Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
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 little 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 institutions 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 sex. 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 wide-spread 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 association 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 associative 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 association 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 preoccupation
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 plans 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 effort 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 assuredly 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 classroom 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 impending. 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 in 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, entitled '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 associations 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 illustrated by a little work with which I
recently became acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of God, the
Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and
Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."[C]
I extract a few passages, 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 God his life, with its pleasures;
but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but
satisfaction in that state...."
[C] Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.
"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he
should be damned; 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 God, 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 God.
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 passed his life in
perfect liberty and continual joy."