(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and what science means to the people.)
(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and what science means to the people.)
We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers. Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say with assurance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all; and this is always the first step towards knowledge.
The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws of the conduct of the mind?
The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and digesting and assimilating them, as the body gropes after and digests and assimilates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take these and analyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them, compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be different; we classify them, and provide them with names, which are, as it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes; those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and principles of experimental science.
It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if our minds adopted a passive attitude toward life. But some minds possess what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new sensationsfor themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the thinker amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"—that is, if it doesn't explain all the facts and stand all the tests—it is thrown away like a worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.
By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour, while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in the sky.
One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind runs ahead of the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, which, less than two hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of other planets, their motions in relation to their mass and distance, discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out the problem of what must be the mass and the exact orbit of this body, in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a certain size." And so for the first time the human sensesbecame aware of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all eternity.
Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and classify the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these fleas—that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of Europe and Asia.
Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and not to lift it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.
Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the difference between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives. The man who knows is godlike to those who do not know; he may enslave them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without knowledge, and it must be the bestknowledge, it must be new knowledge; he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with umbrellas over their heads.
Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it, or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for your feet. Beware of cant—that paraphernalia of noble sentiments, artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?
The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called "Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements lightly.
This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amountof charlatanry, but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop, and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers. Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective. Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making buttons and buttonholes meet.
This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child—which may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting separateschools for defective children—replacing the old-fashioned schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little wretches to learn what was beyond their power.
In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal anything, will give all his associations promptly, and the reaction times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each case the first memory association of the criminal will be one which he does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that the conscious mind is trying to conceal.
Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be working inthe interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field. To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the process seems, is now the most important task confronting the enlightened thinker.
The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection with the subnormal—and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own, they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate purpose of all true science.
(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of all men.)
(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of all men.)
Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be, and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done, and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and compelled to deal with modern ideas.
But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained; your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for understanding.
First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods, cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet, never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter shells—yet I see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions, the lies deliberately maintained—and realize the waste of it all, the pity of it all!
Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugsto his bosom and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and never a week passes that there do not come to me letters from people who tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct—but I fail to understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the "Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes, and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled—there will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!
Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more deadly compulsions of its own making—from prejudices and superstitions. The prejudices and superstitions of mankind are like those diseased mental states which are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a "complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each group of men, each sect or class, have their precious dogmas, their shibboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a brain-storm.
At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."
You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are better than the institutions and systems under which they live; you realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem of social reorganization.
Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is, for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"—and never since the world began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius. Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child is more wonderful than her child.
In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another, and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of power and wisdom which is not ours, but on whichwe draw. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must feel towards life and its miracles.
Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high, marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite, and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many universes, and new ones continually discovered.
The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the universe of outer space, the material world of infinity? Consider the smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the miracles of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars, and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying every which way through space!
Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then, behold, in theatom there are millions of millions of electrons—tiny particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them, and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."
Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it, he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.
Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it—he possesses not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of the spheres, and—who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St. Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest conversing!
(Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem of one organism.)
(Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem of one organism.)
The reader who has followed our argument this far will understand that we are seldom willing to think of the body as separate from the mind. The body is a machine, to be sure, but it is a machine that has a driver, and while it is possible for a sound machine to have a drunken and irresponsible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, we find the fault to be with the driver; in other words, we find that what is needed for the body is a change in the mind.
If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound as long as possible, the first problem for you to settle is what you want to make of your life; you must have a purpose, and confront the tasks of life with energy and interest. What is the use of talking about health to a man who has no moral purpose? He may answer—indeed, I have heard victims of alcoholism answer—"Let me alone. I have a right to go to hell in my own way."
I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition is equally true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health while he has a sick body. It is a good deal like the old question, Which comes first, the hen or the egg? The mind and the body are bound up together, and you may try to deal with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to deal with both. Most physicians have a tendency to overlook the mind, and Christian Scientists make a religion of overlooking the body, and each pays the penalty in greatly reduced effectiveness.
My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, is that it has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and functions, and to overlook the central unity of the system. You will find a doctor who specializes in the stomach and itsdiseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach were a thing that went around in the world all by itself. He will discuss the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook to point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your blood-stream, which is controlled by your nervous system, which in turn is controlled by hope, by ambition, by love, by all the spiritual elements of your being. A single pulse of anger or of fear may make more trouble with the contents of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive ferments can remedy in a week.
Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, and so for a time have a purely local problem. You may smash your finger, and that is a problem of a finger; but neglect it for a few days, and let blood poison set in, and you will be made aware that the human body is one organism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you may hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control your mind.
Some one has said that the blood is the life; and certainly the blood is both the symbol and the instrument of the body's unity. The blood penetrates to all parts of the body and maintains and renews them. If the blood is normal, the work of renewal does not often fail. If there is a failure of renewal—that is, a disease—we shall generally find an abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the blood is controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered pump. One chamber drives the blood to the lungs, a mass of fine porous membranes, where it comes into contact with the air, and gives off the poisons which it has accumulated in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is then sucked out of the lungs, and by the next chamber it is driven to every corner of the body. It takes to every cell of the body the protein materials which are necessary for the body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which are to be burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the carriers of oxygen, and an even greater number of the white corpuscles, which are the body's scavengers, its defenders from invasion by outside germs.
There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails and the scales of the skin, which are dead matter, producedby the body and pushed out from it and no longer nourished by the blood. But all the still living parts of the body are fed at every instant by the stream of life. Each cell in the body takes the fuel which it needs for its activities, and combines it with the oxygen brought by the red corpuscles; and when the task of power-production has been achieved, the cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon dioxide, but many complex chemical products—ammonia, uric acid, and the "fatigue poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The blood-stream bears these along, and delivers some to the sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the kidneys, and the rest to the lungs.
All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal health perfectly regulated and timed by the nervous system. You lie down to sleep, and your muscles rest, and the vital activities slow up, your heart beats only faintly; but let something frighten you, and you sit up, and these faculties leap into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a fresh supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and these organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not do so, your muscles would have no fresh energy; they would become paralyzed by the fatigue poisons, and you would be, as we say, exhausted.
All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter and accessory to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is the blood-stream's means of protecting itself and renewing itself. The stomach is to digest and prepare new blood material, the teeth are to crush it and grind it, the hands are to seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to figure out its whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little world as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who lives somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after the welfare of our blood-stream—he has far better reason for believing that all our consciousness and our personality exist for him!
Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly to renew itself or properly to protect itself and its various subsidiary organs. When you find yourself with a disease, you call in a doctor; and unless this doctor is a modern and progressive man, he makes the mistake of assuming that the disease is in the particular organ where it shows itself. You have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical menhave a love for long names, which have the effect of awing you, and convincing you that you are in desperate need of attention.) Your throat is sore, your tonsils are swollen and covered with white spots; so the doctor hauls out his little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and dips it, say in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a mass of foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he knows that lysol kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle for the same purpose, puts you to bed, and gradually the swelling goes down, and he tells you that he has cured you, and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe the swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. Then he tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature is to blame for your death, but it never occurs to anyone to ask what nature may have had to do with your recovery.
I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now classified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas, and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over. Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before.
We are dealing here with processes which our ancient mother nature has been carrying on for a long time, and which she very thoroughly understands. We ought, therefore, to be sure that we know what is the final effect of our actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we understand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, andnot simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters on a cancer. This is the fundamental problem of health; and in order to make clear what I mean, I am going to begin by telling a personal experience, a test which I made of medical science some twelve or fourteen years ago, in connection with one of the simplest and most external of the body's problems—the hair. First I will tell you what medical science was able to do for my hair, and second what I myself was able to do, when I put my own wits to work on the problem.
I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down condition. I was having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, many symptoms of a general breakdown; among these I noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided that it was foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my hair attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted the best authority available, so I wrote to the superintendent of the largest hospital in New York, asking him for the name of a reliable specialist in diseases of the scalp. The superintendent replied by referring me to a certain physician, who was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went to see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth Avenue.
He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff in my hair, and that he would give me a prescription which would remove this dandruff and cause my hair to stop falling out. He charged me ten dollars for the visit, which in those days was more money than it is at present. Being of an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth by learning what there was to learn about the human hair. I questioned this gentleman, and he told me that the hair is a dead substance, and that its only life is in the root. He explained that barbers often persuade people to have their hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that this was an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. It was better even not to wash the hair too often. All that was needed was a mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff germs; and so I had the prescription put up at a drug store, and for a couple of years I religiously used it according to order, and it had upon my hair absolutely no effect whatever.
So here was the best that medical science could do. But still, I did not want to be bald, so I went among the health cranks—people who experiment without license from the medical schools. Also, I experimented upon myself, and now I know something about the human hair, something entirely different from what the rich and successful "consulting dermatologist" taught me, but which has kept me from becoming entirely bald:
First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, like everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It is perfectly true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, and makes trouble, and that the process of killing this germ can be helped by chemicals; but it does not take a ten-dollar prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth of borax and salt from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer, moisten it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But infinitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair roots are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy blood produces sick hair roots, which cannot hold in the hair. Most important of all is the fact that in order to make healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully and freely to these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight band which almost entirely stopped the circulation of the life-giving blood to my sick hair roots. In other words, by wearing civilized hats, I was literally starving my hair to death.
As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and have never worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. On the few occasions when I go into the city, I wear a soft cap. Now and then I experience inconvenience from this—the elevator boy in some apartment house tells me to come in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these embarrassments with Jack London, who went even further in his defiance of civilization, and wore a soft shirt. It was his custom, he said, to knock down the elevator boys and sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be all right for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to the painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about without the customary symbols of my economic superiority.
The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly andelaborately warned me concerning the danger of moving my hair too violently, and thus causing it to come out; but now my investigations brought out the fact that moving the hair, that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow of blood to the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease. As for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more quickly you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance of your getting another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the root, it kills that root forever, but if it is pulled out before it dies, the root will make a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" specialist knows this; she knows that if a hair is pulled, it grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so to pull out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid of hairs!
I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well-endowed with physical graces by our mother nature. He finds it worth while to preserve them—they being accessory to those amorous experiences which form so large a part of the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values his beautiful hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his fireplace, reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and twists it. He has cultivated this habit for many years, and as a result his hair is as thick and heavy as the "fuzzy-wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a favorite sport of this poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He will mildly suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the challenge, and my friend will proceed to haul him all over the place, to the accompaniment of howls of anguish from the victim, and howls of glee from the victor, who has, of course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros hide.
I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be beautiful, and I have been too busy to remember to pull my hair; but by giving up tight hats, and by limiting the amount of my overworking, I have managed to keep what hair I had left when the hair specialist had got through with me. I tell this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health, because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in every case of disease, and which you must understand in seeking to remedy the trouble.
We have a phrase which has come down to us from theancient Latins, "vis medicatrix naturae," which means the healing power of nature. So long ago men realized that it is our ancient mother who heals our wounds, and not the physician. Out of this have grown the cults of "nature cure" enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those of the "pill doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a man who taught me probably more than any other writer on health questions, and with whom I once discussed the subject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied men in the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was contrary to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a simple way of meeting the argument—he refused to believe it. He insisted that, as with all other germ infections, it must be a question of bodily tone; no germ could secure lodgment in the human body unless the body's condition was reduced.
"But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You know that if you go into the jungle, you are not immune against the scorpion or the cobra or the tiger. There is nothing in all nature that is safe against every enemy. What possible right have you to assert that you are immune against every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?"
We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the truth lies somewhere between the extremes of two warring schools. Our race has been existing for a long time in a certain environment, and its very existence implies superiority to that environment. The weaklings, for whom its hardships were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites invaded their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But those who survived were able to make in their blood-stream the substances known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help the white blood corpuscles devour the germs. As the result of their victory, we carry those anti-bodies in our system, which gives us immunity to those particular diseases, or at any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases without dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into our throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examination proves that we carry around with us in our mouths the germs of all the common throat and nose diseases, colds, bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what precautions we might take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats every few minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And theywage continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in vain upon the gates of our sound health. But take us to some new environment to which we are not accustomed; take us to Panama in the old days of yellow fever, or take us to Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect us with "sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems are not accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as the ancient knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything in sight, and ruled the continent of Europe for many hundreds of years, but were wiped off the earth by a chemist mixing gunpowder.
In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived a beautiful and happy race of savages, believed to have been descended, long ages ago, from Aryan stock. From the point of view of physical perfection, they were an ideal race, living a blissful outdoor life, which you may read about in Melville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements of the nature enthusiast. They went practically naked, their houses were open all the time, they lived on the abundant fruits of the earth. To be sure, they were cannibals, but this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of diet. They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, and not often enough to count, one way or the other, in matters of health. They had lived for uncounted ages in perfect harmony with their environment; they were happy and free; and certainly, if such a thing were possible to human beings, they should have been proof against germs. But a ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the population of this island had been wiped out by the disease. What tuberculosis left were finished by syphilis and smallpox, and today the Marquesans are an almost extinct race.
But there is another side to the argument—and one more favorable to the nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, by soft living, by self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may reduce the tone of our body too far below the standard which our ancestors set for us; and then the common disease germs get us, then we have colds, sore throats, tuberculosis. The nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that there is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the body to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our normal environment and its strains.
You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay," which was so perfectly built in every part that it ran for fifty years and then collapsed all at once in a heap. But the human body is not built that way. It always has one or more places which are weaker than the others, and which first show the effects of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia, in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another decaying teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffening of the joints. But whatever the symptoms may be, the fundamental cause is always the same, an abnormal condition of the blood-stream, and a consequent lowering of the body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its cure, you have first the emergency question, are there any germs lodged in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? As part of the problem, you have to ask whether your blood-stream is normal, and if not, what are the methods by which you can make it normal and keep it so? Also you have to ask, what are the reasons why your trouble manifests itself in this or that particular organ? Is there some weakness or defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? Are there any measures you can take to increase the flow of blood to that organ, and to promote its activity? In the study of your health, you will find that circumstances differ, and the importance of one factor or the other will vary; but you will seldom find any problem in which all these factors do not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless you take all the factors into consideration.