Thought and cell creation are spontaneous and are never-ceasing if
all obstructions are removed from about them. Civilised man places a
quarantine against the enemies of growth, of progress, and of harmony,
and thereby promotes civilisation.
Man is, therefore, the Chief Assistant to Creation, the Architect of
Civilisation and a _Full Partner_ with Nature in Evolution.
This distinction, adequately appreciated, lifts Man above the animal
plane and gives him a place among the gods; his material form, composed
of muscle, hands, powers of locomotion and speech, being but tools with
which to harness and coöperate with the other forces in Nature, under
the direction of the godlike attribute of the Mind, in the removal of
deterrents to free growth, and the cultivation of that Harmony which is
the symbol of God.
* * * * *
Having assumed as an hypothesis that Man is Full Partner with Nature
in Evolution; and having discovered his proper function in the
"Division of Labour" in Nature, it is time for each of us to analyse
the conditions which environ us as Man units, select those which
seem to be useful to our scheme of construction and harmony, declare
all deterrents to the growth of our selection to be weeds, and then
proceed to remove them without delay, first, by pulling those which now
exist, and following that by establishing strict quarantine against
them.
* * * * *
I can teach only that which I have learned, and pronounce good only
that which has led to happiness. I will therefore note the progress of
my own discoveries and describe those which have brought increasing
happiness, in order that they may serve as beacons and monuments to
such as may seek the same goal along the same lines of inquiry.
The first forty-five years of my present life were spent in seeking
happiness by means of personal accumulation. Money, friends,
distinction, acquaintance with art in all its various expressions,
lands, luxurious homes in favoured localities, pictures, rare
porcelains, lacquers and other possessions, isolated for my own use,
and for the enjoyment of chosen friends, seemed to be the necessary
desiderata of happiness.
In turn, all of these came to me in sufficient abundance to give,
at least, a taste of their quality and their efficacy in promoting
happiness; but, in the midst of them were always obstructions to
unhampered enjoyment, increasing with possession and accumulation
of the coveted means, and constantly mocking, as with a mirage, the
ultimate ideal desired.
During these forty-five years of quest of happiness there were
constantly appearing above the horizon of my search flashes of hope,
leading in new directions, which proved in turn to be but will o' the
wisps, until the night--the morning--of my awakening, as related in my
book "Menticulture."
It was then, for the first time, I heard that it was possible to _get
rid_ of anger and worry, the _bêtes noires_ of my existence, which
were, as I then believed and as I now know, the dreaded barriers
between me and perfect happiness; not because the mere removal of
these particular deterrents to happiness will accomplish happiness,
but because the certain result of the removal of any principal mental
obstructions leads to the disappearance of contingent errors, and
permits freedom of growth of the elements of true happiness.
* * * * *
It is proper to state here the definition of happiness which is the
result of my progressive quest. There is only one quality of true
happiness, as there can only be one kind of quarantine, and the former
is dependent on the latter. If both are not _perfect_, both fail. True
happiness is _the evidence and fruit of conscious usefulness, and
quarantine against obstructions to normal altruistic energy is the best
means of attaining happiness_.
In view of the establishment of the status of the Man unit in the
Nature-Man partnership, the above definition and assertion may be
extended to declare that there can be no genuine happiness short of
_usefulness in assisting other units to be strong and useful in the
partnership of which each is a member_.
True happiness cannot exist if there is present an element of
indifference.
Next to destructive aggression, indifference, which leads to neglect
and waste, is the worst fault that a member of the Nature-Man
partnership can be guilty of. Neglect _nothing_ that will aid growth in
any useful form, and happiness will surely follow, for Nature and the
God of Nature will "do the rest."
* * * * *
In qualifying for the Nature-Man partnership, it is of first importance
that our personal equipment should be understood and cared for so as to
give us the greatest strength. The body may appropriately be likened to
an electric power plant--a Mind-Power Plant; the body being the engine,
the stomach the furnace, the arteries and veins the boiler tubes, the
blood in circulation the steam, the brain the dynamo, and the mind
electricity.
Mind is the all-important factor of our equipment, for it is the
commander that will lead and direct better and wiser than we can now
imagine if we allow it a chance to act with freedom.
To secure this freedom we must know its habitat, its requirements, its
nourishment, and learn to allow it to recharge itself sufficiently and
to concentrate itself on its chosen usefulness without imposing upon it
also the drudgery of useless work. This must be done with the same idea
of economy that a _chef_ is relieved of the drudgery of washing dishes
and emptying slops.
According to Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey, a pharmacist, army surgeon
and tireless investigator of forty-five years' experience, whose
revelations have been before the medical profession of the world for
many years without a single challenge, the brain is a dynamo which
accumulates energy during sleep, and uses it during the waking hours of
its possessor.
The brain manages everything for man that he accomplishes. It brings
messages from the Creator, which are sometimes called intuition,
sometimes inspiration, and by various other names. Emerson calls
these messages the "Over-Soul." My own appreciation of the attribute
that distinguishes the Spiritual Man from the animal man is better
satisfied by the name "Spiritual Cerebration," which I have defined
in my book "Happiness" as: "Intelligence not derived from experience,
principally obtained during sleep, and, seemingly supernaturally clear
to consciousness on awaking in the natural manner."
The brain also directs all action, and, with encouragement, will take
up the messages from the Creator and analyse, arrange, and develop them
into useful accomplishments, and then file them away in the archives
of the memory as additions to the equipment which is necessary to
greatness in the pursuit of usefulness.
Dr. Dewey gives the bill of fare of the brain in seeking its own
nourishment, and also describes the work it performs in transforming
the fuel we supply it with into the tissues on which it feeds.
This is undoubtedly a very important discovery and locates the source
of strength and teaches how to conserve it.
I will not give the technical bill of fare of the brain, for you would
not remember it better than I do, but it is all composed of tissues
of the body, fat predominating to the quantity of ninety-seven per
cent, but the important announcement is that neither the brain itself
nor any of the nervous centres diminish during consumption of tissue,
neither do they lose any of their power, even in cases of what is
called starvation, up to the point of death, when all of the fatty and
muscular tissues of the body are wasted away, leaving the brain and
nerve centres to flicker and go out, as a candle does, brighter than
usual with the parting flash of their brilliancy.
Dr. Dewey gives President Garfield as an illustrious example of proof
of the accuracy of his deduction. The martyr President lived eighty
days without the addition of an ounce of nutriment to his life, carried
the usual clearness of mind to the last moment, and passed on only when
the last muscular tissue had been consumed by the brain.
Dr. Dewey's assertion that starvation, so-called, is never a cause
of disease, and never dangerous to life and health until there is no
more tissue left on which to feed the brain and other nerve centres,
was published some years ago and I have the authority of the Doctor
himself that his contention has not been once disputed by the medical
profession. Three eminent English physicians, Drs. A. M. Haig,
George S. Keith and A. Rabigliati, and many American physicians, have
experimented with what is called starvation for the cure of chronic
diseases which have their origin in excess of inharmonious deposits
caused by overeating or careless eating. The results in all instances
recorded have been successful in modifying or curing the disease.
When patients have understood that they were suffering no injury from
not taking food they have ceased to have hunger cravings. These hunger
cravings usually come from fear or from disorder caused by fermenting
food in an overloaded stomach.
We can, then, on undisputed and practical authority, treat craving for
food or drink as a disease and therefore not rational, and starvation
as merely drawing upon the stored fuel--fatty tissue--by the dynamo of
the brain, restorable at will at any time before complete exhaustion,
without injury-- with benefit, in fact--to the machinery of the body.
The brain must first turn food into tissue, and then derive its own
nourishment from the tissue. If the right quantity of nourishment can
be introduced into the stomach, if the quality is of the right kind,
and if it is fed into the furnace of the stomach with relatively the
same wisdom that a competent fireman uses in feeding his furnace, the
brain is required to use the least possible effort in this direction,
and has its stored energy available for directing other useful action
and serving the partnership which employs it with an efficiency,
the possibility of which may be well illustrated by the herculean
accomplishments of the battleship "Oregon" in the late war in steaming
thirteen thousand miles and engaging in a great battle without a stop
or an accident, and without "starting" a rivet.
I will not tell you much of what Dr. Dewey has revealed, because I
want you to read all he has written,[18] as well as the books of the
English physicians mentioned, but I must say this much: Very little
digestion goes on during sleep, and, whether it does or not the brain
has from sixty to one hundred days' nourishment stored up within each
of us, and can feed on that without inconvenience to us, except in the
form of what is called habit craving or imaginary hunger, for the whole
of that time. A person who has been without food for an unusual time,
if he does not gorge his stomach when the first opportunity of breaking
the fast arrives, is not only better for the rest the brain has had,
but the health does not suffer in any way.
[Footnote 18: Dr. Dewey is the author of numerous books: notably, the
"No-Breakfast Plan" which he supplies to inquirers direct from his home
address, Meadville, Pa.]
It is, then, no serious deprivation to ask a person to go without
what we call breakfast--the getting-up or habit-craving--and give the
brain a chance to clean up the remnants of the last day's supply of
food fuel, and express new desires in an _earned_ appetite. There is
available, on waking from sleep, a fresh charged brain ready to serve
its proprietor with great efficiency. Incidentally it has to do some
"chores," rake out the clinkers, dispose of the ashes, relieve the
grate bars, attend to any little repairs, brush out the chimney and
generally get ready for the work of another day.
The hunger of the morning is necessarily but a _habit-hunger_. The best
evidence of this is that, when busily employed, we forget it without
trouble; and also is that European peoples, where the disease dyspepsia
is not known in the list of physical derangements, perform the chief
physical or mental effort of the day before their breakfast, the
morning coffee scarcely meaning anything in the way of what we call a
meal.
Dr. Dewey's firm assertion is that when the stomach has had a chance
to "clean up" and is ready for more fuel, it will make it known in
healthy manner by a healthy appetite, and that it is rarely normal
before noon; and not really before one has done what might be called a
"day's work."
I can assert boldly, as the result of experience, that the time to get
work out of the brain is between the morning awakening and the first
meal, and it is the same relative to endurance draughts on the physical
strength.
Then, in the heat or the glare of the day, having accomplished
something useful and disposed of pressing duties, so as not to feel
the irritation of hurry, the first meal of the day can be taken with
restful ease and it will be found that the supply demanded by the
appetite will not be so great as that demanded by the unhealthful,
habit-inflamed early morning call.
It may not seem so, but this digression from psychics to physics is
very germane to my subject and to my own experience.
Without knowing that Dr. Dewey and the other eminent physicians who
endorse his theories were living in the world, I, in the summer of
1894, blundered into a personal experience of diet that produced
wonderful results which I now recall with all the vividness of the high
lights of extreme pleasure met in foreign travel.
I was in a Southern city for two months during an unusually hot
summer, watching some developments that could not be hurried, and the
fruition of which was important to my interests. I had nothing to do in
connection with this business but to "watch and wait."
I had some writing to do, however, in the mean time, which could not
be well or comfortably done in the heat of the day, hence I arose at
daylight and began to write. At that time of the morning nothing to eat
was to be had, which compelled me to start work without it. My subject
was an absorbing one, so that, once under way, I would not be diverted
until I had "written myself out;" or in other words, had exhausted the
consideration of the morning messages which I now designate "Spiritual
Cerebration."
It happened, under these circumstances, that my habit-hunger was not
given a hearing and it was nearly noon before I felt the fatigue or
even the heat of the burning day, for I worked in my pajamas, and had
no time to look at the thermometer, to get an exaggerated suggestion of
heat by which to start my blood chasing itself through my veins.
I not only noticed that my midday breakfast was a deliciously grateful
meal, but that appetite became satisfied far short of the formally
customary abnormal early morning gorge, and, what was more remarkable
yet, I wanted nothing during the rest of the day, and not even until
midnight, except, after vigorous exercise of some sort, I might desire
a little fruit or a bit of bread or cracker; but never a full course
dinner.
I wore a belt at my trousers, as was the custom of the place, and in a
few days decreased the girth of my corpulency one hole in the belt; and
before the summer was over, four holes, with only the most comfortable
feeling accompanying the loss of weight.
When my family returned from Europe, I settled back into the American
and English habit of a meat breakfast, because I did not want to be
"different," and at the same time I half doubted but that my experience
was nothing more than an abnormal one, attributable to the inertia of
summer heat, literary absorption and lack of physical exercise.
Twice, when I have been left alone since then, away from the restraint
of custom, and also in the midst of abundant athletic exercise, I have
again cultivated the same habit of missing breakfast through desire to
do early morning work, with the same splendid results.
The last time referred to is the present. My search for a lost waif
through the framing of an appeal for him, has given me such absorbing
thought that meals have been of no consideration beside it, and in
the midst of it I find Dr. Dewey's book, the books of the English
physicians indorsing him; and have secured results of health, comfort
and strength to myself which I did not know I possessed; to corroborate
my accidental experience. As I said before, this seems a very wide
digression from the psychical to the physical, but it is really no
digression at all, for it is in the service of the brain, and the
brain is the direct agent of communication between the Creator and
our consciousness, assisting us to work together in the Nature-Man
partnership with useful efficiency.
* * * * *
Now, let me return to the aim of my address, and pursue the thread
of my personal experience in search of the fundamental principles of
True Living, which, to be proven, must be vouched for and tested by
resultant happiness.
When I attacked the tap-roots of trouble and shut the door in the
face of anger and worry for ever, I saw among the bones of their
decomposition the skeleton of fear. It proved to be their backbone.
Fear, then, was the support of all the deterrent passions that beset
brightest manhood and womanhood and pursue it to an untimely death.
My book "Happiness" deals with the separation of fearthought from
forethought in order to show that it is possible to smother a vital
stimulant of energy with a resemblance of it which is as deadly a
poison as carbonic acid gas.
While I have been engaged in pursuing germs of disorder to their
beginnings, during the past three or four years, I have uncovered
many a beautiful possession that formerly I did not appreciate.
_Appreciation of the full value of Appreciation_ is one of these
discoveries of priceless value and usefulness. I have spoken of this
in "Happiness," but not as much as it deserves, for it truly is "The
Appreciation of God and of Good that gives birth to Love, and which is
the only true and adequate measure of wealth."
Nothing else, however, in the whole quest, has approached the beauty
of the love for children that has come to me; the appreciation of
them as Messages from the Creator, consigned to the cultivation of
the environment society provides for them; as likely as not, any one
of them bringing into the world a great intelligence by means of the
humblest of parents.
During observation of social questions in Europe, my interest has been
drawn constantly to children, as by a powerful magnet, so that when I
was called back to this country to attend to a detail of business and
met the adventure which is the cause of my present focalised interest
in neglected ones, as expressed in a book to be called, when published,
"That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine,"[19] it was but natural that I
should put all the force of my sympathy into the cause of rescue, and
that I should find in that service more happiness than in any of the
luxurious amusements which had claimed me as a devotee in times gone by.
[Footnote 19: Published, and proceeds dedicated to the cause of the
waifs, October, 1898.]
True _happiness is the result of conscious usefulness_. This I can
assert with the confidence of knowledge, not alone from my own
experience, but from observation of the great army of kindergartners
and child-savers whom I have met in my travels, and especially within
the past year; and it is evident that the service attaching to
protecting little neglected angels from the evil suggestions and the
cruel conditions that may make of them, not men, but beasts, is one
of the avenues of usefulness in which these "Angels of the State" meet
with the smile of the Master, who was the first Great Kindergartner;
whose teachings centred about and dwelt upon the care of children as of
first consideration, and who said, "Suffer Little Children to come unto
me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Childhood has suffered, manhood has suffered, progress has suffered,
for lo! these ages, the cruel assumption that mankind is naturally
depraved. In recent years public conscience has been dulled by
the anæsthetic that there must be a Have-To-Be-Bad Class in all
communities. This has been formulated into the assumption that there
is in every group of the Heaven-Sent Angels of Purity, a full ten per
cent that must be depraved and unredeemable except by the interposition
of special dispensation, which is a direct contradiction of all of
the observed Laws of Creation to which intelligence now subscribes.
The motto of this assumption is couched in this vicious legend: "The
hopelessly submerged ten per cent stratum of society."
Half an hour's walk from this hospitable mansion, on the shore of the
beautiful Geneva Lake, is a place called "Holiday Home." There are now
housed and thoughtfully cared for at the "Home" about one hundred of
the "Hopelessly Submerged Ten Per Cent Stratum of (Chicago's) Society."
During the summer half a thousand of these unfortunates will come for
two weeks each. When we touched at the wharf last evening after coming
from the concert given in their interest at Mr. Chalner's lakeside
home, the waifs met us with a merry class-yell, and greeted us with an
intelligence, a buoyancy, and a freedom, born of their holiday, such as
was not excelled at any of the other landings where only the children
of rich summer residenters were met. We all saw these "waifs" and we
marvelled at them, for, with the grime of the slum washed from their
sweet faces, and with clean, though sometimes ragged clothing, they
might have figured in the mix-up of "Pinafore," or have starred in a
dramatic representation of the "Prince and the Pauper," with all the
grace required of princelings.
They haven't been long from God, and they are god-like or not, as we
have welcomed and protected them, or rebuffed or neglected them.
Let me assure you in the most practical way that there are two sides to
this child question. There is a sentimental side, than which there is
no other so worthy; and there is a practical side, than which there is
none so profitable.
The best and most profitable service in the whole gamut of useful
occupations that I know about is in learning to know children, and in
connection with a Quarantine movement which is now started, and which
aims to not let one of these wards of the Christ escape the best care
known to Love and the Science of Child-Life.
The crèche and the kindergarten and the manual training schools, and
domestic training classes, as well as institutions similar to the
"Holiday Home" across the Bay, have demonstrated within the past thirty
years that fully ninety-eight per cent of the "Hopelessly Submerged
Ten Per Cent" can be rescued after they have been warped by evil
surroundings. What will not the same effort effect if directed toward
prevention and protection, instead of being squandered in careless and
soulless correction?
Christ said: "And a little child shall lead them." Let us awake to
the call. It is the way to Heaven; for, "_Of such_ is the Kingdom of
Heaven."