why this activity should not be delayed, then military discipline, at least in so far as it involves prompt obedience, would almost inevitably be considerable of a joke. What is needed is unthinking, immediate obedience, and this can be secured only by the formation of deeply graven habits which enable a man to set about the next thing that duty calls for at once.