hate, nor annoyance, nor irritation, nor repulsion to possess one's
feelings, will bring greatest good results. Take the mosquito pest, for
instance: One who begins to feel irritation at the sound made by the
wings of the insect, is already creating within himself a condition
favorable to inflammation from the effects of the bite. Many who
suffer by mosquitos admit that the buzz is worse, to them, than the
bite, which is proof of a purely mental and unnecessary affliction.
There was a time in my boyhood when mosquitos poisoned and annoyed me
beyond endurance. Each bite represented a great itching welt, and the
buzzing was full of terror in consequence, or, more likely, in the
light of present knowledge, the buzzing inspired fearthought or dread,
and the bite was very poisonous in consequence. At present, mosquito
bites are not poisonous to me, and mosquito sounds are no longer
disagreeable. I do not remember when the deliverance came. Possibly the
cure came through intimate acquaintance. I have lived in localities
where the mosquito thrives all the year round, and in such numbers
that he tires his victims into a state of non-resistance, and in the
calm of non-resistance, physical and mental irritations cease. This
is sometimes called acclimatization, but it proves the contention,
whichever way it is interpreted.
In the practice of my freedom from what was once a great affliction,
I sometimes brave a swarm of mosquitos by sleeping in their presence
without drawing the bar. If the mosquitos light on me freely, I find
comfort in the evidence of my popularity, and in the fact that I am
probably being of service to something, or somebody, by possibly
diverting attentions that would not be appreciated in like manner by
them. In the morning, when I look in the glass and note the little
red spots that the bites have left, but of which I am not otherwise
conscious, I consider them as a record of my hospitality, and am proud
of them, as the German corps student is proud of the scars on his face,
that are a record of equally foolish bravery or exposure, taken out of
his university course at Heidelberg or elsewhere. My braving of the
mosquitos would certainly be classed as foolish, except as a test
of superiority, but the pin-point red spots soon disappear and do no
permanent harm.
Mosquitos are said to breed in malarial conditions, and for the purpose
of absorbing the malaria. Flies do not exist except in conditions of
ferment, and are of greatest service in carrying it away. Roaches
are splendid scavengers, and are a result, and not a cause, of
unclean conditions. Our warfare should be waged against unclean and
inharmonious conditions, and not against the purifiers and harmonizers
of the conditions.
It is not a difficult matter to rid one's self of repulsions if the
point-of-view is changed. I presume that the most generally detested
creature that is not altogether deadly in its venom is the bedbug.
The bedbug is more of a tradition than a fact, and many of those who
shudder at mention of him have never seen one of his kind. I am sure
that none of his enemies have much if, any, acquaintance with him, as
to the color of his eyes, his habits of thrift, his amiability in his
family and other qualities that serve to make a creature attractive and
respectable within his sphere.
The truth about this much despised creature is that he is useful as
a warning against unclean conditions, and his odor and his bite are
his notes of warning. Instead of filling one's self with a feeling
of repulsion or anger or any other emotion that affects the free
circulation of the blood, and relaxes and disorders the tissues of the
body, at sight or mention of a bedbug, the discovery should elicit
the expression, "Thank you for the information." If it should happen
in one's own house, no hidden crack nor corner should escape an
overhauling to get rid of the cause of the bedbug's warning; or, if it
should happen in a hotel, there should be a change of hotel.
Mention is made of mosquitos and roaches and bedbugs in this
connection, not for the purpose of degrading the feeling of love by
applying it to things that are disagreeable, no matter what their
mission of usefulness, but to put stress upon the fact that one cannot
afford to hate anything. It is especially useful, in seeking to change
the point-of-view, to consider the greatest of causes of repulsion in
order to more easily reach the lesser causes, for the lesser fade of
themselves by the removal of the greater.
If you can learn not to hate a bedbug, to thank a roach for informing
you of unclean conditions and to endure mosquitos, you are pretty sure
to modify all prejudices by thus doing.
LAST SOMETIMES FIRST.
It is my own habit to read the last chapter of a book first and if the
summary of its contentions and deductions, which are sure to be found
in the closing chapter, interest me, I go carefully through the book
with the author to learn how he has reached his conclusions. I find,
upon enquiry, that many others do the same. This is made necessary
because of the vast number of books that are published and the
impossibility of learning by other than the easiest means more than a
small proportion of the ideas that are given out each year. There are
published, yearly, in English, twenty to thirty thousand volumes of new
matter, or new arrangements or new editions of old matter, so that to
read carefully only a catalogue of them would be a considerable task
for the ordinary reader.
This being the closing chapter of my book, and being especially
possessed of my subject and desirous of being understood, I may be
pardoned for offering a brief syllabus of my effort as a benediction.
I have endeavored to show that fearthought is the arch-enemy of
civilized man. Through the fears of his progenitors, it is the cause
of the weaknesses he inherits; and through his own permission, it is
also the cause of his personally acquired ill health, ill success,
discontent and unhappiness. Fearthought, however, can be eradicated
from the habit-of-thought of even the most timid persons, who are
cursed by the hereditary affliction of fear, or by their own weak
habit-of-thought, by persistent counter-suggestion, as soon as they are
convinced of the possibility of freedom, and have thereby, learned the
profitable point-of-view regarding it. I have shown that forethought
becomes strong-thought as soon as fearthought, or weak-thought, is
separated from it; that the condition of harmony which is created by
the eradication of fearthought, is the normal condition in civilized
nature; that growth is immediate and strong within the harmonic
atmosphere thus created; that happiness is the certain result; and
that fearthought and its various expressions are the basic deterrents
to growth and happiness in man. That God, in the process of Evolution,
has developed Man to the point where he executes the Higher Law of
Harmony through the exercise of Divine Selection in modifying the brute
law of "the survival of the fittest" (or, strongest), and thereby
proves the "superiority of mind over matter." That God has created a
partnership between Growth and Man, which is properly distinguished
as the Man-Nature partnership. That the functions of the partners are
clearly defined by rigid limitations; Nature doing all the growing
without harmonizing or cultivating anything; while Man performs all of
the harmonizing or cultivating, but none of the growing. That Man's
only method of harmonizing or cultivating is through learning and
removing the deterrents to growth. That in watering plants, Man removes
the deterrent, drouth. That in building hot-houses, Man removes the
deterrent, cold. That in oiling machinery, Man removes the deterrent,
friction. That in refusing to be the bondman of fearthought and anger
and worry, Man escapes the only deterrents within himself, to harmony,
health, growth and happiness. And, that in cultivating Appreciation all
of the possibilities of Happiness are opened to him.
I have tried to show that one of the great deterrents to growth and
the acquisition of happiness is nursed by focussing the point-of-view
on worn-out traditions, instead of on the present accomplishments and
acceleration of progress in which all of the elements of happiness
rest. That while happiness is possible to all under present conditions,
indications point to the possibility, within the assured possession
of surplus wealth-of-means, that Altruism may soon "have an inning,"
during which conditions will be so rearranged that dire poverty and
unhappiness will be impossible to any but the perverse. That normal,
civilized human nature is _good_ nature, and that if conditions are
intelligently arranged most men will eagerly mold themselves into
good men to fit the conditions. That the Material Age has become so
rich that it can now afford leisure to give attention to the Higher
Self, and in so doing will soon refuse to permit any one born under
the prejudices and the protection of the Nation--the social family--to
be ignorant nor idle nor poor; that the era of the three great
A's--Appreciation, Attraction and Altruism--is upon us, and that it
will inaugurate the Age of the Higher Self, wherein Man will realize
that he is not simply the highest among animals, but is endowed with
divine possibilities, and cannot longer be respectable with only animal
characteristics. That the resetting of the gauge of respectability
rendered necessary by the Awakening, and the new conditions that
must grow out of it, will be above the toleration of anything that
is unaltruistic, as surely as the gauge of the present is above the
toleration of petty thieving and convicted perjury.
There is not only hope, but there _is assurance_, of harmonic
conditions in the signs of the times and in the constantly increasing
acceleration of progress.
A BEGINNING AND NOT AN END.
It is argued that the Stoics and other philosophers of ancient Greece
attained the perfection of self-control, and successfully suppressed,
and even eliminated, all of the passions and desires which so commonly
dominate man, and attained thereby a state of happiness that is quite
unknown in the present times of ostentation and ambition; but that the
result was a state of lethargic indifference, that became more fatal to
growth and progress in the end than any known condition of tumult and
competition in the history of the race.
This is undoubtedly a just arraignment of the result of the Grecian
philosophical teachings but, at the same time, the reason for so
unhappy a result is not difficult to find.
The Greeks cultivated self-control and the harmonic conditions growing
out of it as an end, and not as a preparatory means to growth. They
prepared a weedless and wormless soil within the mind, but in it
planted poppies, breathed of their poisonous perfume, and slept the
sleep of indifference, which leads to the sleep called death.
Since the time of the Stoics, the world has been told by the God-Man
Jesus of Nazareth, that living means growing, that true happiness
is gained only through works in the service of something, that the
necessary attribute of perfect manhood is spontaneous altruism, and
that there is no other road towards growth, refinement, spirituality
and happiness than along the way made easy by consistent altruism.
During the time that has passed since the power and glory of Hellas
began to wane, mankind has had experience with the forces of nature
and the efficacy of machinery to teach the great universal law of
compensation, which is also the law of happiness. This great law
prescribes that there shall be no balance without support or motion,
no poise without alertness, no life without growth, and no happiness
without service.
Learning a wise lesson from the law of compensation, man has come
to appreciate the value of a wormless and weedless soil, but he has
learned to plant in it trees that bear altruistic fruit, instead of the
poppy of sloth and indifference, which is now classed as a poisonous
weed; he has learned to clean and polish the journals of his engines
and has invented balance wheels to regulate, and ball bearings to
accelerate, their power; but not for the purpose of idleness.
The decadence of Greek manhood was not the result of culture, but
the result of the uses to which it was put, and hence we should not
condemn culture, nor cultivate friction, as an antidote for decadence,
because Greek civilization did not defend itself against assault
and decay, but, rather, let us emulate the good they achieved, and
cultivate the power they attained, and use them as _a beginning and not
as an end_.
APPENDICES.
APPENDIX A.
THE INFLUENCE OF FEAR IN DISEASE.
BY DR. WM. H. HOLCOMB.
Our sanitarians are doing a good work in exploring the physical causes
of disease, and endeavoring to protect the individual and the public
health. But there is a higher and larger sphere of causes which they
have seldom penetrated, and of whose existence even many of them seem
to be ignorant. I allude to the extraordinary influence of affection
and thought, or of emotion and ideas, in the causation and prevention
of disease.
The body is a mirror, in which all the states of the soul are
reflected. We are familiar with the wonderful effects of the will,
the passions, the emotions, of the imagination, sympathy, hope, fear,
faith, and confident expectation upon the physical system. We are
accustomed to regard the phenomena as illustrations of the fact that
the soul can, under certain circumstances, act powerfully upon the
body, with the tacit assumption, however, as a general rule, that the
body executes all the functions by chemical or mechanical law, without
the necessary intervention of any mental influences whatever. This is
the great illusion of the materialist.
Imagination, intellect, will, emotion, faith, hope, expectation,
etc., are only states or modes of the soul's own life, and they are
in perpetual activity, whether we are conscious of it or not. The
operations of the soul of which we are not conscious, are almost
infinite in comparison with the very small portion of them which comes
at any moment within the range of our external consciousness. The soul
organizes its own body in the womb of the mother, holds all its parts
together in due order and functional activity during life, and when he
quits it at death, its material tenement falls into dissolution.
The mind of man is constantly at work, silently pervading every tissue
of his body by its vital influence, repeating itself in every function,
throbbing in the heart, breathing in the lungs, reflecting itself in
the blood, weaving its own form into every act of nutrition, realizing
its own life in every sensation, and working its own will in every
motion. The power of the mind over the body indeed! There is no power
in the body, but in the mind, for the body is the mind, translated into
flesh and blood.
When a limb is broken--the bones shattered, the flesh torn, the
blood-vessels severed, the nerves lacerated, what can the surgeon or
doctor do to repair the injury? A little outside mechanical work. He
ligates, he stitches, he plasters, he fixes the parts in apparatus so
they will remain motionless in the natural position. He can do no more.
The soul which creates the body and keeps it in health, repairs it when
injured. By her own occult forces she regulates the movement of the
blood and development of nerve power, the chemical decomposition and
re-combination, going on in every tissue, according to ideas and models
implanted upon her by the Divine Mind, the Over-Soul of the universe.
The old writers call this wonderful power the _vis medicatrix naturi_,
the curative power of nature. Swedenborg, for whom nature has no powers
underived from spiritual sources, teaches that this vital power is
the soul itself. His view that the soul itself acts unconsciously to
our perceptions in the development and conservation of the body is
advocated by Morell in his "Elements of Psychology," and is highly
spoken of by Professor William B. Carpenter.
When we have constructed a true psychological pathology, we shall
understand clearly why and how it is that fear can turn the hair gray
in a single night; that a mother's milk can be poisoned by a moment of
terror; that the heart may be paralyzed by a sudden joy or sorrow; that
dyspepsia, paralysis, and many other diseases are produced by mental
worry and fret and the brain-fag of overwork and anxiety. Yea, we will
understand that away back of all physical causation, the roots of our
disease originate in the spiritual conditions of the race, in our false
religions, our false philosophies, our false way of thinking, our false
relations to God and each other.
The most extensive of all the morbid mental conditions which reflect
themselves so disastrously on the human system, is the state of fear.
It has many degrees or gradations, from the state of extreme alarm,
fright, or terror, down to the slightest shade of apprehension
of impending evil. But all along the line it is the same thing--a
paralyzing impression upon the centers of life which can produce,
through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid
symptoms in every tissue of the body.
We have very seldom reflected upon the fact that fear runs like a
baleful thread through the whole web of our life from beginning to end.
We are born into the atmosphere of fear and dread, and the mother who
bore us had lived in the same atmosphere for weeks and months before
we were born. We are surrounded in infancy and childhood by clouds of
fear and apprehension on the part of our parents, nurses, and friends.
As we advance in life we become, instinctively or by experience, afraid
of almost everything. We are afraid of our parents, afraid of our
teachers, afraid of our playmates, afraid of ghosts, afraid of rules
and regulations and punishments, afraid of the doctor, the dentist,
the surgeon. Our adult life is a state of chronic anxiety, which is
fear in a milder form. We are afraid of failure in business, afraid of
disappointments and mistakes, afraid of enemies, open or concealed;
afraid of poverty, afraid of public opinion, afraid of accidents, of
sickness, of death, and unhappiness after death. Man is like a haunted
animal from the cradle to the grave, the victim of real or imaginary
fears, not only his own, but those reflected upon him from the
superstitions, self-deceptions, sensory illusions, false beliefs and
concrete errors of the whole human race, past and present.
If fear produces disease, acute or chronic, suddenly or gradually,
through the correlations existing between the spirit and the body, how
can there be a genuinely and perfectly healthy man or woman in the
world? There is none.
That fear does produce all kinds of disease, has been frequently
observed and fully substantiated by the medical profession. Dr. Tuke,
in his admirable book, "Influence of the Mind upon the Body," cites
well authenticated instances of the following diseases as having been
produced by fear or fright: Insanity, idiocy, paralysis of various
muscles and organs, profuse perspirations, cholerina, jaundice, turning
of the hair gray in a short time, baldness, sudden decay of the teeth,
nervous shock followed by fatal anæmia, uterine troubles, malformation
of embryo through the mother, and even skin disease--erysipelas,
eczema, and impetigo.
We observe in this list that fear not only affects the mind and
the nervous and muscular tissues, but the molecular chemical
transformations of the organic network, even to the skin, the hair, and
the teeth. This might be expected of a passion which disturbs the whole
mind, which is represented or externalized in the whole body.
Dr. Tuke reiterates the fact which has been so frequently observed,
that epidemics owe a great deal of their rapid extension and violence
to the panic of fear which exists among the people. When yellow fever,
cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, and other malignant diseases obtain a
footing in a community, hundreds and thousands of people fall victims
to their own mental conditions, which invite the attack and insure its
fatality. When the disease was new and strange, as the yellow fever was
to the interior in its visitation in 1878, when the doctors were not
familiar with it, the nurses not trained to it, the people, having no
confidence in its management, lost hope, their fears became excessive,
and consequent mortality was frightful.
How does fear operate upon the body to produce sickness? By paralyzing
the nerve centres, especially those of the vasomotor nerves, thus
producing not only muscular relaxation, but capillary congestions of
all kinds. This condition of the system invites attack, and there is no
resilience, or power of resistance. The gates of the citadel have been
opened from within, and the enemy may enter at any point.
What determines the specific nature of the disease which attacks a
person thus prostrated by fear? Men are frequently prostrated by fear
in storms or fire or earthquakes or accidents, and no disease results.
It is because they have been not thinking and brooding over any special
morbid conditions. But in an epidemic, say of yellow fever, the
subjects connected with the disease are strongly pictured on the mind.
They are talked of, read about, discussed and written about, until the
mind is full of images of fever, delirium, black vomit, jaundice,
death, funerals, etc. When such is the case, no microbes or bacteria
are needed to produce an outburst of yellow fever. The whole mass of
horrors already stamped upon the mind is simply reflected and repeated
in the body.
"As a man thinketh, so is he," said Solomon. Thoughts become things,
apprehensions take form and substance, and lo! the disease. In the
height of his happiness and prosperity, Job permitted himself to brood
in silent fear over the possibility of losses and misfortunes, and he
had at last to exclaim, "The thing which I greatly feared has come upon
me."
Sudden and great fears are not frequent. The fears of every day, the
constant apprehensions and anxieties of life, which are really fears
of impending evil, prey upon our vitality and lessen our power of
resisting, so that any passing disease may be photographed on our minds
and seen upon our bodies.
Fear is itself a contagious disease, and is sometimes reflected from
one to another mind with great rapidity. It needs no speech or sign
to propagate it, for by psychological laws we are just beginning to
comprehend, it passes from one to another, from the healthy to the
sick, from the doctor or the nurse to the patient, from the mother to
the child. Thus malignant influences may be cast around us by even our
best friends and would-be helpers, under whose baleful shadow, without
our even knowing of its existence, we and our children may sicken and
die.
The summer of 1888 was signalized by a moderately severe epidemic of
yellow fever at Jacksonville, Florida, and a very extensive epidemic of
fear throughout the Southern states. The latter disease was much more
contagious than the former, and much less amenable to treatment. This
mental malady visited every little town, village, and railway station,
and kept the people in a chill of trepidation for many weeks. This
causeless and senseless terror originated many precipitate and unjust
measures of self-defense. Under its influence public and private rights
were disrespected, and the panic greatly intensified. In a few cases
the refugee was driven from the door, the hungry left unfed, the sick
unattended. There was exhibited on a small scale, here and there, that
same principle of terror which is manifested in a burning theatre, on
a sinking ship, or in a stampeded army, when brave men suddenly become
cowards, and wise men fools, and merciful men brutes.
Truly, something ought to be done for the moral treatment of yellow
fever.
I will relate an anecdote of Dr. Samuel Cartwright, of Natchez,
Mississippi, which furnishes an ideal type for the mental treatment of
yellow fever.