A Book of Exposition Part 6

And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory ever since. "You Americans," he said, "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 betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,"

continued Dr. Clouston, "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 intensely the trivial moments of life."

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote seems to me to mean a great deal. And 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 sh.o.r.es. 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. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence 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, vivacity 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, as it was to Dr.

Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a story in which, after describing 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 character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak.

Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the more or less of tension about which I am making such a fuss is a small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension in our faces and in our unused muscles _is_ a small thing: not much mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its place and function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man and another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what little there is, is very important." And the remark certainly applies to this case. The general over-contraction may be small when estimated in foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. This follows as a necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete, and your muscles all relaxed?

Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well, our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme in every great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.

To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are _bad habits_, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about?

Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own characteristic national type,--a type with the production of which, so far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically nothing at all to do.

This type; which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be _wholly_ disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run.

Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his "bad days."

We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the same work would nine times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner att.i.tude and outer manner in us, caught from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the American camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and tear and fatigue.

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. And if talking high and tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to _do_ more by the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different.

There would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My colleague, Professor Munsterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently, has written some notes on America to German papers. He says in substance that the appearance of unusual energy in America is superficial and illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of our people. I think myself that it is high time for old legends and traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to write about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty paradoxical thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote, and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this over-tension,--and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main facts,--where does the remedy lie? It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed.

And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.

So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn't work contagiously in _some_ particular. The very idiots at our public inst.i.tutions imitate each other's peculiarities.

And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now in New York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that, because more radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little volume called _Power Through Repose_, a book that ought to be in the hands of every teacher and student in America of either s.e.x. You need only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. But of one thing be confident: others still will follow you.

And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. If one's example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed. _Become the imitable thing,_ and you may then discharge your minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which this precept reposes is a law of very deep and widespread importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that _strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free a.s.sociation of one's objective ideas and motor processes._ We get the extreme example of this in the mental disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His a.s.sociative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is _painful_. Joyous emotions about the self also stop the a.s.sociation of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Oh, it was _fine!_ it was _fine!_ it was _fine!_" is all the information you are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune. "_Good!_ GOOD! GOOD!" is all we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very foolishness.

Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic pre-occupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed.

Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plan of campaign, and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. _Unclamp_, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get "rattled" in the recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well?

Often those who are most indifferent. _Their_ ideas reel themselves out of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other hand, conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting from its efforts on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful.

But we Yankees are a.s.suredly not those to whom such a general doctrine should be preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the _subject so well that it shall be always on tap_: then in the cla.s.s-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running of one's mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive days of examination pending. One ounce of good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. If you want really to do your best at an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say this sincerely and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In her later book, ent.i.tled _As a Matter of Course_, the gospel of moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not "caring," is preached with equal success. Not only our preachers, but our friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping on this string. And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the various mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a good start might be made in the direction of changing our American mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of a.s.sociations and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth. This is charmingly ill.u.s.trated by a little work with which I recently became acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of G.o.d, the Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."[7]

I extract a few pa.s.sages, the conversations being given in indirect discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. "He said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer, and that he was a great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That he had desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so he should sacrifice to G.o.d his life, with its pleasures; but that G.o.d had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction in that state....

"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he should be d.a.m.ned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about it: _I engaged in a religious life only for the love of G.o.d, and I have endeavored to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of G.o.d.

I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to love Him ..._ That since then he had pa.s.sed his life in perfect liberty and continual joy.

"That when an occasion of practicing some virtue offered, he addressed himself to G.o.d, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless Thou enablest me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. That, when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to G.o.d, 'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself: it is You who must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave himself no further uneasiness about it.

"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision of wine for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. That he said to G.o.d, 'It was his business he was about,' and that he afterward found it well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne, the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the matter pa.s.sed, but that it proved very well.

"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for the love of G.o.d, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he had been employed there.

"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of G.o.d.

"That the goodness of G.o.d a.s.sured him He would not forsake him utterly, and that He would give him strength to bear whatever evil He permitted to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."

The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him is a refreshing spectacle.

The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any rate,--and long enough to the female s.e.x. What our girl-students and women-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.

It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of G.o.d, you may all at once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of G.o.d) be enabled to go on.

And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: From _Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Problems_. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1902.]

[Footnote 7: Fleming H. Revell Company, New York (AUTHOR).]

SCIENCE AND RELIGION[8]

_Charles Proteus Steinmetz_

The problem of religion--that is, of the relations of man with the supernatural, with G.o.d and immortality, with the soul, our personality or the ego, and its existence or nonexistence after death--is the greatest and deepest which ever confronted mankind. In the present state of human knowledge, science can give no definite and final conclusions on these subjects, because of the limitations inherent in science.

We must realize that all our knowledge and information and the entire structure of science are ultimately derived from the perceptions of our senses and thereby limited in the same manner and to the same extent as our sense perceptions and our intellect are limited. The success or failure of scientific achievement largely depends on the extent to which we can abstract--that is, make our observations and conclusions independent of the limitations of the human mind. But there are limitations inherent in the human mind beyond which our intellect cannot reach, and therefore science does not and cannot show us the world as it actually is, with its true facts and laws, but only as it appears to us within the inherent limitations of the human mind.

The greatest limitation of the human mind is that all its perceptions are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity.

The same limitation therefore applies to the world as it appears to our reasoning intellect, and in the world of science there is no infinity, and conceptions such as G.o.d and the immortality of the ego are beyond the realm of empirical science. Science deals only with finite events in finite time and s.p.a.ce, and the farther we pa.s.s onward in s.p.a.ce or time, the more uncertain becomes the scientific reasoning, until, in trying to approach the infinite, we are lost in the fog of unreasonable contradiction, "beyond science"--that is, "transcendental".

Thus, we may never know and understand the infinite, whether in nature, in the ultimate deductions from the laws of nature in time and in s.p.a.ce, or beyond nature, on such transcendental conceptions as G.o.d and immortality. But we may approach these subjects as far as the limitations of our mind permit, reach the border line beyond which we cannot go, and so derive some understanding of how far these subjects may appear nonexisting or unreasonable, merely because they are beyond the limitations of our intellect.

There appear to me two promising directions of approach--first, from the complex of thought and research, which in physics has culminated in the theory of relativity; and, second, in a study of the gaps found in the structure of empirical science and what they may teach us.

All events of nature occur in s.p.a.ce and in time. Whatever we perceive, whatever record we receive through our senses, always is attached to, and contained in, s.p.a.ce and time. But are s.p.a.ce and time real existing things? Have they an absolute reality outside of our mind, as a part or framework of nature, as ent.i.ties--that is, things that are? Or are they merely a conception of the human mind, a form given by the character of our mind to the events of nature--that is, to the hypothetical cause of our sense perceptions? Kant, the greatest and most critical of all philosophers, in his _Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der Reinen Vernunft)_, concludes that s.p.a.ce and time have no absolute existence, but are categories--that is, forms in which the human mind conceives his relation to nature. The same idea is expressed by the poet-philosopher Goethe in his dramatic autobiography _Faust_ (in the second part), when he refers to the "Mutter," to the marriage of Achilles and Helena "outside of all time." It is found in ancient time. So Revelation speaks of "there should be time no longer" (hoti chronos ouketi estai).

The work of the great mathematicians of the nineteenth century--Gauss, Riemann, Lobatschefsky, Bolyai--offered further evidence that s.p.a.ce is not an empirical deduction from nature, but a conception of the mind, by showing that various forms of s.p.a.ce can be conceived, differing from one another and from the form in which the mind has cast the events of nature (the "Euclidean" s.p.a.ce). Finally, physical science, in the theory of relativity, has deduced the same conclusions: s.p.a.ce and time do not exist in nature by themselves, as empty s.p.a.ce and empty time, but their existence is only due to things and events as they occur in nature. They are relative in the relation between us and the events of nature, so much so that they are not fixed and invariable in their properties, but depend upon the observer and the conditions of observation.

We can get an idea of how utterly our perception of nature depends on the particular form of our time conception by picturing to ourselves how nature would look if our time perception were 100,000 times faster, or 100,000 times slower.