Man’s Supreme Inheritance

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“Our contemporaries of this and the rising generation appear to be hardly aware that we are witnessing the last act of a long drama, a tragedy and comedy in one, which is being silently played, with no fanfare of trumpets or roll of drums, before our eyes on the stage of history. Whatever becomes of the savages, the curtain must soon descend on savagery forever.”—J. G. Frazer.

The long process of evolution still moves quietly to its unknown accomplishment. Struggle and starvation, the hard fight for existence working with fine impartiality, remorselessly eliminate the weak and defective. New variations are developed and old types no further adaptable become extinct, and thus life fighting for life improves towards a sublimation we cannot foresee. But at some period of the world’s history an offshoot of a dominant type began to develop new powers that were destined to change the face of the world.

Speculations as to what first influenced that strange and wonderful development do not come within the province of this treatise, but I should like in passing to point out that the theory and practice 4of my system are influenced by no particular religion nor school of philosophy, but in one sense may be said to embrace them all. For whatever name we give to the Great Origin of the Universe, in the words of a friend of mine, “we can all of us agree ... that we mean the same thing, namely, that high power within the soul of man which enables him to will or to act or to speak, not loosely or wildly, but in subjection to an all-wise and invisible Authority.” The name that we give to that Authority will in no way affect the principles which I am about to state. In subscribing to them the mechanist may still retain his belief in a theory of chemical reactions no less than the Christian his faith in a Great Redeemer. But through whatever influence these new powers in man came into being I maintain that they held strange potentialities, and, among others, that which now immediately concerns us, the potentiality to counteract the force of evolution itself.

This is, indeed, at once the greatest triumph of our intellectual growth and also the self-constituted danger which threatens us from within. Man has arisen above nature, he has bent circumstance to his will, and striven against the mighty force of evolution. He has pried into the great workshop and interfered with the machinery, endeavouring to become master of its action and to control the workings of its component parts. But the machine has as yet proved too intricate for his complete comprehension. 5He has learned gradually the uses of a few parts which he is able to operate, but they are only a small fraction of the whole.

What then is man’s position to-day, and what is his danger? His position is this. In emerging from the contest with nature he has ceased to be a natural animal. He has evolved curious powers of discrimination, of choice, and of construction. He has changed his environment, his food, and his whole manner of living. He has enquired into the laws which govern heredity and into the causes of disease. But his knowledge is still limited and his emergence incomplete. The power of the force we know as evolution still holds him in chains, though he has loosened his bonds and may at last free himself entirely. Thus we come to man’s danger.

Evolution—a term we use here and elsewhere in this connection as that which is best understood to indicate the whole operation of natural selection and all that it connotes—has two clearly defined functions; by one of these it develops, by the other it destroys. By an infinitely slow action it has developed such wonders as the human eye or hand; by a process somewhat less tedious it allows any organ that has become useless to perish, such as the pineal eye or (in process) the vermiform appendix, and, if we can estimate the future course, the teeth and hair.

By the change he has effected in his mode of life, man is no longer necessarily dependent upon his 6physical organism for the means of his subsistence, and in cases where he is still so dependent, such as those of the agriculturist, the artisan, and others who earn a living by manual labour, he employs his muscles in new ways, in mechanical repetitions of the same act, or in modes of labour which are far removed from those called forth by primitive conditions. In some ways the physical type which represents the rural labouring population is, in my opinion, even more degenerate than the type we find in cities, and mentally there can be no comparison between the two. The truth is that man, whether living in town or country, has changed his habitat and with it his habits, and in so doing has involved himself in a new danger, for though evolution may be cruel in its methods, it is the cruelty of a discipline without which our bodies become relaxed, our muscles atrophied, and our functions put out of gear.

The antagonism of conscious as opposed to natural selection^[2] has now been in existence for many 7thousands of years, but it is only within the last century or less that the effect upon man’s constitution has become so marked that the danger of deterioration or decay has been thrust upon the attention, not only of scientific observers, but of the average, intelligent individual. No examination of history is necessary in this place to set out a reason for this comparatively sudden realisation of physical unfitness. Briefly, the civilisation of the past hundred years has been unlike the many that have preceded it, in that it has not been confined to any single nation or empire. In the past history of the world an intellectual civilisation such as that of Egypt, of Persia, of Greece, or of Rome, perished from internal causes, of which the chief was a certain moral and physical deterioration which rendered the nation unequal to a struggle with younger, more vigorous and—this is important—wilder, more natural peoples. Thus we have good cause for believing that the danger we have indicated, though as yet incipient only, was a determining cause in the downfall of past civilisations. But we must not overlook the fact that destructive wars and devastating plagues held sway in the earlier history of mankind, and whilst the latter acted as an instrument of evolution in destroying the unfit, the former, by decreasing the population, threw a burden of initiative and energy on the remnant, necessitating the use of active physical qualities in the business of all kinds of production.

8Now the conditions have altered. Greater scientific attainments in every direction than have ever been known have combated, and will probably in the future overcome the devastating diseases which have decimated the populations of cities, whilst a higher ethical ideal constantly tends to oppose the horrible and repugnant barbarism of war which, with the spread of civilisation even to the peoples of the Orient, becomes to our senses more and more fratricidal, a fight of brother against brother.

A hundred years ago Malthus, a prophet if not a seer, recognised our danger and within the past quarter of a century a dozen theorists have proposed remedies less stringent than those advocated by Malthus, but almost equally futile. Among the theorists are those perhaps unconscious reactionaries who advocate the simple life, by a return to natural food and conditions, in endlessly varying ways. To them in their search for natural foods and conditions we would point out that countless generations separate us from primitive man, a lapse of time during which our functions have become gradually adapted to new habits and environment, and that if it were possible by universal agreement for the peoples of Europe to return instantly to primitive methods of living, the effect would be no less disastrous than the reversal of the process, the sudden thrusting of our civilisation upon savage tribes whereby, to quote one or two recent examples only, the aborigines of North America, New Zealand, 9and Japan (the Ainu tribes) have become, or are rapidly becoming, extinct.

When therefore we point out man’s power of adaptability in this connexion, the emphasis is thrown on the slowness with which that adaptability is passed on to our descendants and on the relative permanence of the new powers acquired. For our purpose the argument remains good whether we admit or deny the inheritability of acquired characteristics, our point being that in either case the process is necessarily a slow one, though it is plainly more rapid if the hypothesis be true.^[3]

From the savage to the civilised state, man passed, as I say, so slowly that the passing in the early stages caused neither difficulties nor changes sufficiently marked to force themselves on our recognition. In other words, the subject of these changes was unconscious of them, and the habit of depending upon these sensory appreciations (“feeling-tones,” or “sense of feeling”) dominant by right in the savage or subconsciously directed state, remained firmly established in the civilised experiences, so that to-day man walks, talks, sits, stands, performs in fact the innumerable mechanical acts of daily life without giving a thought to the psychical and physical processes involved.

It is not surprising that the results have proved 10unsatisfactory. The evils of a personal bad habit do not reveal themselves in a day or in a week, perhaps not in a year, a remark that is also true of the benefits of a good habit. The effects of the racial habits I am now describing have gone on unnoticed for untold centuries. But in the last hundred years the evil has become so marked that its effect has at last forced itself upon our attention. The failure of subconscious guidance in modern civilisation is now being widely admitted, and the consideration of this fact has led a few to the logical conclusion that conscious guidance and control is the one method of adapting ourselves not only to present conditions but to any possible conditions that may arise. We have passed beyond the animal stage in evolution and can never return to it.

For these reasons it becomes necessary, if we would be consistent, to reject at once all propositions for improving our future well-being which can by any possibility be described as reactionary. Even in this brief résumé of man’s history one tendency stands out clearly enough, the tendency to advance. When that first offshoot from a dominant type began to develop new powers of intellect, a form was initiated which must either progress or perish. Atavism must be counteracted by the powers of the mind, and reaction is a form of atavism. No return to earlier conditions can increase our knowledge of the secret springs of life, or aid our 11formulation of world-laws by the understanding of which we may hope to control the future course of development.

The physical, mental, and spiritual potentialities of the human being are greater than we have ever realised, greater, perhaps, than the human mind in its present evolutionary stage is capable of realising. And the present world crisis surely furnishes us with sufficient evidence that the familiar processes we call civilisation and education are not, alone, such as will enable us to come into that supreme inheritance which is the complete control of our own potentialities. One of the most startling fallacies of human thought has been the attempt to inaugurate rapid and far-reaching reforms in the religious, moral, social, political, educational, and industrial spheres of human activity, whilst the individuals by whose aid these reforms can be made practical and effective, have remained dependent upon subconscious guidance with all that it connotes. Such attempts have always been made by men or women who were almost completely ignorant of the one fundamental principle which would so have raised the standard of evolution, that the people upon whom they sought to impose these reforms might have passed from one stage of development to another without risk of losing their mental, spiritual, or physical balance.

For in the mind of man lies the secret of his ability to resist, to conquer and finally to govern 12the circumstance of his life, and only by the discovery of that secret will he ever be able to realise completely the perfect condition of mens sana in corpore sano.

“... Having heard that Henry Taylor was ill, Carlyle rushed off from London to Sheen with a bottle of medicine, which had done Mrs. Carlyle good, without in the least knowing what was ailing Henry Taylor, or for what the medicine was useful.”—Life of Tennyson.

The danger of that mental, nervous, and muscular debility, which is the outcome of the conditions resulting from the trend of our development, has been widely recognised during the past fifty years, and we must turn aside for a moment to consider certain phases of its treatment as indicated by the well-known and widely applied terms “physical culture,” “relaxation” and “deep breathing.”

With regard to “physical culture,” it must be clearly understood that I do not allude to any one system or practice, but speak in the widest terms; terms which are applicable alike to the most primitive forms of dumb-bell exercise, or to the most elaborate series of evolutions designed to counteract the effect of a particular malady. But lest my application of the term be misunderstood, I will explain that where I write “physical culture” thus, 14between inverted commas and with a hyphen, I mean it to stand for “a series of mechanical exercises, simple or complicated, designed to strengthen a bodily function by the development of a set of muscles or of the complete system of muscles”; but where I use the words physical culture, currently and without a hyphen, I denote a general system for the improvement of the entire physical economy by a just co-ordination and control of all the parts of the system, particularly excluding any method which tends to the hypertrophy of any one energy without regard to the balance of the whole.

In the first place it will be recognised from what I have already said, that the whole theory upon which the present “physical culture” school is based is but another aspect of that reversion to nature which we have stigmatised as a form of atavism. It is an attempt to stiffen the new garment of our intellectual development by lining it with the old fabric of so-called “natural exercise.” “Physical culture” as defined, is what one might term the obvious, uninspired method which naturally presents itself as a remedy for the ills arising from an artificial condition. The logic of it is of the simplest, and proceeds from the major premise that bodily defects arise from the disuse and misuse of muscles and energies in an artificial civilisation, which muscles and energies in a natural state would be continually called upon to provide the means of livelihood.

15From this it seems obvious to argue that if we contrive an artificial mechanical means of exercising these muscles for, let us say, one, two, or three hours a day, they will resume their natural functions, and so—— The lacuna cannot be satisfactorily filled. If we carry on the argument to its logical conclusion the fallacy is made evident. For the method arising from this argument creates civil war within the body. There is no co-ordination, and the outcome must be strife. This point will be at once made clear by an instance which must be taken to represent a broadly typical case, an allegory rather than a special example of particular application.

Let us take for example the case of John Doe, whose work keeps him indoors from 9 a. m. to 6 p. m., and makes a very urgent call upon his mental and nervous powers. By the time he is thirty-five, possibly five or ten years earlier, John Doe is suffering from anæmia, indigestion, nervous debility, lassitude, insomnia, heart weakness, and heaven only knows what other troubles. His bodily functions are irregular, his muscular system partly atrophied and unresponsive, his nerves irritated, and his general condition—there is really no better word—“jumpy.”

Incidentally I must add that his mind is inoperative in many directions. He has a bad mental attitude towards the physical acts of everyday life. For him his body is a mechanism, the intricate 16workings of which he never pauses to examine, but which he drives or forces through a certain series of evolutions similar in kind to those it has always performed within his experience. When this mechanism fails, it has to be forced on again by tonics and stimulants or given a “rest,” which is followed by a return to the old methods of propulsion.

However, John Doe, who has already postponed far too long his search for a remedy, at last takes a course of “physical culture,” although his time is severely limited, and his exercises are confined to an hour or two morning and evening. At first he may say that he feels a wonderful benefit and probably advises every friend he meets in the city to follow his example. I am quite willing to grant that Doe may be benefited, I will even admit that if he continues his exercises it is possible he may not fall back into the same state of nervous prostration into which he fell originally, but the point I wish to make quite clear is that his cure did not in itself possess the elements of permanence. It was merely a tinkering or botching-up of the fabric of his body. For if we consider his case from a purely detached standpoint, we must see that Doe attempted to develop two systems or modes of life which could not in the nature of things work harmoniously together. On the one hand, for two, three, or four hours a day, he was occupied in mechanically developing his muscular system without any reference to the manner in which he drove 17his machine, stimulating and accelerating the supply of blood which therefore required increased oxygenation or reinforced lung power; in brief, he was exercising those functions and energies which in a primitive state would have been called upon during the greater part of his waking life to supply him with food. On the other hand, for the remaining twelve hours or so during which he was engaged in his profession, in the eating of meals or in reading, in playing indoor games or in similar sedentary occupations, the newly developed powers were being neglected and a call was being made upon the old nervous energies and centres of control. John Doe’s physical body thus had two existences, excluding the natural condition of sleep, one fiercely active, muscular, dynamic, the other sedentary, nervous, static.

These two existences are not correlated, they are antagonistic; they do not mutually support each other, they conflict. John Doe’s body becomes the scene of a civil war, and the heart, lungs, and other semi-automatic organs are in a state of perpetual re-adjustment to opposing conditions, as they are called upon to support one side or the other in the perpetual combat. Such a condition cannot tend in the long run to the improvement of mankind as a whole.

For, as I shall show later,^[4] in the case of John Doe and in all parallel cases, the consciousness of 18the person concerned is not changed in regard to the use of the muscular mechanism. Even if he exercise for six hours daily, on taking up his ordinary occupations once more he will immediately revert to the same muscular habits he has already acquired in connexion with such occupations. For it is clear that John Doe has a wrong mental attitude towards the uses of his muscular mechanism in the acts of everyday life. He has been using muscles to do work for which they were never intended, whilst others, which should have been continuously employed, have remained undeveloped, inert, and imperfectly controlled. We may say in truth that he is suffering from mental and physical delusions with regard to the uses of his body. To mention but one of many instances of his lack of recognition of the true uses and functions of his muscular system, we shall notice that whenever he thrusts his head forward or throws it back his shoulders always accompany the movement in either direction, this movement of the shoulders being entirely unconscious and made without any recognition of the fact that they are being moved. Now in this condition of mental and physical delusion, the unfortunate man tries to do something with these mechanisms which he is unable to control, hoping that by the mere performance of certain physical exercises he can restore his body to a condition of perfect physical health.

It may be well at this point, seeing that I have 19admitted the possibility of some preliminary benefit to John Doe from his first experience of the “physical culture” exercises, to show more in detail why that benefit was not maintained. The fact is that when this man realised the seriousness of his digestive troubles he was simply recognising a symptom and not a primary cause or causes of his increasing disorders. A proper psycho-physical examination would have revealed bad habits in his waking and sleeping moments which tended more or less to reduce his intra-thoracic capacity to a minimum; such a minimum is not only harmfully inadequate but also renders due functioning of the vital organs practically impossible.

Incidentally it may be of value to consider what this condition of minimum intra-thoracic capacity really means and to note some of the influences upon the whole organism. For as this thoracic cavity contains many of the vital organs, the whole abdominal viscera is directly or indirectly influenced by its capacity. Minimum thoracic capacity means that the organs within the thorax are harmfully compressed and that the heart and lungs do not get a proper chance to function adequately. A harmful strain is thrown upon the heart, the lungs are not adequately employed or sufficiently aerated, and the lung tissue deteriorates. The proper distribution of the blood is interfered with because of the undue accumulation in the splanchnic area, to the detriment of the lung supply. As the lungs are the 20chief distributors of blood it will be understood that this condition of minimum thoracic capacity interferes with the circulation and general nutrition. The respiratory processes are employed in sucking in air instead of creating a partial vacuum in the lungs by a co-ordinated thoracic expansion which will give atmospheric pressure its opportunity.^[5] There is an undue intra-abdominal pressure and harmful flaccidity of the abdominal muscles, which means dropping of the viscera, imperfect functioning of the liver, kidneys, bladder, etc., stagnation in the bowels and irritation and distention of the colon, intestines, etc.; in other words, indigestion, constipation and all the concomitant disorders and general impairment of the vital functioning. Let us, for a moment, think of the thoracic and abdominal cavities as one fairly stiff oblong rubber bag filled with different parts of a working machine which are interrelated and interdependent, and which are held in position by their attachment to the different parts of the inner surface of this bag. We will then suppose, for the sake of our illustration, that the circumference of the inner upper half of this bag is three inches more than that of the lower half. As long as this general capacity of the bag is maintained the working standard of efficiency of the machinery is indicated as the maximum. Let us then, in our mind’s eye, decrease the capacity of the upper part of the bag 21and increase that of the lower half until the inner circumference of the latter is three inches more than the former. We can at once picture the effect upon the whole of the vital organs therein contained, their general disorganisation, the harmful irritation caused by undue compression, the interference with the natural movement of the blood, of the lymph and of the fluids contained in the organs of digestion and elimination. In fact we find a condition of stagnation, fermentation, etc., causing the manufacture of poisons which more or less clog the mental and physical organism, and which constitutes a process of slow poisoning.

Now to revert to the experiences of John Doe. I have already stated that when he first tried physical exercises at home or in the gymnasium as a remedy for his digestive disorders, he experienced a sense of relief. This was only natural, seeing that he was leading a more or less sedentary life. Why, then, was the effect of these exercises gradually diminished until he considered the physical treatment a comparative failure? This brings us to the point of real interest. The fact is that any increased amount of exercise does give a sense of relief to those who lead sedentary lives, but unfortunately this sense of relief is too often a delusive mental exaggeration of the real changes in the right direction. It is not often a reliable register of benefits derived which make for permanent relief. Students of these questions know that the man 22whose conditions we are analysing has already developed debauched kinæsthetic systems which permit defective registrations of different sensations or feeling-tones, and hence it is very difficult for the person so constituted to arrive at a reliable estimate of the extent of his improvement through such faulty senses. We know, too, that, so far as he is concerned, the improvement is not permanent, a fact which he readily admits. There are scientific reasons for accepting the accuracy of this conclusion, and I will endeavour to explain the position. Let us admit, for the sake of our explanation, that benefits actually accrued in various directions in the early stages of his physical exercises. Whatever these benefits may have been, and however great they were, I contend that it was always certain that sooner or later if he persisted in the physical exercises, he would gradually develop defects which would counterbalance and finally outweigh the benefits we have admitted.

The following are some of the reasons which support these contentions. I shall deal more fully with them in later chapters.

1. A Defective Kinæsthetic System. Experience has proved to us that the conditions present, when he took up the exercises, go hand in hand with an incorrect and defective kinæsthetic system.

The mere performance of physical exercises could not give him a new and correct kinæsthetic 23sense in connexion with the use of the mental and physical organism in his acts of everyday life.

2. Erroneous Preconceived Ideas. It is impossible for me to set down the myriad dangers with which he is beset in consequence of erroneous preconceptions during his daily practice on “physical culture” lines. The pages of a fairly large book will be necessary to do even meagre justice to this subject. But I can assure my readers that this is demonstrably true and I am daily convincing the most sceptical by practical procedures.

3. Defective Sense-Registration and Delusions. This serious defect is in practice linked up with erroneous preconceptions resulting in mental and physical delusions which are far-reaching and dangerous.

An Example. Take a person who, prior to re-education, has the habit of putting the head back whenever an attempt is made to put the shoulders back. Ask this person to put the head forward and keep the shoulders still and it will be found that as a rule he fails to carry out the order, and moves his shoulders also. Ask him to put the head forward whilst the teacher holds the shoulders still, and the pupil will put the head back instead of forward.

4. Defective Mental and Physical Control. The most common form of this defective control encountered in teaching work is when the teacher wishes to move the head, or hand, or arm, or leg for the pupil, in order to give the new and correct sensation 24in the proper use of the parts. Experience proves that the great majority are utterly wanting in the controls necessary to enable the person to gain this experience quickly.

The teacher asks the pupil to lift his arm. He does so but exercises an undue amount of tension. In order to give the pupil the new kinæsthetic register of the correct amount of tension necessary, the teacher asks to be permitted to lift the arm for him, but as a rule the pupil acts exactly as he did when he was requested to perform the act himself.

5. Defective Inhibition. The practical teacher finds all pupils more or less hampered by lack of inhibitory control, the possession of which would make re-education and co-ordination from the pupil’s standpoint comparatively easy. Consideration will show that our ordinary mode of life and the generally accepted teaching methods do not make for the development of the inhibitory powers. On the contrary, our powers in this direction rather tend to diminish, and the outward and visible signs of the serious results are everywhere for him who runs to read.

6. Self-Hypnotism. This very serious and all too common evil has not been attacked on a practical basis. People have spoken of it and written about it in a general theoretical way, much as they have done about relaxation, but with no better results on the practical side, when applied to everyday life. The self-hypnotism I am referring to is a 25specific self-hypnotism indulged in at a given and particular time, and is cultivated unknowingly by teachers and pupils during lessons, and frequently by both in everyday life.

People will tell you they can think better by closing their eyes. This is a prevalent form of self-hypnotism, self-deception, and produces a state of dreaming which is particularly serious because it is a harmful condition assumed consciously. The ordinary dreamer falls into this condition unconsciously.

7. Cultivated Apprehension. This is probably the most serious condition which we cultivate and which has been dealt with at length on pages 249–259.

8. Prejudiced Arguments and Attempted Self-Defence. The real weakness and shallowness of human nature is shown in this connexion in a way which is uncomplimentary to our intellectual pride. The saddest fact is, that it is always intensified in the person who would be counted above the average in intellectuality by a consensus of opinion. We are all well aware that such an one to win an argument will strain his statement of his facts in the direction he desires them. His reason is so dominated by his emotions and his sense appreciation (feeling-tones) that an appeal to the former is at first in vain. The majority of mankind has overcompensated in these directions, and it is for this reason that in the education and development of 26the child of to-day and the future, we must see to it that we relinquish all educational methods which tend to cultivate guidance and control through the emotions and the sensory appreciations (feeling-tones).

Some perception of the evils that we have thus briefly summarised has been awakened in the minds of the more earnest thinkers during the last few years, and, as a result, the systems of exercises display a clearly marked tendency towards modification. They have lessened their muscle-tensing violence, and have become, and are becoming, ever less and less strenuous physical acts. Thus we find “physical culture” advocates who a few years ago insisted upon the use of dumb-bells, and in some cases dumb-bells increasing in weight over a graduated series of exercises, now emphasising the necessity for gentle exercises without even mentioning the dumb-bell, which is perhaps as good a proof as any of the truth of my contentions.

My next instance, namely, “relaxation,” is even less efficient. The usual procedure is to instruct the pupil, who is either sitting or lying on the floor, to relax, or to do what he or she understands by relaxing. The result is invariably collapse. For relaxation really means a due tension of the parts of the muscular system intended by nature to be constantly more or less tensed, together with a relaxation of those parts intended by nature to be more or less relaxed, a condition which is readily 27secured in practice by adopting what I have called in my other writings the position of mechanical advantage.^[6] But apart from an incorrect understanding of the proper condition natural to the various muscles, the theory of relaxation, like that of the rest cure, makes a wrong assumption, and if either system is persisted in, there must inevitably follow a general lowering of vitality which will be felt the moment regular duties are taken up again, and which will soon bring about the return of the old troubles in an exaggerated form.

The last remedy mentioned at the opening of this chapter was “deep breathing.” This is a later form of “physical culture” development, and is, in effect, a modification in the right direction. It is the logical outcome of the perception that strenuous, forcing, muscular exercises were resulting in new and possibly greater evils than those they professed to cure. “Deep breathing” is indeed a step in the right direction, but only a step, because, while it does not always do serious harm and in some instances, perhaps, a certain amount of good, it does not go to the root of the matter, the eradication of defects, nor does it take cognisance of the most important factor in the scheme of physical co-ordination. What that radical factor is I shall explain in detail in my next chapter, but I will first briefly review the chief points of the argument as far as it has been unfolded.

28In imagination we have seen man through the darkness which covers his first appearance on the earth, the early Miocene man. As we have pictured him, he was a creature of simple needs and of a vigorous bodily habit, an animal in all save that spark of self-consciousness which burned feebly in his primitive, but increasing and differentiating brain. Again we have a somewhat clearer vision of him with wider powers of courage and cunning, adapting weapons to his use, and so specialising the functions of his mind through a long two million years, through palæolithic and neolithic periods into the age of bronze, where he has become a reasoning, designing creature, with powers of imagination and idealisation, powers still turned, however, to physical uses.

And at last we reach the differentiation of man from man and class from class which marks the historical period of civilisation, the period of dwelling in cities, of adaptability to new and specialised habits, of labour that makes little or no call upon the physical capacities, of food procured without energy, the period when the slow process of evolution, which has resulted in the product of a new and marvellous instrument of self-conscious, directive powers, was becoming gradually superseded by that which it had brought forth.

“You can have neither a greater nor a less dominion than that over yourself.”—Leonardo da Vinci.

Within the last thirty years we have evolved a new science, the science of psychology. A generation ago psychology was subject-matter only for the philosopher, the metaphysician, the poet, or the ecclesiastic; now it is being investigated in the laboratory by tests of sensibility, reaction-times, and other responses to stimulation too technical to be explained here, tests carried out by means of elaborate and intricate instruments and machinery designed to weigh the hidden springs of life in the balance. The phrase I have italicised is purposely vague, for I have no wish to fall foul of a terminology or to make any a priori assumption which might involve me in controversial matters completely outside my province. At the same time I see clearly that some convenient phrase will become necessary, and I will therefore adopt one which is at least familiar and within certain limits descriptive enough, namely, the “subconscious self.”

30It may seem strange that one should look to any such formally organised science as modern psychology, to a science that is working in a laboratory with mechanical appliances, for any elucidation of a question which has for so long been regarded as strictly within the domain of the priest. But science, as Tyndall said, is only another name for common-sense, and a little consideration will show that the postulate I have insisted upon, namely, the growth and progress of intellectual control, demands that this admirable quality of common-sense or reason, should be applied to the elucidation of this all-important problem. Unhappily, psychology, from which we hope so much, is as yet in its infancy, and the few attempts that have been made, such as those of the late Professor Münsterberg, to apply the theories of the laboratory and the class room to the practical work of the world, cannot be said to have produced any results worth considering. In any case I must transcend the present limits of academic psychology in this consideration of the subconscious.

The concepts which have grown up round this term, the “subconscious self,” are in many cases curiously concrete in form. Much error has sprung from that earnest and well-intentioned work of the late F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death. Mr. Myers pictured an entity within an entity, and his work, though inductive in form, was a priori in method, for he 31had formed the conception of a subjective personality taking shape within an objective, material shell, and had controlled his evidence to a definite, preconceived end.

The fallacies of Myers have been exposed again and again. His argument is intrinsically unsound, and when put to the test of newer knowledge his hypothesis fails to explain the fact. But because Myers’ conception was so graphic and credible it took a strong hold upon the popular imagination, a hold which in the eight years following the publication of Human Personality has not become weakened in the minds of a great number of people, full though these years have been of discovery and new knowledge. It is for this reason that I have reverted to Myers’ conception of the subconscious, or as he called it, the “subliminal self,” inasmuch as I wish it to be clearly understood from the outset that I use the term “subconscious self” to denote an entirely different concept. Indeed, any one who has followed my argument to this point must have inferred the trend of my purpose, namely, that as the intellectual powers of man extend, we progress in the direction of conscious control. The gradual control of evolution by the child of its production has pointed always to this end, and by this means, and by this alone, can the human race continue in the full enjoyment of its physical powers without forfeiting a fraction of its progressive intellectual ideal.

32It will inevitably be asked at this stage what I mean when I speak of the “subconscious self,” and I must therefore answer that question to the best of my ability, even though I have to leave for a moment the limits of proved fact to tread on the wider ground of hypothesis. I do not propose, however, to overburden my theory with the detail of evidence, and what follows must therefore be taken as an inclusive statement, much of which I could prove conclusively in a larger work, whilst the unproved remnant must necessarily await confirmation from the researches of future investigators in the domains of psychology. In the first place then we must see not only that the subconscious self is not a possession peculiar to man, but that it is in fact more active, in many ways more finely developed, in the animal world. Among some animals the consciousness of danger is so keen that we have attributed it to prescience. The fear of fire in the prairies, of flood, or of the advance of some natural danger threatening the existence of the animal, is evidenced far ahead of any signs perceptible by human senses, and as we cannot, except sentimentally, attribute powers of conscious reasoning to the animal world, it is evident that this “foreknowledge” is due to a delicate co-ordination of animal senses. Again, we see that animals which have not had their powers dulled by many generations of domestication make the majority of their movements, as we say, “instinctively.” They can 33judge the length of a leap with astonishing accuracy, or take the one certain chance of escape among the many apparent possibilities open to them without an instant’s hesitation, and as these powers are evidenced in some cases within a few hours or minutes after the birth of the animal, they are admittedly not the outcome of experience.

The whole argument for the evidence of the possession of a subconscious self by animals can be elaborated to any length, and depends upon facts of observation made over a long period of time. The few examples I have here cited merely illustrate that side of the question which throws into prominence the point of what we may call abnormal powers, or powers which seem to transcend those of human reason so far as it has been developed. It is this appearance of transcendent qualities in the human subconsciousness which misled Myers, who did not pause to apply his allegory of the subconscious entity to the animal world. Such an application would have tended to prove that the “soul” (for that is what Myers really intended, however carefully he may have avoided the actual word) of the animal was more highly developed than that of man.

In the second place, however, we are confronted with the unquestionable fact that the subconsciousness can be “educated” below the plane of reason. Acts very frequently performed become so mechanical that they can be repeated without any sense of 34conscious awareness by the operator. The pianist, after constant rehearsals, will perform the most intricate passage while his attention is engaged with an entirely unrelated subject,—although it is particularly worthy of remark in this connexion, that when such an art as the performance of music falls temporarily into such an automatic repetition, the connoisseur will instantly recognise the loss of some quality,—generally spoken of as “feeling,”—in the rendering. Again, it appears that in some cases a more or less permanent impression may be made upon the subconsciousness by casual suggestions, often related to fear, even though such suggestions be, in some cases, the result of a single experience. A nervous hysterical subject, already far too willing to submit to the guidance of emotion and what he or she fondly believes to be “instinct” or “intuition” may be so harmfully impressed in this way as to develop any of the many forms of “phobia,” which are, as the suffix correctly implies, forms of morbid terror. These are but two instances of the “education” of the subconsciousness below the reasoning plane, but a dozen others will suggest themselves to the reader out of his own experience. The important point is the fact that the phase of being with which we are dealing becomes, as we progress through life, a composite of animal instincts and habits acquired below the plane of reason either by repetition or by suggestion. But before I leave this general conception of the subconsciousness, 35I must emphasise the fact that up to this point we share the qualities of the subconscious mind with the animal kingdom. For in the lower organisms no less than in that of humanity, this subconsciousness can be educated. The observations of naturalists now confirm the belief that the young of certain birds—the swallow has been particularly instanced—are taught to fly by the parent birds; whilst any one who has trained a dog will know how such a trick as “begging” for food may become so habitual as to appear instinctive.

So much for general definition; I come now to the point which marks the differentiation of man from the animal world, and which is first clearly evidenced in the use of the reasoning, intellectual powers of inhibition.

Now it is evident that in the earlier stages of man’s development, the inhibition of the subconscious animal powers was frequently a source of danger and of death. Reason, not as yet sufficiently instructed and far-seeing, was an inefficient pilot, and sometimes laid the ship aback when she would have kept before the wind if left to herself. To abandon the metaphor, the control was imperfect, it wavered between two alternatives, and by rejecting the guidance of instinct it suffered, it may be, destruction. But the necessity for conscious control grew as the conditions of life came to differ ever more and more from those of the wild state. This, plainly, was due to many causes, but chiefly 36to the limitations enforced by the social habit which grew out of the need for co-operation.

This point must be briefly elaborated, for it marks the birth of inhibition in its application to everyday life, and in so doing it demonstrates the growth of the principle of conscious control which, after countless thousands of years, we are but now beginning to appreciate and understand.

It is true that we have evidence of conscious inhibition in a pure state of nature. The wild cat stalking its quarry inhibits the desire to spring prematurely, and controls to a deliberate end its eagerness for the instant gratification of a natural appetite. But in this, and in the many other similar instances, such instinctive acts of inhibition have been developed through long ages of necessity. The domestic kitten of a few weeks old, which has never been dependent on its own efforts for a single meal, will exhibit the same instinct. In animals the inherited power is there; in man also the power is there as a matter of physical inheritance, but with what added possibilities due to the accumulated experience gained from the conscious use of this wonderful force.

The first experience must have come to man very early in his development. As soon as any act was proscribed and punishment meted out for its performance, or as soon as a reward was consciously sought—though its attainment necessitated realised, personal danger—there must have been a deliberate, 37conscious inhibition of natural desires, which in its turn enforced a similar restraint of muscular, physical functioning. As the needs of society widened, this necessity for the daily, hourly inhibition of natural desires increased to a bewildering extent on the prohibitive side. There grew up first “taboos,” then the rough formulation of moral and social law, and on the other hand a desire for larger powers which encouraged qualities of emulation and ambition.

Among the infinite diversity of these influences, natural appetites and the modes of gratifying them were ever more and more held in subjection, and the subconscious self or instinct which initiated every action in the lower animal world fell under the subjection of the conscious, dominating intellect or will. And in this process we must not overlook one fact of supreme importance, viz., man still progressed physically and mentally. It is therefore clear that this control acquired by the conscious mind broke no great law of nature, known or unknown, for, if this acquired control had been in conflict with any of those great, and to us as yet incomprehensible forces which have ruled the evolution of species, the animal we call man would have become extinct, as did those early saurian types which failed to fulfil the purpose of development and perished before man’s first appearance on this earth.

Before we attempt, then, any exact definition of 38the subconscious self we must have a clearer comprehension of the terms “will,” “mind,” and “matter,” which may or may not be different aspects of one and the same force. More than two thousand years of philosophy have left the metaphysicians still vaguely speculating as to the relations of these three essentials, and personally, I am not very hopeful of any solution from this source. The investigation, though still in its infancy in this form, has taken the shape of an exact science, and it is to that science of psychology as now understood that I look to the elucidation of many difficult problems in the future. Without touching on the uncertain ground of speculative philosophy, I will try, however, to be as definite as may be with regard to my conception of the subconscious self.

In the first place, great prominence has been given to the conception of the subconscious self as an entity within an entity, by the claim made for it that it has absolute control of the bodily functions. This claim depends for its support upon the evidence of hypnotism and of the various forms of auto-suggestion and faith-healing. Under the first heading, we have been told that under the direction of the hypnotist the ordinary functions of the body may be controlled or superseded, as for instance, that a wound may be formed and bleed without mechanically breaking the skin,^[7] or that a 39wound may be healed more rapidly than is consistent with the ordinary course of nature. Under the second heading, which includes all forms of self-suggestion, we have had examples of what is known as stigmatisation,^[8] or the appearance on the bodies of hysterical and obsessed subjects of some imitation of the five sacred wounds. Indeed the instances of cures which seem to our uninstructed minds miraculous, and due by inference to the power of faith, are so numerous that no special example need be cited. These and many kindred phenomena have been explained on the hypothesis that the hidden entity when commanded by the will is able to exert an all-powerful influence either beneficent or malignant, the obscure means by which the command may be enforced being variously described. We see at once that the conception of a hidden entity is the primitive explanation which first occurs to the puzzled mind. We find the same tendency in the many curious superstitions of the savage who turns every bird, beast, stone, and tree into a Totem, and endows them with powers of evil or of good, and discovers a “hidden entity” all of a piece with this conception of the subconscious 40self, in a piece of wood that he has cut from a tree, or a lump of clay that he has modelled into the rude shape of man, bird, or beast.

My own conception is rather of the unity than the diversity of life. And since any attempt to define the term Life would be presumptuous, the definition being beyond the scope of man’s present ability, I will merely say that life in this connexion must be read in the widest application conceivable. And it appears to me that all we know of the evolution or development of life goes to show that it has progressed, and will continue to progress, in the direction of self-consciousness.^[9] If we grant the unity of life and the tendency of its evolution, it follows that all the manifestations of what we have called the “subconscious self” are functions of the vital essence or life-force, and that these functions are passing from automatic or unconscious to reasoning or conscious control. This conception does not necessarily imply any distinction between the thing controlled and the control itself. This may be inferred from the use of the word “self-conscious,” but the further elucidation of this side of the theory is not germane to the present argument.

Now I am quite prepared to accept as facts phenomena of the kind I have instanced, such as unusual cures effected by hypnotism, and by the somewhat allied methods of the various forms of faith 41healing, but I do deny, and most emphatically deny, that either procedure is in any way necessary to produce the same or even more unusual phenomena.^[10] In other words, I maintain that man may in time obtain complete conscious control of every function of the body without, as is implied by the word “conscious,” going into any trance induced by hypnotic means, and without any paraphernalia of making reiterated assertions or statements of belief.

Apart from my practical experience of the harm that so often results from hypnotic and suggestive treatment, an experience sufficient to demonstrate the dangers of applying these methods to a large majority of cases, I found my objection to these practices on a broad and, I believe, incontrovertible basis. This is that the obtaining of trance is a prostitution and degradation of the objective mind, that it ignores and debases the chief curative agent, the apprehension of the patient’s conscious mind, and that it is in direct contradiction to the governing principle of evolution, the great law of self-preservation by which the instinct of animals has been trained, as it were, to meet and overcome the imminent dangers of everyday existence. In man this desire for life is an influence in therapeutics so strong that I can hardly exaggerate its potentiality, 42and it is, moreover, an influence that can be readily awakened and developed. The will to live has in one experience of mine lifted a woman almost from the grave, a woman who had been operated upon and practically abandoned as dead by her surgeons. A passing thought flashing across a brain that had all but abandoned the struggle for existence, a sudden consciousness that her children might not be well cared for if she died, was sufficient to reawaken the desire for life, and to revivify a body which no medical skill could have saved.^[11] But there is no need to quote instances. The fact is recognised, yet how small is the attempt made to use and control so potent a force! The same argument may be also applied to the prostration of the mind as a factor in the popular rest cures which really seek to put the mind, the great regenerating force, out of action.

Returning to my definition of the subconscious self, it will be seen that I regard it as a manifestation of the partly-conscious vital essence, functioning at times very vividly but on the whole incompletely, and from this it follows that our endeavours should be directed to perfecting the self-consciousness 43of this vital essence. The perfect attainment of this object in every individual would imply a mental and physical ability and a complete immunity from disease that is still a dream of the future. But once the road is pointed, we must forsake the many bypaths, however fascinating, bypaths which lead at last to an impasse and necessitate a return in our own footsteps. Instead of this, we must devote our energies along the indicated road, a road that presents, it is true, many difficulties, and is not straight and easy to traverse, but a road that nevertheless leads to an ideal of mental and physical completeness almost beyond our imaginings.

One of the most recent phases of popular, as opposed to scientific, thought has been that which has endeavoured to teach the control of the mind. This teaching has been spoken of in general as the “New Thought” movement, though certain of its precepts may be found in Marcus Aurelius. This movement has had, and is still having, a considerable vogue in America, and the influence of it has been felt in England, many of the writings of its exponents having been published here within the last fifteen or twenty years. The object of the teaching is to promote the habit of “right thinking” which is to be obtained by the control of the mind. The “New Thought” teaches that certain ideas such as fear, worry, and anger, are to be rigidly excluded from the mind and the attention fixed upon their opposites, such as courage, complacency, calm. With certain of the tendencies expressed in this movement I am in sympathy, but following the 45usual course of such movements, the “New Thought” is losing sight of its principle, which was, indeed, never fully grasped, and is becoming involved in a species of dogma, the rigidity of which is in my opinion directly opposed to its primary object. One of its earlier and most capable exponents, however, Ralph Waldo Trine, marked the principle with a phrase, and by naming one of his works In Tune with the Infinite, gave permanence to the central idea, though more recent writers in embroidering the theme have lost sight of the original thesis. Moreover, I have not found in the “New Thought” a proper consideration of cause and effect in treating the mental and physical in combination. These writings exhibit, and have always exhibited, the fallacy of considering the mental and physical as in some sense antitheses which are opposed to each other and make war, whereas, in my opinion, the two must be considered entirely interdependent, and even more closely knit than is implied by such a phrase.

Again in all these writings we are confronted with one word which is dominant, and by its iteration must produce an effect on the mind of all readers. That word is “faith,” and because it is so prominent and so little understood, I feel that it is essential I should give some explanation of it in the light of my own principles.

In the first place, it is perhaps hardly necessary for me to point out that faith in this connexion 46need not be allied with any conception of creed or religion. It is true that this is the form in which we are most familiar with it in mental healing, and the associations which are grouped round the word itself very commonly induce us to connect it with the conceptions that have had such a wide and general influence on the thoughts of mankind in all stages of civilisation. But we have abundant evidence now before us that in healing it is the patient’s attitude of mind that is of the first importance, and that faith is every whit as effective when directed towards the person of the healer, a drug, or the medicinal qualities supposed to be possessed by a glass of pure water, as when it is directed to a belief in some supernal agency. This fact is indisputable, and it is only because the latter form of faith is so much more widespread, inasmuch as it lies at the very foundation of all religions, that this agency has effected a number of cures out of all proportion to those brought about by faith in some purely material object. What I here intend by faith, therefore, is its exercise in the widest sense and without any restriction of creed.

So far as we can analyse the effect of what we call an act of faith on the mental processes, it would seem that it is operative in two directions. The first is purely emotional. The patient having conceived a whole-hearted belief that he is going to be delivered from his pain or disease by the means of some agency supernal or material, experiences a sensation 47of profound relief and joy. He understands and believes that without effort on his part he is to be cured by an apparent miracle, and the effect upon him is to produce a strong, if evanescent, emotional happiness. In this we have an exact parallelism between the patient whose cure is physical and material, and the convert whose cure is spiritual. Now it is widely acknowledged by scientists and the medical profession generally that this condition of happiness is an ideal condition for the sufferer, that it is not only the most helpful condition of mind, but that it actually produces chemical changes in the physical constitution, changes which are the most salutary in producing a vital condition of the blood, and hence of the organisms.

The second way in which this act of faith operates is in the breaking down of a whole set of mental habits, and in the substitution for them of a new set. The new habits may or may not be beneficial from the outset apart from the effect produced by the emotional state which is hardly ever maintained for a long period, but even so the breaking down of the old habits of thought does produce such an effect as will in some cases influence the whole arrangement of the cells forming the tissues, and dissipate a morbid condition such as cancer.

Thus we see that this so-called act of faith is in reality purely material in its action, and there is no reason why we should have recourse to it to produce the same and greater effects. It may perhaps 48be asked by some objectors why we should seek to dismiss the act of faith, since it undoubtedly produces these ideal conditions in some cases. The answer is obvious. Faith-healing is dangerous in its practice and uncertain in its results. It is dangerous, because in the majority of cases its professors seek in the first place to alleviate pain. They may do this, leaving the disease itself untouched, but, as I shall point out later on, in such cases the disease will continue and eventually kill the patient, even though he may be able successfully to fight the pain. Faith-healing is also uncertain in its results, because, in addition to the danger I have mentioned, it merely substitutes one uncontrolled habit of thought for another. At first the new habit, because it is new, may bring about a change to a better condition, but if it remains, it will in its turn become stereotyped, and may very well lead at last to just as morbid a condition as was induced by the old mental habit it superseded. For these reasons, which are, I think, trenchant enough, I desire most earnestly to see all the present conceptions that surround this profession of faith-healing thrown aside in order that we may arrive at a sane and reasoned process of mental therapeutics. I have touched briefly on the movement here because it emphasises the fact that we are dimly grasping at a truth but paralysing our attempts to hold it by the premature assumption that we have it safe at last. At the 49same time I believe that underlying the teachings of these recent movements, “New Thought” and “Faith-healing” in general (and in these two closely allied influences I include all the offshoots and subdivisions), there is some apprehension of an essential, an apprehension which is liable to lose its grip by reason of the dogma and ritual that has grown up and tends to obscure the one fundamental.

All these sects, parties, societies, creeds—call them what you will—have a common inspiration; we need no further proof than this that no one of the many developments from the common source is in itself complete and perfect. There is good evidence that each new development as soon as it becomes specialised is separated from its true source, becomes overelaborated, and so works its own downfall, the principle becoming absorbed and dominated by the bias of some individual mind. This is my analysis of the phenomena. It follows that what we seek is the noumenon, the reality, the true idea that underlies all these various manifestations.

Before I attempt, however, to trace out this common principle, I wish to make three statements.

(1) I do not profess to offer a finally perfected theory, for by so doing I should lay myself open to the same arguments I have advanced against other theories of the same nature. I say frankly that we are only at the beginnings of understanding, 50and my own wish is to keep my theory as simple as possible, to avoid any dogma.

(2) I do not propose for many reasons to consider in this place my own methods in any other connexion but that of their application to physical defects, to the eradication of diseases, distortions, and lack of control, and, progressively, to the science of race culture and the improvement of the physique of the generations to come.

(3) I wish it to be clearly understood that this treatise is not finally definitive. I hope in the future to have many opportunities of elaborating my general thesis, and of stating my experience of particular applications of my methods to peculiar cases, but I should not be true to my own principles if I were not willing to accept amendments, even perhaps to alter one or other of my premises, should new facts tend to show that I have made a false assumption in any particular.

Now that I have thus cleared the ground, I will examine what I believe to be the first and greatest stumbling-block to conscious self-control, namely, “rigidity of mind.” This rigidity results in a fixed habit of thought and its concomitant evils, among which is the subjection of functional and muscular habits to subconscious control.

In defining rigidity of mind, I must hark back for a moment to that suggestive phrase of Mr. Trine’s, In Tune with the Infinite, although in the 51present application the rigidity I am concerned with is considered in a physical connexion and does not involve interference with any non-spatial conceptions. It is rather the first half of the phrase that is here of importance, for to be “In Tune” conveys to my mind, and I wish it to convey the same meaning to others, the idea of sensitiveness to impressions and responsiveness to the touch, when “all the functions of life are becoming an intelligent harmony.” In a word, I want by this phrase to suggest the idea of being open-minded. For even in reading this, if the individual deliberately puts himself in opposition to my point of view, he can by no possibility hope to benefit. Wherefore I desire above all things that he or she will read at least with an open mind, form no conclusion until I have finished, and will perhaps, more particularly, subdue the interference of that great and ruling predisposition which has in the past so long impeded the advance of science, and with which I will deal in my next chapter.

Let us consider for a moment the application of rigidity of mind to physical functions. A person comes to me with some crippling defect due to the improper use of some organ or set of muscles. When I have diagnosed the defect and shown the patient how to use the organ or muscles in the proper way, I am always met at once with the reply, “But I can’t.” Let me ask any one who is reading this and who suffers in any way, whether his or her 52attitude to the defect they suffer from is not precisely the same? This reply indicates directly that the control of the part affected is entirely subconscious; if it were not, we should merely have to substitute the hopeful “I can” for that despondent “I can’t,” to remove the trouble. By (a) hypnotic treatment, by (b) faith-healing, or by (c) the application of the principles of the “New Thought,” the patient in such a case would have the subconscious control influenced, either (a) by the mechanical means of trance and suggestion by the hypnotist, which leaves the conscious mind in exactly the original condition and merely changes, and it may be only temporarily, the habit of the subconscious control, or (b) and (c) by reiterated commands of the objective mind. Even if these commands have been reinforced by the influencing suggestion of the healer, they either substitute by repetition one habit for another without any apprehension by the intelligence of the true method of the exchange, or, what is quite as frequent and far more harmful, they shut out the sensitiveness to pain from the cerebral centres, and so leave the radical evil, no longer labelled by nature’s warning, to work the patient’s destruction in secret. Briefly, all three methods seek to reach the subjective mind by deadening the objective or conscious mind, and the centre and backbone of my theory and practice, upon which I feel that I cannot insist too strongly, is that the Conscious Mind Must Be Quickened.

53It will be seen from this statement that my theory is in some ways a revolutionary one, since all earlier methods have in some form or another sought to put the flexible working of the true consciousness out of action in order to reach the subconsciousness. The result of these methods is, logically and inevitably, an endeavour to alter a bad subjective habit whilst the objective habit of thought is left unchanged. The teachings of the “New Thought” and of many sects of faith-healers set out clearly enough that the patient must think rightly before he can be cured, but they then set out, automatically, to carry out their teaching by prescribing “affirmatives” or some sort of “auto-suggestion,” both of which are in effect no more than a kind of self-hypnotism, and, as such, are debasing to the primary functions of the intelligence.

I will take a simple instance from my own experience to illustrate a case in point. A patient, whom I will call X, came to me with an obstinate stammer arising from a congenital defect in the co-ordination of the face, tongue, and throat muscles. Whenever X attempted to speak he drew down his upper lip. This was the outward sign of a series of vicious acts connected with a train of muscular movements, a sign that the ideo-motor centres were working to convey a wrong guiding influence to the specific parts concerned in the act of speech. These guiding influences rendered X quite incapable of speech, and would, indeed, have had the same effect 54upon any other individual who produced the same working of the parts concerned. To insist in such a case that X should repeat, “I can speak” or “I won’t stutter,” would be merely to endeavour to reach a supposed omniscient subconscious self which would counteract the evil by the exercise of some assumed and separate intelligence possessed by it. I undertook the case by appealing to X’s intelligence.

Now, strange as it may seem (and I intend to treat this curious perversion in my next chapter), X’s objective intelligence is not so easily reached and influenced as might appear. He has formed a muscular habit of drawing down his lip independently of his conscious control, and the line of suggestion set up by the wish to speak induces at once a reflex action of a complicated set of muscles. X has learned to do this automatically, and at first seems incapable of controlling those lip muscles when the wish to speak is initiated.

In this case my first endeavour must be directed to keeping in abeyance, by the power of inhibition, all the mental associations connected with the ideas of speaking, and to eradicating all erroneous, preconceived ideas concerning the things X imagines he can or cannot do, or what is or is not possible. My next effort must be to give X a correct and conscious guidance and control of all the parts concerned, including, of course, the lip and face muscles, and in order to obtain this control, he must 55have a complete and accurate apprehension of all the movements concerned. And this apprehension must precede and be preparatory to any conception of “speaking,” during the application of all the guiding orders involved. In originating some new idea which is to take the place of the old idea of drawing down the upper lip, it may be necessary at first to break the old association by means of some new order, such as deliberately to draw the lip up, to open the mouth, or to make some similar muscular act previously unfamiliar in its application to the act of speaking. This new order is then substituted for the command to speak. X is told not to speak but to draw up his lip, open his mouth, etc. It will be understood that I have omitted much detail touching the interdependence of the parts concerned, but I wish here to convey the essentials of method rather than the physiological explanation of their working. It must always be remembered that Nature works as a whole and not in parts, and once the true cause of the evil is discovered and eradicated all the affected mechanisms can soon be restored to their full capacity. I may note here that X was completely cured of his stammer, and that his was a particularly obstinate case, a fact chiefly due to the confirmation of a wrong habit in early childhood.

This is an example, chosen for its simplicity, to illustrate the prime essentials of my theory, but it is capable of a very wide application, so wide that 56it may be applied to the working not only of the ordinary controlled muscles, but of the semi-automatic muscles which actuate the vital organs. Not many years ago an Indian Yogi was examined by Professor Max Müller at Cambridge, and we have it on the authority of the latter that this Yogi was able to stop the beating of his own heart at will and suffer no harmful consequences.

Let it be clearly understood, however, that I have no sympathy with these abnormal manifestations which I regard as a dangerous trickery practised on the body, a trickery in no way admirable or to be sought after. The performances of the Yogis certainly do not command my admiration, and the well-known system of breathing practised and taught by them is, in my opinion, not only wrong and essentially crude, but I consider that it tends also to exaggerate those very defects from which we suffer in this twentieth century. I have merely quoted this case of the Yogi in support of my assertion that there is no function of the body that cannot be brought under the control of the conscious will.

That this is indeed a fact and not a theory, I do claim without hesitation, and I claim further that by the application of this principle of conscious control there may in time be evolved a complete mastery over the body, which will result in the elimination of all physical defects. Certain aspects of this control and the reasons why it has not been acquired I will treat under the next heading.

The term “conscious control” is one which is employed by different people to convey different conceptions. The usual conception is one which indicates specific control, such as the moving of a muscle consciously, and is practised by athletes who give performances of physical feats in public. Again, there is the conscious movement of a finger, toe, ear, or some other specific muscle or limb.

The phrase “Conscious Control” when used in this work is intended to indicate the value and use of conscious guidance and control, primarily as a universal, and secondly as a specific, the latter always being dependent upon the former in practical procedure.

Furthermore, it is not used merely to indicate a guidance and control which we may apply in the activities of life with but doubtful precision in one or two directions only, but one which may be applied universally, and with precision in all directions, and in all spheres where the mental and physical manifestations of mankind are concerned.

58Since the publication of my book, Conscious Control, I have received and continue to receive letters from interested readers concerning the practical application of conscious control, and also regarding my conception of the principles involved.

“It is all very well to talk of conscious control, but how are we to acquire it?” wrote one enquirer. “How far-reaching is its application?” wrote another, whilst a third remarked, “If your experience has proved that such far-reaching beneficial effects result from conscious guidance and control, your concept must be much more comprehensive than that usually accepted.” “I have a friend who is cursed with a bad temper,” wrote another enquirer, “and he realises the fact. He has applied to his medical and spiritual advisers for help. They have given him a certain amount of valuable advice, but the result is far from satisfactory.”

We all know of cases of men and women who eat or drink more than is good for them, and we also know that only a small minority are able to master their unhealthy desires in these directions. Examination of the misguided majority would reveal the fact that they were badly co-ordinated, and that psycho-physical conditions were present which would lead an expert to expect an overbalanced state in one direction or another, a domination of conscious reasoned control by subconscious unreasoned desire.

Such cases may be readily and successfully dealt 59with on a basis of conscious guidance and control in the spheres of re-education, re-adjustment, and co-ordination.

To gain control where there is a tendency to overindulgence in alcohol or food is a very difficult problem for the ordinary human being while he remains in his badly co-ordinated condition. This is shown by the failure which succeeds failure until the unfortunate person arrives at the conclusion that it is impossible to break the habit.

He or she then drifts into the advanced stages of a condition which becomes as akin to disease as neuritis, neurasthenia, indigestion, or rheumatism. As a matter of fact these malconditions may be the immediate outcome of the indulgences before referred to.

The unfortunate fact which we must face is that such people are practically without control where these failings are concerned, and the general opinion is that these people lack will-power. In my opinion this is not really true.

Say that a man is a thief and is caught and punished. He tells his friends and relatives that he intends to reform. But does he really intend to do so? In the first instance does not the answer to this question depend upon the point of view of the person concerned? Let us take as an example two brothers. The one is a thief but the other is not, inasmuch as he has never stolen anything in his life. He would scorn such an act, but he has 60no hesitation in taking advantage of a friend with whom he makes an agreement. He may even fail to realise that he is acting unjustly towards his friend. The fact is, he is well acquainted with the details and possibilities of the business concern which this agreement represents. He is aware of his superior knowledge and he deliberately uses it in framing the clauses of the agreement so that he is certain to derive more benefit from the transaction than his less experienced friend, though at the same time he may thoroughly understand that the contract should be drawn upon lines which would ensure that equal benefits would be derived. This he calls business, not theft.

It is quite possible that the thief would scorn to take such advantage of a friend. I have known of such cases; hence the phrase, “Honour among thieves.”

Now we do not speak of the other brother as lacking in will-power, but wherein lies the difference in this connexion between him and his thief brother?

In the case of the thief, the promise to reform was made. He steals again and again, so that people say in the ordinary way, “He is hopeless, he hasn’t the will-power to enable him to reform.” As I have before indicated, I fear this is not a correct solution.

For if we admit that in both instances all depends upon the point of view, we cannot be surprised 61that the mere promise to reform is usually futile, and we must furthermore realise that a changed point of view is the royal road to reformation. At the same time, experience of human idiosyncrasies has taught us that the most difficult thing to change is the point of view of subconsciously controlled mankind. The lack of power to reform is the result of the usually partial failure of the subconscious mental mechanisms in a sphere demanding reasoned judgment.

As a matter of fact this man possesses a great amount of will-power and energy in certain directions, just as he probably lacks it in others. This applies equally to his brother and, in a greater or less degree, to every human being. At the same time I think we are justified in concluding that the thief, as compared with his brother, exercises his energy, will-power and resourcefulness in but limited directions. This applies to all people cursed with what we call criminal tendencies in contrast to their more fortunate fellow beings. Here we arrive at the point where we are once more confronted with misdirected energies concentrated into narrow channels through abnormal tendencies; hence the overcompensation which inevitably follows.

A thief, unfortunately, too often confines his energies to what to his perverted outlook—the result of a wrong point of view—is a legitimate means of gaining the necessaries of life. From his perverted 62point of view he merely takes something from another person which he considers he has as much right to possess as any one else, if he is clever enough to get it by any means at his command. I have heard a certain type of Socialist express views which justify this mode of reasoning. His point of view is practically that of the thief, and he needs the same help if he is to come into communication with his reason. We know that men and women have continued to steal for years without being even suspected, and there cannot be any doubt that in thus escaping detection, they prove that they possess forms of exceptional will-power, energy, resourcefulness, courage, determination, and initiative, which, if directed into the right channels, would have made them highly successful and valuable members of society.

It must not be forgotten that if the thief is detected, his punishments are so formidable, not only because of the legal penalties he incurs, but also because of the scorn and derision with which he meets in the social sphere, even amongst his blood relations, that they would act as a deterrent upon the ordinary person.

Obviously, then, the problem to be solved in connexion with the thief or any other criminal, is concerned with the psycho-physical conditions which influence him in the direction of crime, and also with the failure of punishment either to change his point of view or to direct his excellent mental and 63physical gifts into honest and valuable spheres of expression.

We are all aware that a conservative is rarely converted to the liberal viewpoint or vice versa in a day, or a month, or even a year. Such mental changes, in the subconsciously controlled person should, with rare exceptions, be made gradually and slowly; for the demands of re-adjustment in the psycho-physical self are great, and depend upon the conditions present in the particular person. It is conceivable that with certain conditions present, the process of re-adjustment may bring about such disorganisation as may cause a serious crisis. During an experience of this kind the person would for a period be in greater danger than ever,^[12] and the length of this period would vary in different people. The process of re-adjustment in all spheres means immediate interference with the forces of strength and weakness, and in the case of the thief under consideration the force of strength was associated with mental and physical peculiarities in him as evil factors which had more or less controlled 64him; in fact, they constituted guidance and direction in his case. In all his physical and mental activities, which these evil factors stimulated, he experienced his maximum of confidence and directive power.

Now where his weaknesses were concerned, he had little to depend upon. His attempt to reform was a demand for re-adjustment, which, in turn, meant a period of comparative loss of confidence and directive power. His new efforts needed to be directed into channels where he not only lacked confidence, but where he suffered most from the overcompensation experienced in the past. In reality, his supports were suddenly wrenched from him, and replaced by those which his well-meaning friends and relatives considered infinitely superior and absolutely reliable. Their experiences of life had, to their satisfaction, proved them to be so; but their experiences were not his experiences, their strength was not his strength, their weaknesses were not his weaknesses; and it is in consequence of such facts as these that subconscious control fails, and reasoned conscious control is needed.

If I have succeeded in making my point clear to the reader he will recognise and admit this unfortunate thief’s danger. He must, in a way, sympathise with this man who, through no fault of his own, is being directed during the period of comparative helplessness, in a round of unfamiliar and complex experiences by a delusive and debauched subconsciousness. If, on the other hand, conscious 65reasoned control had been substituted and employed in re-education and co-ordination, the process of re-adjustment would have presented the minimum of the difficulties and dangers we have enumerated.

In view of the foregoing, are we justified, except in rare instances, in expecting to change the thief any more than the liberal or conservative by ordinary methods on a subconscious basis? The evidence in the light of experience is against the proposition.

The conservative and the liberal of our example, no less than the thief, are equally dependent upon subconscious guidance and control, and are the victims of the particular tendencies, harmful and otherwise, which have developed and become established, as a rule, without recognition, and without any primary appeal to their reasoning faculties.

Therefore, we must turn our attention once more to that psycho-physical process which we call habit, including developments which have their origin in consciousness as well as those which spring from the subconsciousness.

For instance, a man may be, as we say, born a thief. In other words, he is cursed with the subconscious abnormal craving or habit which makes a man a thief by nature.

On the other hand, he may be quite normal at birth, but in early life he may drift into simple and apparently harmless little ways which through 66carelessness and lack of sound training, develop very slowly and remain unobserved either by the person concerned or by his friends and relatives.

We all know of men and women who became drug fiends merely through wishing to experience the sensation or sensations produced by the drug. In the most unsuspecting way it is repeated at some future time. This innocent beginning has so often developed into the drug habit.

We know of apparently strong-minded scientific men who have taken drugs, in the first instance, from a purely scientific standpoint and so in a seemingly harmless way, but who, in spite of this, have rapidly fallen victims to the drug habit. Exactly the same process has served to create the majority of inebriates.

It is important to keep in mind that different men and different women fall victims to some particular stimulant or drug, whilst they are in absolute mastery of themselves where other seductive influences are concerned.

For instance, A became addicted to a certain drug habit, but although he had taken alcohol from an early age he never became an immoderate drinker. It was not until he came into contact with this particular drug that his latent abnormality or weakness or whatever one chooses to call it, became fully manifested. Again, B had lived in China, and had continually smoked opium with the Chinese. He did so for a year without the habit gaining any 67hold upon him, but the tea habit on the contrary became his danger. Despite the fact that his health was seriously affected by overindulgence in tea, and that according to his medical advisers’ opinion he had, by its immoderate use, developed certain troubles which caused him considerable suffering, he continued his excesses in tea drinking, as others do who come under the influence of drugs, or of alcohol, in one or all of its forms.

When this point is reached these people are, in the words of Emerson, “out of communication with their reason”; a subconscious tendency. Herein lies the explanation of difficulties which they rarely surmount, difficulties which could not remain as such if subconscious control were supplanted by conscious guidance and control of the whole organism; for in practical procedures in life this conscious guidance and control connotes “bringing them once more into communication with their reason” and supplying the “means whereby” of successful re-adjustment.

That they were out of communication with reason is indicated by the fact that though they knew they were seriously ill, and were told by their doctors that in order to regain health they must abstain from certain foods and drinks, they did not so abstain. Their continuance in indulgence merely satisfied some inward craving which can only become a governing factor as against human reason, when men are controlled by the subconscious instead 68of by the conscious powers; for subconscious control (instinct) is the outcome of experiences in those spheres where the animal senses exercised the great controlling and directing influences in the early stages of man’s evolution; whereas conscious control (reasoned experience) through re-education, co-ordination and re-adjustment is the result of the use of the reasoning powers in the conduct of life, by means of which man may fight his abnormal desires for harmful sensory experiences.

The fact that civilised human beings will take wine or sugar or drugs, when conscious that it is gradually undermining health and character, is proof positive of the domination of the physical over the mental self, exactly as in the Stone Age.

It shows that in the case of sugar, for instance, they have become victims to the sense of taste. In other words, the sensations produced by the sense of taste influence and finally govern their conduct in this connexion, whereas instead they should be governed by the faculties of reason. They have developed vicious complexes in which perverted physical sensations must be satisfied, even at the cost of mental and physical injury, and often of intense pain.

This psycho-physical state does not indicate satisfactory progress on the evolutionary plane up to the present time, and, furthermore, it does not give promise of greater progress in the future under this same subconscious direction. The domination of 69certain perverted sensations presents another interesting phase, inasmuch as these sensations are very often associated with comparatively superficial complexes.

For instance, take the case of a person who is suffering from the ill effects of taking sugar in harmful quantities. If he happens to decide to abstain from satisfying his taste desires in regard to sugar, and actually abstains, for, say, a week or ten days, it often happens that he loses the seductive pleasing sensation formerly derived from sugar, and frequently develops a positive dislike for it.

This also serves to reveal in the majority of people the unreliability of the different senses, such as taste, etc. Of course, in all these cases this unreliability is due to abnormality in one or more directions, usually more, and this fact emphasises the absolute necessity for the establishment of those normal conditions which demand conscious guidance and control, for their maintenance in civilisation; conditions which tend to eradicate and prevent abnormal cravings and desires in any direction.

When discussing the foregoing phenomena with friends and pupils, I am frequently asked questions like this: “To what are we to attribute the particular manifestations of strength or weakness in different people, where specific abnormal sensations are concerned?”

“Why is one person swayed unduly by some particular 70sensation which he knows is ruining his health and causing daily suffering, whilst another, equally abnormal and deluded though proof against this failing of his fellow being, succumbs to some other type of sensory influence?”

It is simply a matter of the psycho-physical make-up of the individual, of his inherent tendencies, and of his general experiences of life in different environments. All people whose kinæsthetic systems are debauched and delusive develop some form of perversion or abnormality in sensation. The point of real importance is to eradicate and prevent this kinæsthetic condition in order to make impossible in the human being such domination by sensation.

There is another point which exercises the layman’s mind, and that is that great suffering, in consequence of abnormal indulgence in some direction, does not act as a deterrent.

Of course, if these unfortunates were in communication with their reason and were thus consciously guided and controlled, such suffering would serve to prevent them from repeating the experience which caused it.

To those who have studied this curious phase of mental and physical phenomena, it would almost seem that they derived a form of satisfaction or pleasure from such suffering; otherwise, one would conclude, they would not continue to repeat the 71acts, which, in their experience, have been followed by actual pain and discomfort.

And surely there is nothing very unreasonable in this suggestion, seeing that there is little doubt that ill health in some people is just as natural as health is in others.

It simply means an attempt on the part of nature to do her work where the conditions are abnormal, in accordance with the same process as where they are normal.

The person enjoying the latter condition abhors suffering and pain, and will act reasonably in order to prevent both, and it is quite consistent with our knowledge and experience of the abnormal in the human organism to incline to the idea that those who are afflicted with abnormal tendencies find a perverted form of pleasure in pain.

And all these suggestions serve to support the theory that the first principle in all training, from the earliest years of child life, must be on a conscious plane of co-ordination, re-education and re-adjustment, which will establish a normal kinæsthesia.

The abnormal condition referred to is more or less governed by the senses through the subconsciousness and we must remember that the great controlling forces in the animal kingdom are chiefly physical. It is also in keeping with the purely animal stage of evolution, and any advance from this 72stage demands that the balance of powers must gradually move in favour of the mental.

The controlling and guiding forces in savage four-footed animals and in the savage black races are practically the same; and this serves to show that from the evolutionary standpoint the mental progress of these races has not kept pace with their physical evolution from the plane of the savage animal to that of the savage human.

This brings us to the crux of my contentions regarding conscious guidance and control in its widest meaning, that is, as a universal.

Wherever we find the domination of subconscious (instinctive) control, it affords proof that in the lowly-evolved states of life the physical is the great controlling force, and we are well aware that this condition does not ensure progress to those higher planes of evolution which should be the goal of civilised growth and development, the goal for which mankind was undoubtedly destined.

The inadequate relative progress of the mental evolution of the black races as compared with that of their physical evolution, when considered in relation to their approximation to the savage animals, cannot be considered other than a most disappointing result. It surely does not furnish any convincing evidence that mankind is likely to advance adequately on the evolutionary plane in civilisation by continuing to rely upon the original subconscious guidance and control.

“The man who has so far made up his mind about anything that he can no longer reckon freely with that thing, is mad where that thing is concerned.”—Allen Upward, The New Word.

When speaking of the case of stammering, cited in my last chapter, I had occasion to note that it was not an easy task to influence X’s conscious mind. The point is this: A patient who submits himself for treatment, whether to a medical man or to any other practitioner, may Do what he is told, but will not or cannot Think as he is told. In ordinary practice the man who has taken a medical degree disregards this mental attitude in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. Medicine, diet, or exercise is prescribed, and if the patient obediently follows the mechanical directions given with regard to the prescriptions, he is considered a good patient. The doctor does not trouble as to the patient’s attitude of mind, except in that one case out of a hundred, possibly a case of flagrant hypochondria.

Indeed I am willing to maintain and prove in this 74connexion that a very large percentage of cases which are now being treated in our public and private lunatic asylums, have been allowed to develop insanity by reason of this disregard of the mental attitude. I cannot stop now to consider this interesting subject of insanity, but I must note in passing that the very large percentage of the cases I have mentioned should never have been allowed to arrive at the condition which made it necessary to send them to an asylum in the first instance. Very many of them, so far from lacking mental control, possess minds of quite exceptional ability. Some are instances of subjects who in the first place have assumed a deliberate attitude to subserve a private end, such as the avoidance of uncongenial work, or the overindulgence of some desire or perverted sense, the result being that the attitude which was first adopted deliberately, became afterwards a fixed habit, and so uncontrollable.

When therefore we are seeking to give a patient conscious control, the consideration of mental attitude must precede the performance of the act prescribed. The act performed is of less consequence than the manner of its performance. It is nevertheless a remarkable fact that although the patient or enquirer into the system may apprehend this truth, he often finds an enormous difficulty in altering some trifling habit of thought which stands between him and the benefit he clearly expects. 75And the simple explanation of this apparently strange enigma is that the majority of people fall into a mechanical habit of thought quite as easily as they fall into the mechanical habit of body which is the immediate consequence.

I will take an instance from a subject outside my own province in order to bring the matter home, but I will preface my illustration by pointing out that I personally am not in the least concerned to alter the habit of thought of either of the persons I bring forward as examples, and I only cite well-known political propaganda in order to give vividness to my picture.

Let us suppose then that A is a convinced Freetrader, and that Z is no less certain of the glorious possibilities of Protection, and let us set A and Z to argue the matter. We notice at once that when A is speaking Z’s endeavours are confined to catching him in a misstatement or in a fault of logic, and A’s attitude is precisely the same when Z holds the stage. Neither partisan has the least intention from the outset of altering his creed, nor could either be convinced by the facts and arguments of the other, however sound. This is a fact within the experience of every intelligent person. The disputants have so influenced their own minds that they are incapable of receiving certain impressions; a part of their intelligence normally susceptible of receiving new ideas, even if such ideas are opposed to earlier conceptions, is in a state of anæsthesia; 76it is shut off, put out of action. The habit of mind which has been formed mechanically translates all the arguments of an opponent into misconceptions or fallacies. Neither disputant in our illustration has the least intention or desire to approach the subject with an open mind. Unfortunately, the rigid habit of mind does not only apply to political issues; it is evidenced in all the thoughts and acts of our daily life, and is the cause of many demonstrable evils.

And touching this question of mental rigidity, I may cite a very valuable criticism from Mr. William Archer, the well-known London dramatic critic, on the primary point of the “Desirability of the Open Mind.” This criticism was published in The Morning Leader for 17th December, 1910. I replied in the same paper, and my answer was published on 23rd December, 1910.

As this brief discussion illustrates very clearly the misconception which most easily arises with regard to this question, I now reprint these two letters, precisely as they originally appeared.

“In the fifth chapter of an able and interesting book by Mr. F. Matthias Alexander, entitled Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Methuen), there occurs a passage which I propose to take as the text of this 77week’s discourse. Treating of ‘mechanical habits of thought,’ Mr. Alexander says:

“‘Let us suppose that A is a convinced Free Trader, and that Z is no less certain of the glorious possibilities of Protection, and let us set A and Z to argue the matter. We notice at once that when A is speaking, Z’s endeavours are confined to catching him in a misstatement or in a fault of logic, and A’s attitude is precisely the same when Z holds the stage. Neither partisan has the least intention from the outset of altering his creed, nor could either be convinced by the facts and arguments of the other, however sound.... The habit of mind which has been formed mechanically translates all the arguments of an opponent into misconceptions or fallacies. Neither disputant has the least desire to approach the subject with an open mind. Unfortunately this rigid habit of mind does not only apply to the issues of government; it is evidenced in all the thoughts and acts of our daily life, and is the cause of many demonstrable evils.’

“Very often, of course, the fact is as Mr. Alexander states it; but can we, I wonder, accept the ideal of the ‘open mind’ implied in his illustration? Is not a certain stability of conviction absolutely necessary to the efficient conduct of the business of life? And are we not almost as apt to err on the side of impressionability as on the side of rigidity? 78I seem to remember a warning in Scripture against being ‘blown about by every wind of doctrine.’

“If we reflect for a moment, I think we shall see that the amount of open-mindedness which reason demands must vary according to the nature of the question at issue. On a question of fact, which is capable of absolute demonstration, it is, of course, folly to let prejudice or bias prevent us from perceiving the truth. But it is not on such questions that disputes commonly arise. Theology, I fancy, is, in the modern world, almost the only influence that frequently leads people to close their minds against demonstrable facts or overwhelming probabilities. But of the most important questions in life, many are not questions of fact at all, while as to others, the evidence is so complex or so inaccessible that demonstration is not, as the saying goes, humanly possible. It is proverbially futile to argue on questions of taste; for enjoyment consists in a relation of the perceiver to the thing perceived which cannot be produced by force of reason or of reasoning. No doubt, in going to ‘Salome’ or to the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, we ought to take with us an open mind; that is to say, we ought not to go in a wilfully Philistine or frivolous mood. And in discussing them afterwards, we ought to preserve an open mind, in so far that we ought not to make a law of our own limitations, and accuse of folly or insincerity those people who see more in post-Wagnerism and post-Manetism 79than (perhaps) we do. Yet even here open-mindedness may be carried to excess; for undoubtedly there exists a great deal of affectation and charlatanism in matters of art, and it would be weak credulity to take every Maudle and Postlewaite at his own valuation. ‘A popgun remains a popgun,’ says Emerson, ‘though the ancient and honourable of this world affirm it to be the crack of doom’; and there are innumerable questions of quality and value on which no one who has any mind at all can possibly keep his mind open.

“Let us turn now to political questions of the order suggested by Mr. Alexander’s illustration. They are not, as a rule, questions of ascertainable fact, but of speculation or conjecture as to the probable results of a given course of action. They are generally very complex questions; the present issue between the two Houses of Parliament is almost unique in its simplicity. And not only is each question complex in itself; it is inextricably interwoven with other questions of similar complexity. Can we reasonably expect or desire, then, that either A or Z, in a single discussion of such a topic and Tariff Reform, should have his whole system of thought revolutionised? When such a conversion occurs (and I suppose it does sometimes occur) ought we to praise the convert’s open mind? Ought we not rather to pity his shallow mind, in which the new conviction can scarcely be deeper rooted than the old? A man’s political 80opinions, I take it, if they have any substance and consistency, are, and ought to be, a sort of mosaic set in a cement of fundamental principle. You may alter the pattern by laborious picking and rearranging but not by a mere push at a single point. Does it follow from this that political discussion is an idle waste of time? Not at all. It forces us to rethink our thoughts, and to keep them consciously and clearly related to fundamental principles. Also it sifts our arguments; in looking out for our opponent’s fallacies we not infrequently become aware of our own. Furthermore, a discussion may form part of the long course of thought, or evolution of feeling, whereby a really valid conversion may be ultimately brought about. Though we may think ourselves wholly unmoved by our opponent’s reasoning, a subconscious effect may remain, and may in due time manifest itself. Without our realising it, one or two cubes in our mental mosaic may, in fact, have been loosened. A greater result than this, from any single discussion of a complex political question, is scarcely, I think, to be desired. No doubt it is highly desirable that we should at one time or another have brought a perfectly open mind to the study of such a question as Tariff Reform; and this many of us have done. For my own part, I can honestly say that when Mr. Chamberlain first threw the apple of discord into our midst, I so clearly realised the merely traditional and unreasoned character of my Free 81Trade ideas, that I was biassed, if anything, against them, and fully prepared to find them fallacious. The fact that I have not done so may be due to insufficient or unintelligent study, but certainly not to any initial lack of openness of mind.

“Finally, I would note another limitation to the ideal of the open mind. There are certain questions on which we cannot safely keep our minds open, because we know that that way madness lies. I once spent a whole day at Concord, Mass., arguing with a friend who had become a convert to astrology, and was bent on drawing my horoscope. To that I had no objection; but I cannot pretend that my mind was for a moment open to his arguments. Somewhat more difficult is the case of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory: ought we to keep an open mind on that? I am inclined to answer, ‘No’; for if we once lose grip of the fact that the whole thing is an insanity, we are in danger of being submerged in a swirling torrent of ‘folie lucide.’ The origin and psychological conditions of the illusion are perfectly plain. It is, indeed, one of the oddest and most instructive incidents in the history of the human error, and in that sense worthy of study. Poor Bacon has been forced, by no fault of his own, into the position of the Tichborne Claimant of literature, and one cannot but wonder what he would think of the Onslows, Whalleys, and Kenealys, who are pleading what they believe to be his cause. But a really ‘open 82mind’ on the question is, I conceive, a symptom of an exorbitant love of the marvellous and an imperfect hold upon the reality of things. There are subjects on which no mind can remain open without in some degree losing its balance.”

“Sir—Although Mr. William Archer has rather misapprehended my point of view in his very interesting article, I would not intrude a reply upon you did I not believe that this question is one that lies at the root of so many physical evils, and that it is a question, therefore, which must not be hastily put on one side—as, no doubt, many of your readers will be inclined to put it after their perusal of Mr. Archer’s temperate and, apparently, logical reasoning. I say ‘apparently,’ because, though his syllogism is sound enough, it is based on a faulty premise due to his misapprehension of my statement; doubtless, I am to blame for not having made myself fully comprehensible.

“In the first place, let me admit at once that the whole question is relative. Mr. Archer’s implied example of the man ‘blown about by every wind of doctrine,’ is an example, from my point of view, of rigidity rather than plasticity, inasmuch as he is necessarily a hysterical neurotic, and is almost 83entirely dependent on his subconscious processes. Now, it is these very subconscious processes which restrict the use of the conscious, reasoning centres; which form what we call habits of mind, that, becoming fixed, are almost beyond the control of reason; which, in extreme cases, take possession of what was once the intelligence, and are manifested as the idée fixe, the obsession, the monomaniacal tendency.

“But, disregarding these extremes, let me take an example from ordinary life, and, perhaps, no better one could be offered than Mr. Archer’s own of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, a subject, among others, which Mr. Archer suggests is sufficient to upset our reason, should we attempt to maintain an open mind with regard to it.

“As a matter of fact, what he conceives as an open mind here is a mind with an inclination to be perverted (or converted) by specious reasoning. The right attitude of the open mind in this case is, ‘I have weighed the arguments in favour of Bacon’s authorship and have found them insufficient, and until such a time as new and better evidence is forthcoming, I shall continue to hold the view I have always held.’

“The rigid attitude which I condemn in this connexion is the one that says, ‘You will never alter my opinion, whatever fresh evidence you may adduce.’ In the first example we can come to a conclusion on the evidence; the conscious reason has 84been exercised and remains in command. It is not until the attitude becomes subconscious and fixed that any danger arises. When that comes about, the man who has decided for Shakespeare’s authorship would remain unconvinced in face of any discovery of new evidence. Yet can any one doubt, any one who cares to walk through the world with open eyes as well as an open mind, that the vast majority of opinions given out by the average man and woman have become subconscious habits of thought?

“My professional experience has shown me how great an obstacle to the recovery of physical soundness this impeding habit of thought has become. The whole purpose of my book (Man’s Supreme Inheritance), from which Mr. Archer quotes, is to submit that the course of evolution had tended in the direction of our obtaining conscious control of our own bodies, and argues that this is the only means by which we can rise above the artificial restrictions, often physically poisonous, imposed by civilisation. And I assure you, sir, that this ideal of conscious control is absolutely unrealisable by any person who is guided and restrained by these subconscious habits of thought, and who is, in consequence, quite unable to exercise the free use of his intelligence.

“So what I intend by the open mind, and in this, I think, Mr. Archer has not fully understood me, is the just use and exercise of conscious reason, a 85use which is the rare exception to a very delimiting rule.

To this letter Mr. Archer did not reply, but this brief correspondence covers very fairly, in my opinion, a statement of the popular objection to the “open mind,” and my answer to that objection.

Returning now to my own province of therapeutics, I need hardly give any special instance to carry my point. Of late years much attention has been given to the consideration of mental attitude in relation to disease, and although no clearly defined remedy has been advanced, the condition has been diagnosed and defined. The “fixed idea,” hallucination, obsession, are all terms used deliberately to denote a morbid condition, but we have to apply these terms much more widely and grasp the fact that they are applicable to small, disregarded mental habits as well as to the well-defined evils which marked their development. In the case of X, the mental habit which had grown up as the result of postulating, “I can’t draw my lip up before speaking,” was only another aspect of the attitude of A and Z towards the subject of their discussion, and it was precisely similar in kind. The aggregate of these habits is so characteristic in some cases that we see how easily the fallacy arose of assuming an entity for the subconscious self, a self which at the last analysis is made up of these 86acquired habits and of certain other habits, some of them labelled instincts, the predisposition to which is our birthright, a predisposition inherited from that long chain of ancestors whose origin goes back to the first dim emergence of active life. Fortunately for us there is not a single one of these habits of mind, with their resultant habits of body, which may not be altered by the inculcation of those principles concerning the true poise of the body which I have called the principles of mechanical advantage,^[13] used in co-operation with an understanding of the inhibitory and volitional powers of the objective mind, by which means these deterrent habits can be raised to conscious control. The false pose and carriage of the body, the incorrect and laboured habits of breathing that are the cause of many troubles besides the obvious ill effects on the lungs and heart, the degeneration of the muscular system, the partial failure of many vital organs, the morbid fatty conditions that destroy the semblance of men and women to human beings,—all these things and many more that combine to cause debility, disease, and death, are the result of incorrect habits of mind and body, all of which may be changed into correct and beneficial habits if once we can clear away that first impeding habit of thought which stands between us and conscious control.

87I believe I have at last laid myself quite open to the attack of the habitual objector, a person I am really anxious to conciliate. I have given him the opportunity of pointing a finger at my last paragraph and saying, “But you only want to change one habit for another! If, as you have implied, the habit of mind is bad, why encourage habits at all, even if they are as you say, ‘correct and beneficial’?”

Now this is a point of the first importance. But in the first place it is essential to understand the difference between the habit that is recognised and understood and the habit that is not. The difference in its application to the present case is that the first can be altered at will and the second cannot. For when real conscious control has been obtained a “habit” need never become fixed. It is not truly a habit at all, but an order or series of orders given to the subordinate controls of the body, which orders will be carried out until countermanded.

It will be understood, therefore, that the word “habit” as generally understood, does not apply to the new discipline which it is my aim to establish in the ordinary subconscious realms of our being. The reasons for this are two:

(1) The conscious, intelligently realised, guiding orders are such as may be continued for all time, becoming more effective year by year until 88they are established as the real and fundamental guidance and control necessary to that which we understand by the words growth and evolution.

(2) The stimuli to apprehension, or excitement of the fear reflexes, are eliminated by a procedure which teaches the pupil to take no thought of whether what he calls “practice,” is right or wrong.

This second statement, however, requires further elucidation; and I feel that a lay description by a pupil of mine may present the case more clearly to the untrained reader than any technical account. The excerpt is from a letter written by the Rev. W. Pennyman, M.A.

“One great feature of Mr. Alexander’s system as seen in practical use is that the individual loses every suggestion of strain. He becomes perfectly ‘lissom’ in body; all strains and tensions disappear, and his body works like an oiled machine. Moreover, his system has a reflex result upon the mind of the patient, and a general condition of buoyancy and freedom, and indeed of gaiety of spirit takes the place of the old jaded mental position. It is the pouring in of new wine, but the bottles must also be new or they will burst, and this is exactly what Mr. Alexander’s treatment does. It creates the new bottles, and then the new wine can be poured in, freely and fully.”

89This quotation, however, describes a result, and the means to its achievement can only be attained under certain conditions. There must be, in the first place, a clear realisation by the pupil that he suffers from a defect or defects needing eradication. In the second place, the teacher must make a lucid diagnosis of such defects and decide upon the means of dealing with them. In the third place there must be a satisfactory understanding between teacher and pupil of the present conditions and the means proposed to remedy them.

These three preparatory realisations indicate the real psycho-physical significance of the pupil’s mental position. He begins by a definite admission that the subconscious factors by which his psycho-physical organism is being guided are limited and unreliable. He acknowledges in fact that he suffers from mental delusions regarding his physical acts and that his sensory appreciation, or kinæsthesis, is defective and misleading; in other words, he realises that his sense register of the amount of muscular tension needed to accomplish even a simple act of everyday life is faulty and harmful, and his mental conception of such conditions as relaxation and concentration, impossible in practical application.

For there can be no doubt that man on the subconscious plane, now relies too much upon a debauched sense of feeling or of sense appreciation for the guidance of his psycho-physical mechanism, 90and that he is gradually becoming more and more overbalanced emotionally with very harmful and far-reaching results.

The results indeed are all too obvious, and yet it must be presumed that the individual has endeavoured to do the right and not the wrong thing. Does any one set out to catch a train relying upon a watch which as he knows perfectly well is unreliable? Would any sane person place dependence on the reading of a thermometer that he knows to be defective? No, we must admit not only that there is a failure to register accurately in the sensory appreciation, but also that the fault is unrecorded in the conscious mind. And it is for this reason that the pupil must be given a new and correct guiding and controlling centre, before being asked to perform even the simplest acts in accordance with his own idea and judgment.

Some understanding of these slightly technical and practical details is necessary in order to form a clear idea of what is meant by the simple word “habit,” which was the origin of this discussion; but I shall return to a fuller analysis of method in this relation in Part II of this work. What I wish to emphasise in this place is that the evil, disturbing habit which it is necessary to eradicate is in the ordinary experience both permanent and unrecognised. It may in some cases have been originally incurred above the plane of reason, but this form of habit is invariably perpetuated in the subconsciousness. 91On the other hand, the mode of functioning which is substituted, but which may nevertheless be spoken of quite correctly by the same term of “habit,” is as subject to control as the routine of a well-organised office. Certain rules are established for the ordinary conduct of business, but the controller of that business must be at liberty to break the rules or to modify them at his discretion. The man who allows an office to take precedence of any other consideration—and I have known instances of such a morbid concession to traditional procedure in business houses—is surely and steadily on the way to commercial failure.

I will now take an illustration of the principle from my own practice. Suppose a patient comes to me who has acquired incorrect respiratory habits, and suppose he is plastic and ready to assimilate new methods, and that after receiving the new guiding orders from me, he soon learns consciously to make a proper use of the muscular mechanism which governs the movements of the breathing apparatus, a word that fitly describes this particular mechanism of the body. Now it would be absurd to suppose that thereafter this person should in his waking moments deliberately apprehend each separate working of his lungs, any more than we should expect the busy manager of affairs constantly to supervise the routine of his well-ordered staff. He has acquired conscious control of 92that working, it is true, but once that control has been mastered, the actual movements that follow are given in charge of the “subconscious self” although always on the understanding that a counter order may be given at any moment if necessary. Until, however, such counter order is given, if ever it need be given, the working of the lungs is for all intents and purposes subconscious, though it may be elevated to the level of the conscious at any moment. Thus it will be seen that the difference between the new habit and the old is that the old was our master and ruled us, whilst the new is our servant ready to carry out our lightest wish without question, though always working quietly and unobtrusively on our behalf in accordance with the most recent orders given.

Briefly, as I see it, the subconsciousness in this application is only a synonym for that rigid routine we finally refer to as habit, this rigid routine being the stumbling-block to rapid adaptability, to the assimilation of new ideas, to originality. On the other hand, the consciousness is the synonym for mobility of mind, that mobility which the subconscious control checks and impedes, mobility which will obtain for us physical regeneration and a mental outlook that will make possible for us a new and wider enjoyment of those powers which we all possess, but which are so often deliberately stunted or neglected.

Consider this point also in its application to the 93case of John Doe, cited in my second chapter. If the mental attitude of that individual had been changed, and he had learned to use his muscles consciously; if, instead of automatically performing a set of muscle-tensing exercises, he had devoted himself to apprehending the control and co-ordination of his muscles, he could have carried his knowledge into every act of his life. In his most sedentary occupations he could have been using and exercising his muscular system without resort to any violent contortions, waving of the arms or kicking of the legs, and I cannot but think that he could better have employed the hours spent in this manner by taking a walk in the open air or by occupying himself with some other form of natural exercise. Still, if in his case certain mild forms of exercise at certain times were necessary, such exercises should have employed his mental and physical powers, and through these agencies he should have used his muscular mechanism in such a way that its uses could have been applied to the simplest acts, such as sitting on a stool and writing at a desk. There would then have been no question of what we have termed “civil war” within his body; the whole physical machinery would have been co-ordinated and adapted to his way of life.

In an earlier paragraph I pointed out that John Doe was suffering from certain mental and physical delusions, and I endeavoured to show how these delusions militated against his recovery of health. 94Returning to this point now that the correct method has been indicated, I may use his case to give another example of this method. What John Doe lacked was a conscious and proper recognition of the right uses of the parts of his muscular mechanism, since while he still uses such parts wrongly, the performance of physical exercises will only increase the defects. He will, in fact, merely copy some other person in the performance of a particular exercise, copy him in the outward act, while his own consciousness of the act performed and the means and uses of his muscular mechanism will remain unaltered. Therefore before he attempts any form of physical development, he must discover, or find some one who can discover for him, what his defects are in the uses indicated. When this has been done he must proceed to inhibit the guiding sensations which cause him to use the mechanism imperfectly; he must apprehend the position of mechanical advantage, and then by using the new correct guiding sensations or orders, he will be able to bring about the proper use of his muscular mechanism with perfect ease. If the mechanical principle employed is a correct one, every movement will be made with a minimum of effort, and he will not be conscious of the slightest tension. In time a recognition will follow of the new and correct use of the mechanism, which use will then become provisionally established and be employed in the acts of everyday life.

95For instance, if we decide that a defect must be got rid of or a mode of action changed, and if we proceed in the ordinary way to eradicate it by any direct means, we shall fail invariably, and with reason. For when defects in the poise of the body, in the use of the muscular mechanisms, and in the equilibrium are present in the human being, the condition thus evidenced is the result of an undue rigidity of parts of the muscular mechanisms associated with undue flaccidity of others. This undue rigidity is always found in those parts of the muscular mechanisms which are forced to perform duties other than those intended by nature, and are consequently ill-adapted for their function.

As Herbert Spencer writes:

“Each faculty acquires fitness for its function by performing its function; and if its function is performed for it by a substituted agency, none of the required adjustment of nature takes place, but the nature becomes deformed to fit the artificial arrangements instead of the natural arrangements.”

Unfortunately, all conscious effort exerted in attempts at physical action causes in the great majority of the people of to-day such tension of the muscular system concerned as to lead to exaggeration rather than eradication of the defects already present. Therefore it is essential at the outset of 96re-education to bring about the relaxation of the unduly rigid parts of the muscular mechanisms in order to secure the correct use of the inadequately employed and wrongly co-ordinated parts.

Let us take for example the case of a man who habitually stiffens his neck in walking, sitting, or other ordinary acts of life. This is a sign that he is endeavouring to do with the muscles of his neck the work which should be performed by certain other muscles of his body, notably those of the back. Now if he is told to relax those stiffened muscles of the neck and obeys the order, this mere act of relaxation deals only with an effect and does not quicken his consciousness of the use of the right mechanism which he should use in place of those relaxed. The desire to stiffen the neck muscles should be inhibited as a preliminary (which is not the same thing at all as a direct order to relax the muscles themselves), and then the true uses of the muscular mechanism, i.e., the means of placing the body in a position of mechanical advantage, must be studied, when the work will naturally devolve on those muscles intended to carry it out, and the neck will be relaxed unconsciously. In this case the conscious orders, by which I mean the orders given to the right muscles, are preventive orders, and the due sequence of cause and effect is maintained.

I will, here, only note one more point in concluding my reference to the hypothetical John Doe, 97who, nevertheless, stands as the representative of a very large body of people. This point is the question of the storing and reserving of energy, and, to use a phrase which has a mechanical equivalent, the registration of tension. If you ask a man to lift a papier-mâché imitation of an enormous dumb-bell, leading him to believe that it is almost beyond his capacity to raise it from the floor, he will exert his full power in the effort to do that which he could perform with the greatest ease. In a lesser degree the same expenditure of unnecessary force is exerted by the vast majority of “physical culture” students, and by practically every person in the ordinary duties of daily life. The kinæsthetic system has not been taught to register correctly the tension or, in other words, to gauge accurately the amount of muscular effort required to perform certain acts, the expenditure of effort always being in excess of what is required, an excellent instance of the lack of harmony in the untutored organism. This fact may be easily tested by any interested person who will take the trouble to try its application. Ask a friend to lift a chair or any other object of such weight that, while it may be lifted without great difficulty, will in the process make an undoubted call on the muscular energies. You will see at once that your friend will approach the task with a definite preconception as to the amount of physical tension necessary. His mind is exclusively occupied with the question of his own muscular 98effort, instead of with the purpose in front of him and the best means to undertake it. Before he has even approached it, he will brace or tense the muscles of his arms, back, neck, etc., and when about to perform the act he will place himself in a position which is actually one of mechanical disadvantage as far as he is concerned. Not only are all these preparations of course quite unnecessary, but the whole attitude of mind towards the task is wrong. In such instances as this, any preconception as to the degree of tension required is out of place. If we desire to lift a weight with the least possible waste of energy, we should approach it and grasp it with relaxed muscles, assuming the position of greatest possible mechanical advantage, and then gradually exert our muscular energies until sufficient power is attained to overcome the resistance.

Returning now to the consideration of that bias or predisposing habit of mind which so often balks us at the outset, we may see at once that this predisposition takes many curious forms. Sometimes, it is frankly objective, and is outlined in the statement, “Well, I don’t believe in all this, but I may as well try it.” In this form a single unlooked-for result is generally enough to change disbelief into credulity. I write the word “credulity” with intention, for I mean to imply that the reaction in a certain type of mind is little, if any, better than the profession of disbelief. What is required is not prejudice in either direction, but a calm, clear, 99open-eyed intelligence, a ready, adaptive outlook, an outlook, believe me, which does not connote indefiniteness of purpose or uncertainty of initiative.

Another form of predisposition arises from lack of purpose, and the mental habits that go with this condition are hard to eradicate, more particularly when the original feebleness has led to some form of hypochondria or nervous disease which has been treated with the usual disregard of the radical evil. It is not difficult for the most superficial enquirer to understand that in treating cases like these any method which relieves the subject still further of the exercise of initiative—such a method as the rest cure, for instance, though I could quote many others—only increases the original evil. The lack of purpose is pandered to and cultivated, and after the six weeks or so of treatment, the patient returns to his or her duties in ordinary life, even more unfitted than before to perform them. As I have said before, no account is taken of the instinct for self-preservation or the will to live. This is the very mainspring of human life, yet in the routine of our protected civilisation even its power tends at times to become relaxed, and the machinery runs down. The machinery should then be wound up again, instead of being allowed to become still further relaxed by resting. This lack of purpose, the immediate effect of our educational methods, is unhappily very common in all classes, but especially among those who have no occupation, or those 100whose employment is a mechanical routine which does not exercise the powers of initiative. The curious thing about this very large class is that they do not really want to be cured. They may be suffering from many physical disabilities or from actual physical pain, and they may and will protest most earnestly that they want to be free from their pains and disabilities, but in face of the evidence we must admit that if the objective wish is really there, it is so feeble as to be non-existent for all practical purposes. In many cases this attitude of submission to illness is the outcome of a strong subjective habit. The trouble, whatever it is, is endured in the first instance; it is looked upon as a nuisance, perhaps, but not as an intolerable nuisance; no steps are taken to get rid of it, and the trouble grows until, by degrees, it is looked upon as a necessity. Then at last, when the trouble has increased until it threatens the interruption of all ordinary occupations, the sufferer seeks a remedy. But the habit of submission has grown too strong, and as long as the disease can be kept within certain bounds, no effort is made to fight it. This is of course one of the commonest experiences in the healing profession. A patient is treated and benefited and seems on the high road to perfect health. Then follows a relapse. The first question put is, “Have you been following the treatment?” and the answer, if the patient is truthful, is “I forgot,” or “I didn’t bother any more about it.” In a recent experience 101of a medical friend of mine, a patient confessed to having stayed in the house for a week after a certain relapse occurred, although the very essence of the prescription by which he had previously benefited was to be in the fresh air as much as possible. This simply means that the subjective habit of submission has grown so strong that the objective mind, weakened in its turn by the neglect of its guiding functions, is unable to conquer it. No prescription or course of treatment can have any effect upon such a patient as this, unless the subjective habit can be brought within the sphere of conscious control. In other cases this apparent lack of desire for health is due to an attachment to some dearly loved habit, which must be given up if the proper functions of the body are to be resumed. It may be a habit of petty self-indulgence or one that is imminently threatening the collapse of the vital processes, but the attachment to it is so strong that the enfeebled objective mind prefers to hold to the habit and risk death sooner than make the effort of opposing it. Even in cases where no harm can be traced directly to a markedly influencing habit, the general all-pervading habit of lassitude or inertia is so strong that any régime which may be prescribed is distasteful if it involves, as it must, the exercise of those powers which have been allowed to fall more or less into disuse.

Space will not permit of my giving further instances of the predisposing habit, but very little introspection 102on the part of my readers should enable them to diagnose their own peculiar mental habits, the first step towards being rid of them. We must always remember that the vast majority of human beings live very narrow lives, doing the same thing and thinking the same thoughts day by day, and it is this very fact that makes it so necessary that we should acquire conscious control of the mental and physical powers as a whole, for we otherwise run the risk of losing that versatility which is such an essential factor in their development.

If, at this point, the reader feels inclined to analyse these habits and to set about a control of them, I will give him one word of preliminary advice, “Beware of so-called concentration.”

This advice is so pertinent to the whole principle that it is worth while to elaborate it. Ask any one you know to concentrate his mind on a subject—anything will do—a place, a person, or a thing. If your friend is willing to play the game and earnestly endeavours to concentrate his mind, he will probably knit his forehead, tense his muscles, clench his hands, and either close his eyes or stare fixedly at some point in the room. As a result his mind is very fully occupied with this unusual condition of the body which can only be maintained by repeated orders from the objective mind. In short, your friend, though he may not know it, is not using his mind for the consideration of the subject you have given him to concentrate upon, but for the consideration 103of an unusual bodily condition which he calls “concentration.” This is true also of the attitude of attention required for children in schools; it dissociates the brain instead of compacting it. Personally, I do not believe in any concentration that calls for effort. It is the wish, the conscious desire to do a thing or think a thing, which results in adequate performance. Could Spencer have written his First Principles, or Darwin his Descent of Man, if either had been forced to any rigid narrowing effort in order to keep his mind on the subject in hand? I do not deny that some work can be done under conditions which necessitate such an artificially arduous effort, but I do deny that it is ever the best work. Nor will I admit that such a case as that of Sir Walter Scott can logically be argued against this view. For the real earnest wish to write the Waverley novels was there, even if it originated in the desire to pay the debts he took upon himself, and not in the desire to write the novels because he took a pleasure in the actual performance. Briefly, our application of the word “concentration” denotes a conflict which is a morbid condition and a form of illness; singleness of purpose is quite another thing. If you try to straighten your arm and bend it at the same moment, you may exercise considerable muscular effort, but you will achieve no result, and the analogy applies to the endeavour to delimit the powers of the brain by concentration, and at the same time to exercise them 104to the full extent. The endeavour represents the conflict of the two postulates “I must” and “I can’t”; the fight continues indefinitely, with a constant waste of misapplied effort. Once eradicate the mental habit of thinking that this effort is necessary, once postulate and apprehend the meaning of “I wish” instead of those former contradictions, and what was difficult will become easy, and pleasure will be substituted for pain. We must cultivate, in brief, the deliberate habit of taking up every occupation with the whole mind, with a living desire to carry each action through to a successful accomplishment, a desire which necessitates bringing into play every faculty of the attention. By use this power develops, and it soon becomes as simple to alter a morbid taste which may have been a lifelong tendency as to alter the smallest of recently acquired bad habits.

The following is an interesting experience with a pupil who was strongly inclined to a belief in the value and power of concentration. This pupil contested vigorously my attacks on the object of her faith, as practised in accordance with the orthodox conception. She put forward the usual arguments, of course, and I quite failed to make any impression on her mental attitude towards the vexed question under discussion. But at last, some days after our first encounter, my opportunity came. We were not at the time directly discussing concentration, but we were dealing with kindred subjects, and 105presently my pupil began to speak of the attitudes adopted by people towards the things in life that they like or dislike to do. Her own plan, she said, with a touch of pride, had been to develop the habit of keeping her mind on other and more pleasant subjects whenever she had been engaged in a task that was unsympathetic to her, and she had so far succeeded in the cultivation of this habit that the disagreeable sensations of any unpleasant duty were no longer experienced by her. I then put one or two questions to her and elucidated among other facts that for years she had been unable “to concentrate” when reading and that this difficulty was becoming constantly more pronounced. Fortunately this instance opened those locked places of her intelligence that I had been unable to reach by argument. I showed her how she had been cultivating a most harmful mental condition, which made concentration on those duties of life which pleased her appear as a necessity. She had been constructing a secret chamber in her mind, as harmful to her general well-being as an undiagnosed tumour might have been to her physical welfare. I am glad to say that she came to admit the truth of my original position and has since begun her efforts to carry out the suggestions I offered for the correction of her bad habit.

And in all such efforts to apprehend and control mental habits, the first and only real difficulty is to overcome the preliminary inertia of mind in order 106to combat the subjective habit. The brain becomes used to thinking in a certain way, it works in a groove, and when set in action, slides along the familiar, well-worn path; but when once it is lifted out of the groove, it is astonishing how easily it may be directed. At first it will have a tendency to return to its old manner of working by means of one mechanical unintelligent operation, but the groove soon fills, and although thereafter we may be able to use the old path if we choose, we are no longer bound to it.

In concluding this brief note on mental habits I turn my attention particularly to the many who say, “I am quite content as I am.” To them I say, firstly, if you are content to be the slave of habits instead of master of your own mind and body, you can never have realised the wonderful inheritance which is yours by right of the fact that you were born a reasoning, intelligent man or woman. But, I say, secondly, and this is of importance to the larger world and is not confined to your intimate circle, “What of the children?” Are you content to rob them of their inheritance, as perhaps you were robbed of yours by your parents? Are you willing to send them out into the world ill-equipped, dependent on precepts and incipient habits, unable to control their own desires, and already well on the way to physical degeneration? Happily, I believe that the means of stirring the inert is being provided. The question of Eugenics, or the science 107of race culture, is being debated by earnest men and women, and the whole problem of contemporary physical degeneration is one which looms ever larger in the public mind. It is the problem which has exercised me for many years, and which is mainly responsible for the issue of this book, and in my next chapter I shall treat it in connection with the theory of progressive conscious control which I have outlined in the foregoing pages.

“In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilise those sources of happiness which nature supplies,—how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage; how to live completely? And this being the great thing needful for us to learn, is, by consequence, the great thing which education has to teach. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge.”—Herbert Spencer, Education.

Every child is born into the world with a predisposition to certain habits, and furthermore, the child of to-day is not born with the same development of instinct that was the congenital heritage of its ancestors a hundred or even fifty years ago. Many modern children, for example, are born with recognisable physical disadvantages that are the direct result of the gradually deteriorating respiratory and vital functioning of their forbears.

For many months, the period varying with the sex and ability of the individual, the vital processes 109and movements are for all practical purposes independent of any conscious control, and the human infant remains in this helpless, dependent condition much longer than any other animal. The habits which the child evidences during this protracted period are those hereditary predispositions which are early developed by circumstance and environment, habits of muscular uses, of vital functioning, and of adaptability. If it were possible to analyse the tendencies of a child when it is, say, twelve months old, we could soon master the science of heredity which is at present so tentative and uncertain in its deductions, but the child’s potentialities lie hidden in the mysterious groupings and arrangement of its cells and tissues, hidden beyond the reach of any analysis. The child is our material; within certain wide limits we may mould it to the shape we desire. But even at birth it is differentiated from other children; our limits may be wide but they are fixed. Within those limits, however, our capacity for good and evil is very great.

There are two methods by which a child learns. The first and, in earlier years, the predominant method is by imitation, the second is by precept or directly administered instruction, positive or negative.

With regard to the first method, parents of every class will admit the fact not only that children imitate those who are with them during those early plastic years, but that the child’s first efforts to 110adapt itself to the conditions surrounding it are based almost exclusively on imitation. For despite the many thousand years during which some form of civilisation has been in existence, no child has yet been born into the world with hereditary instincts tending to fit it for any particular society. Its language and manners, for instance, are modelled entirely on the speech and habits of those who have charge of it. The child descended from a hundred kings will speak the language and adopt the manners of the East End should it be reared among these associations; and the son of an Australian aboriginal would speak the English tongue and with certain limitations behave as a civilised child if brought up with English people.

No one denies this fact; it has been proved and accepted, yet how often do we seek to make a practical application of our knowledge? Although the science of heredity is still tentative and indeterminate, no reasoning person can doubt from this and other instances that in the vast majority of cases at least, the influence of heredity can be practically eradicated. Personally, I see very clearly from facts of my own observation that when the characteristics of the father and mother are analysed, and their faults and virtues understood, a proper training of the children will prevent the same faults and encourage the same virtues in their children.

To appreciate to the utmost the effect of training upon the children, we must remember that the first 111tastes, likes, or dislikes of the infant begin to be developed during the first two or three days after birth. Long before the infant is a month old, habits, tending to become fixed habits, have been developed, and if these habits are not harmful, well and good. The first sense developed is the sense of taste, a sense that develops very quickly and needs the most careful attention. Artificial feeding is in itself a very serious danger, but when this feeding is in the hands of careless or ignorant persons the danger becomes increased a hundredfold. An instance of this is the common idea that considerable quantities of sugar should be added to the milk. This is done very often to induce the child to take food against its natural desire. It may be that the child has been suffering from some slight internal derangement, and Nature’s remedy has been to affect the child with a distaste for food in order to give the stomach a rest. Then the unthinking mother tempts the child with sugar, and all sorts of internal trouble may follow. But in such a case as this the taste for a particular thing, such as sugar, is encouraged, and apart from the direct harm which may result, the habit becomes the master of the child, and may rule it through life; the child, in fact, is sent out into the world the slave of the sense of taste.

Unfortunately, in ninety cases out of a hundred, children up to the age of six or seven years are allowed to acquire very decided tastes for things 112which are harmful. Women are not trained for the sphere of motherhood, they do not give these matters the thought and attention they deserve, and hence they do not understand the most elementary principles concerning the future welfare of their offspring in such matters as feeding and sense guidance. Children are not taught to cultivate a taste for wholesome, nourishing foods, but are tempted, and their incipient habits pandered to, by such additions as the sugar I have more particularly cited.

At the present time I know a child of five years old whose taste is already perverted by the method, or lack of method, I have indicated. This child dislikes milk unless undue quantities of sugar are added, will not eat such food as milk puddings or brown bread, and has a strong distaste for cream. It is almost impossible to make the child eat vegetables of any kind, but he is always ready to take large quantities of meat and sweets. The child is already suffering from malnutrition and serious internal derangement. The latter would be greatly improved by small quantities of olive oil taken daily, but it is only with the greatest difficulty that the child can be induced to take it. If he lives with his parents for the next ten years, he will grow into a weak and ailing boy, and will suffer from the worst forms of digestive trouble and imperfect functioning of the internal organs.

Apropos of this point, I remember hearing a 113question put to my friend, Dr. Clubbe of Sydney, by a London specialist, who asked what, in Dr. Clubbe’s opinion, was the primary cause of the derangement of the natural working of a child’s muscular mechanism and respiratory system. The answer was given without hesitation, “Toxic poisoning as a result of artificial feeding.” The logic of this answer will be readily apprehended by the layman, when he considers the interdependence of every part of the system, for in this case the nerve centres connected with the sensory apparatus of the digestive organs and the urea control also the respiratory processes. As a consequence, when these centres are dulled in their action as a result of toxic poisoning, there is a loss of activity in the processes of respiration, with consequent maladjustments of those parts of the muscular mechanism more nearly concerned, and so the whole machine is thrown out of gear.

Thus we see that in such instances the mischief begins very early in the life of the child, and it is carried on and exaggerated with every step in its development. Even in babyhood precept and coercion should come into play. Usually when the child cries, little effort is made to discover the cause. Often the child is soothed by being carried up and down the room. It is wonderful how soon the infant begins to associate some rudiments of cause and effect. The child who is unduly pandered to will soon learn to cry whenever it desires 114to be rocked or dandled, and thus the foundations of pandering to sensation are quickly laid.

But as the child comes to the observant age its habits begin to grow more quickly. We have admitted that a child imitates its parents or nurses in tricks of manner and speech, yet we do not stop to consider that it will also imitate our carriage of the body, our performance of muscular acts, even our very manner of breathing. This faculty for imitation and adaptation is a wonderful force, and one which we have at our command if we would only pause to consider how we may use it in the right way. The vast majority of wrong habits acquired by children result from their imitation of the imperfect models confronting them. But how many parents attempt to put a right model before their children? How many learn to eradicate their own defects of pose and carriage so that they may be better examples to the child? How many in choosing a nurse will take the trouble to select a girl whom they would like their children to imitate? Very, very few, and the reason is simple. In the first place they do not realise the harmful effect of bad example, and, in the second, the great majority of parents have so little perception of truth in this matter that they are incapable of choosing a girl who is a good specimen of humanity, and are sublimely unconscious of their own crookedness and defects.

Children too accept their parents’ defects as normal 115and admirable. The boy of 12 or 14 never dreams for instance that his father’s protruding stomach is anything but the condition proper to middle-age, and often, doubtless, figures to himself the time when he will arrive at the same condition. The time will come when such things as these—I refer to the abnormality of the father—will be considered a disgrace. What then can we hope from these parents who are at the present time so unfit, so incapable of teaching their own children the primer of physical life? And I may note here that this principle has a wider application than that of the nursery; it holds, also, in connection with the model of physical well-being set by the teachers in all primary and secondary schools. There is no need for me to elaborate this theme. The iniquity of allowing children to be trained in physical exercises, in our Board Schools for instance, by a teacher who is obviously physically unfit, is sufficiently glaring.

The crux of the whole question is that we are progressing towards conscious control, and have not yet realised all that this progress connotes. Children, as civilisation becomes continually more the natural condition, evidence fewer and fewer of their original savage instincts. In early life they are faced by two evils, if they are developed on the subconscious plane. If they are trained under the older methods of education they become more and more dependent upon their instructors; if under the 116more recent methods of “free expression” (to which I shall presently refer at some length) they are left to the vagaries of the imperfect and inadequate directions of subconscious mechanisms that are the inheritance of a gradually deteriorated psycho-physical functioning of the whole organism.

In such conditions it is not possible for the child to command the kinæsthetic guidance and power essential to satisfactory free expression, or indeed to any other satisfactory form of expression for its latent potentialities. As well expect an automobile, if I may use the simile, to express its capacity when its essential parts have been interfered with in such a way as to misdirect or diminish the right impulses of the machinery.

The child of the present day, once it has emerged from its first state of absolute helplessness, and before it has been trained and coerced into certain mental and physical habits, is the most plastic and adaptable of living things. At this stage the complete potentiality of conscious control is present but can only be developed by the eradication of certain hereditary tendencies or predispositions. Unfortunately, the usual procedure is to thrust certain habits upon it without the least consideration of cause and effect, and to insist upon these habits until they have become subconscious and have passed from the region of intellectual guidance.

I will take one instance as an example of this, the point of right-and-left-handedness. We assume 117from the outset, and the superstition is so old that its source is untraceable, that a child must learn to depend upon its right hand, to the neglect of its left. This superstition has so sunk into our minds by repetition that it has become incorporated in our language. “Dexterous” stands for an admirable, and “sinister” for an inauspicious quality, and we may even find ignorant people at the present day who say that they would never trust a left-handed person. As a result of this attitude and of the absolute rule laid down that a child must learn to write and use its knife with the right hand only, the number of ambidextrous people is limited to the few who, by some initial accident, used their left hand by preference and were afterwards taught to use their right. In a fairly wide experience I do not remember having heard of a father or mother who has said: “This child may become an artist or a pianist,” for example, “and may therefore need to develop the sensitiveness and powers of manipulation of the left hand as well as the right,” although I have known of many cases where much time and trouble had to be expended in acquiring the uses of the left hand later in life, such cases as those of persons suffering from writers’ cramp and dependent for their living on their ability to use a pen.

I have cited this example of right-handedness because it exhibits the pliability of the physical mechanism in early life, and the manner in which we thoughtlessly bind it to some method of working, 118without ever stopping to think whether that method is good in itself, or whether it is the one adapted for the conditions of life into which the child will grow. We thrust a rigid rule of physical life and mental outlook upon the children. We are not convinced that the rule is the best, or even that it is a good rule. Often we know, or would know if we gave the matter a moment’s consideration, that in our own bodies the rule has not worked particularly well, but it is the rule which was taught to us, and we pass it on either by precept, or by holding up our imperfections for imitation and then we wonder what is the cause of the prevailing physical degeneration!

What is intended by these methods of education is to inculcate the accumulated and inferentially correct lessons derived from past experience. It is true that the lesson varies according to the religious, political, and social colour of the parent and teacher, but speaking generally, the intention would be logical enough, if we could make the primary assumption that each generation starts from the same point,—the assumption, in other words, that a baby is born with the same potentialities, the same mental abilities and assuredly the same physical organism whether he be born in the 16th or the 20th century.

And even as recently as a hundred years ago, that assumption might have been made with some show of reason. For the changes were so slight and have evolved so slowly as to attract little attention. 119Granted similar conditions of parentage and upbringing, the differences between the child of 1800 A. D. and that of 1700 A. D. were hardly noticeable.

That statement, however, does not apply to the child of 1917. For many years past there has been unrest and dissatisfaction in the world of education. New methods have been tried, superimposed for the most part on the top of the older ones, and even more daring experiments have been made, experiments which sought to throw over the old traditions, bag and baggage. All these trials have so far failed, in my opinion; and one reason for the failure has been due to the fact that educationalists as a body have been unable to recognise the obvious truth that the child of the twentieth century cannot be judged by the old standards.

This truth is so evident to me that I hesitate at the necessity to prove it. It seems incredible to me that any one of my generation could fail to realise the extraordinary differences between the contemporaries of his own growth and the children of our present civilisation. I could produce a dozen instances of this difference, but one must suffice in this place. It is, however, an example that is peculiarly typical. For I remember, and my experience has not been in any way an abnormal one, the facility with which the children of my generation learnt the uses of common tools. In a sense they may be said to have inherited a certain dexterity in the handling of such things as a hammer, knife, or 120saw. To-day many parents are greatly impressed if a child of from 2½ to 6 years old can use one of these implements with a reasonable show of efficiency. I have known fathers and mothers representative of the average parent of to-day who find any instance of this efficiency in their own children an almost startling thing and certainly matter for boast to their relations and friends.

Unhappily the real difference goes far deeper than this superficial effect would at first seem to indicate. The early attempts of the modern child to employ his physical endowment in such common and necessary acts as walking, running, sitting or speaking, are far below the standard of ability that I remember a generation ago. The standard of kinæsthetic potentiality has been lowered. Elements that I will not attempt to trace, lest I be tempted on to the fascinating ground of evolutionary theory, have intervened most amazingly in the past thirty years, and the most evident result of this intervention has been the marked change in the subconscious efficiency of the modern child.

Thus, even from the birth of the infant, our problem is not precisely that of the old educationalists; and this primary congenital difference between the children of two generations has been, and is being, exaggerated in the nurseries of the independent classes both in England and America. (Doubtless in other countries of Europe the same effects are being produced, but I prefer to speak only of that 121which I have observed and closely studied for myself.) There is still a tendency to take all responsibility and initiative away from the child of wealthy parents. Nurses first and governesses later perform every possible act of service that shall relieve the child of trouble. It is not even allowed to invent its own games. Toys are supplied in endless quantities, expensive, ingenious toys, that need no imaginative act to transform them into reduced models of the motors, trains, or animals they are manufactured to represent, and some one, some adult, is always at hand to amuse the child and teach him how to play. I must italicise the absurdity of that last sentence. For what does this teaching mean, if it does not mean that it is seeking to substitute the adult idea of play for the childish one? In my day, any old brick played the part of a train or a horse, and in the mental act required to see the reality under so uncompromising a guise my imagination was exercised. Then I, and the other children of my time, grew dissatisfied with so poor a substitute, and as we progressed in experience, the stimulated imaginations found expression in inventing and in making better replicas of the realities of our childish experience. And we grew with the exercise. We had our little responsibilities and we taught ourselves not only how to play but how presently to adapt our play to the great business of social life. But what equipment is furnished to the child who never has an independent moment 122throughout its nursery career? How can such a child hope to succeed in life, should the fortune it hopes to inherit from its parents be suddenly lost or diverted? Every one knows the answer. We can see the results in any great city of modern civilisation, in London slums and in the Bowery of New York. A few generations of such teaching as this and we should have had a differentiated race as helpless as the slave-keeping ants.

But although this petrifying method of teaching and supervision is still practised, the reaction against it has already set in both in England and America. Unhappily that reaction has been too violent as such reactions commonly are. From one extreme of permitting the child no opportunity of the exercise of independent thought and action, we have flown to the other in adopting the principle which is now known as “Free Expression”—a principle which I can show to be no less harmful than over-supervision. In fact so far as the physical expression of a child is concerned, the methods of Free Expression are even more dangerous than those of the opposite school.

In England, this movement towards “Free Expression” has not so far been crystallised into a definite propaganda, nevertheless a number of thoughtful but unhappily inexpert parents are trying to adopt the principle in their own homes. Mr. Shaw’s Preface to his Misalliance puts the theory of the method in a very clear and convincing argument. 123His main assumption is as follows: “What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the first man made perfect; that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of our own....” That represents, of course, an idealist attitude, and every idealistically minded parent in Great Britain who reads that Preface of Mr. Shaw’s on “Parents and Children” at once attempts to put the theory into practice. The results, if the theory is persisted in, will be disastrous; and although in many cases the parents realise their error by practical experience before the child reaches the age of seven or so, certain cases I have seen demonstrate all too clearly that much mischief is being done even at the age of seven; faults and bad habits have become so far established that it is sometimes very hard to eradicate them.

And in America the mischief is going further still. So-called “free” schools have been instituted which, although they may differ in the detail of their methods, are based on the same underlying principles. As far as I have examined the theory and practice of these schools their purposes are:

(1) To free the child as far as possible from outside interference and restraint.

(2) To place him in the right environment and then to give him materials and allow him activities 124through which he may “freely express himself.”

Now this presupposes, firstly, that the child if left to himself has the power of expressing himself adequately and freely; secondly, that through this expression, he can educate himself. How far both these suppositions are fallacies will be understood by any one who has followed my argument and my citations of actual cases even up to this point; but the matter is so important that I do not hesitate to bring forward further evidence to establish my objection to this new and dangerous method.

I will begin by drawing attention to the practical side of two of the channels for self-expression, which are specially insisted upon in schools where the new mode is being practised, namely, dancing and drawing. A friend of mine always refers to them as the two D’s, a phrase that refers very explicitly to these two forms of damnation when employed as fundamentals in education.

The method of the “Free Expressionists” is to associate music with the first of these arts. Now music and dancing are, as every one knows, excitements which make a stronger emotional appeal to the primitive than to the more highly evolved races. No drunken man in our civilisation ever reaches the stage of anæsthesia and complete loss of self-control attained by the savage under the influence of these two stimuli. But in the schools where I 125have witnessed children’s performances, I have seen the first beginnings of that madness which is the savage’s ecstasy. Music in this connection is an artificial stimulus and a very potent one. And though artificial stimuli may be permissible in certain forms of pleasure sought by the reasoning, trained adult, they are uncommonly dangerous incitements to use in the education of a child of six.

Need I defend still further my description of music as an artificial and powerful stimulus? During the present war it has been reported that the influence of alcohol and drugs has been resorted to by the Germans to drive their men to the attack. But we know that in earlier wars, the greatest effects could be attained by music, effects that drive the fighters into the most delirious excesses of savagery. And, doubtless, if the sound of music could have made itself heard above the awful din of guns that precede a modern advance, the old stimulus would have been preferred by the Germans to the administration of drugs. As it is, I have heard that bands are used whenever possible. Full-grown men and women will admit that they can become “drunk” with music and by “drunk” I mean that the motions of the subconsciousness are excited to such a pitch that they take control, until they completely dominate the reasoning faculties. Alcohol produces this result by partial paralysis of the peripheral cilia, music and dancing by overexaltation of the whole kinæsthetic system. In the latter case, 126however, no evil effects can be produced in the first instance, without the reasoning consent or submission of the subject. Savages and young children have not yet learnt to withhold that consent.

And altogether apart from this question of intoxication—to which by the way every individual is not susceptible—these unrestrained, unguided efforts of the children to dance are likely to prove extremely harmful. I have watched while first one air and then another has been played on the piano, the intention of these changes being to convey a different form of stimulus with each air, and I admit that the children responded in accordance with the more or less limited kinæsthetic powers at their command. But it was very obvious to me that all these little dancers were more or less imperfectly co-ordinated; that the idea projected from the ideo-motor centre constantly missed its proper direction; that subconscious efforts were being made that caused little necks to take up the work that should have been done by little backs; that the larynx was being harmfully depressed in the efforts to breathe adequately causing both inspiration and expiration to be made through the open mouth instead of through the nostrils; and that the young and still pliable spines were being gradually curved backwards and the stature shortened when the very opposite condition was essential even to a satisfying æsthetic result.

And when we realise that the teachers who witness 127these lessons are entirely ignorant of the ideal physical conditions that are proper to children, and so are wofully unaware of the dangerous defects that are being initiated by these efforts to dance, we must admit that, as practised, this particular form of free expression is being encouraged at a cost that far outweighs any imagined advantage.

Here, for instance, is an example that came directly under my notice. A little girl six years old was brought to me for kinæsthetic examination and I found her to be in really excellent physical condition. She was then sent to school where she became interested in dancing. The dancing at this school was considered a form of free expression, and the children were encouraged to make their own movements, undirected. Different airs were played to which the child was expected to react, and the little girl of my example found great pleasure in this part of her school work and gave much of her time to it, until she was considered to express herself more freely than any of the other children in the form of art she had chosen. I may point out that one of the essential principles of these free-expression schools is to permit a child to choose its own activity and to pursue it for practically as long as it desires.

Her mother, however, became dissatisfied after a time with her child’s general condition. Curious and somewhat alarming physical distortions were beginning to manifest themselves, most noticeably 128a tendency to carry her head on one side, a tendency she was unable to rectify. At last the mother brought back the child to me for re-examination.

Now less than a year before I had passed this child as an unusually fine example of correct physical co-ordination. When she came back to me she was in little better condition than a congenital degenerate. All that fluent co-ordination of her muscular mechanisms had disappeared, and in place of it I found rigid tendons, stiffened muscles, and, worst of all, faulty habits of guidance and control, among them a habit of governing the muscles of her body and legs by stiffening the unrelated muscles of her neck. (Incidentally I may note in passing that in the human being the neck is very often the indicator of inadequate and false controls. There are good reasons why this should be the case, a priori, but they are too technical for this book.) A further particular defect was due to a tensing and shortening of the upper muscles of the thighs where they are attached to the torso, a defect that was tending to warp and shorten the child’s stature. Lastly, the most significant change of all, the child who a year before had been outspoken and fearless, and clear of speech, was now timid and shy, and mumbled her words so badly that I could with difficulty understand her.

Here then is a case of a child, starting in the best physical condition, who was placed in what was considered the right environment and permitted the 129exercise of free activity. And I claim that the harmful result was so inevitable that any one of real experience might have anticipated it with almost absolute certainty.

The second ominous “D” is drawing, and this comes into another category of damnation, since mental rather than physical effects are concerned, although the latter are involved both in the harmful, uncorrected poses adopted by the children when seated at the table, and in the false directions of the ideo-motor centres of which only a few reach the essential fingers that are holding or more often grotesquely clutching the pencil. It may seem a small thing to the layman that a child should try to guide a pencil by movements of its tongue, but to the expert that confusion of functions is indicative of endless subconscious troubles.

Let me describe the practical procedure of a certain type of “free-drawing” lesson. Pencils, paper, and the usual paraphernalia are placed on tables or desks in different parts of the schoolroom, in the hope that the child may be tempted to use them in drawing. Then, one day, a pupil takes up a pencil and makes an attempt to draw, another follows his example and so on, until all the pupils have made some kind of effort in this direction.

Now the act of drawing is in the last analysis a mechanical process that concerns the management of the fingers, and the co-ordination of the muscles of the hand and forearm in response to certain 130visual images conceived in the brain and imaginatively projected on to the paper. And the standard of functioning of the human fingers and hand in this connection depends entirely upon the degree of kinæsthetic development of the arm, torso, and joints; in fact upon the standard of co-ordination of the whole organism. It is not surprising, therefore, that hardly one of these more or less defectively co-ordinated children should have any idea of how to hold a pencil in such a way as will command the freedom, power, and control that will enable him to do himself justice as a draughtsman.

Any attentive and thoughtful observer who will watch the movement and position of these children’s fingers, hand, wrist, arm, neck and body generally, during the varying attempts to draw straight or crooked lines, cannot fail to note the lack of co-ordination between these parts. The fingers are probably attempting to perform the duties of the arm, the shoulders are humped, the head twisted on one side. In short, energies are being projected to parts of the bodily mechanism which have little or no influence on the performance of the desired act of drawing, and the mere waste projection of such energies alone is almost sufficient to nullify the purpose in view.

But I have already said enough to prove that no free expression can come by this means. The right impulse may be in the child’s mind, but he has not the physical ability to express it. Not one modern 131child in ten thousand is born with the gift to draw as we say “by the light of Nature,” and that one exceptional child will have his task made easier if he is wisely guided in his first attempts.

But my chief objection to this teaching of drawing is the encouragement it gives to profitless dreaming. Drawing is an art, and we know some of the characteristics that are commonly imputed to the artist,—though many of the greatest artists have been exemplarily free from them. These characteristics are eccentricity, lack of balance, power of self-hypnotism, and a general irrationality. Yet surely it cannot be emphasised too strongly that the artist succeeds in spite of these impediments to expression, and not because of them. These characteristics that I have instanced are by-products of the artistic genius. They are developed through erroneous conceptions and overconcentration on a particular creative activity, and time and again in the history of the world these by-products have ruined, incapacitated, and disgraced men of real genius.

Nevertheless, if I can judge by my experience of this form of free expression, the child is encouraged to practise the eccentricity as a means to obtain the gift of drawing, which as a principle is about the same as trying to breed race horses with weak lungs because it has been noted that certain very fast horses have been rather deficient in this respect. To encourage eccentricity is not to breed genius, 132and genius itself is more free and more creative when it is not hampered by eccentricity. Let us, at least, have some appreciation of rational cause and effect.

So much for my two “D’s,” but my general criticism of the “free expression” experiment does not end there. For I must confess that I have been shocked to witness the work that has been going on in these schools. I have seen children of various ages amusing themselves—somewhat inadequately in quite a number of cases—by drawing, dancing, carpentering, and so on, but in hardly a single instance have I seen an example of one of these children employing his physical mechanisms in a correct or natural way. I insist upon the use of the word natural even though it be applied to such relatively artificial activities as drawing and carpentering. For there is a right, that is to say a most effective, way of holding and using a pencil or a carpenter’s tool. But the children I saw commonly sat or stood in positions of the worst mechanical advantage, and the manner in which they held their pencils or their tools demonstrated very clearly that until their management of such instruments was corrected, they could never hope to produce anything but the most clumsy results. Worse still, these children were forming physical habits which would develop in a large majority of cases into positive physical ills. A child who tries to guide its pencil by futile movements of its head, tongue, and shoulders 133may be preparing the way to ills so far-reaching that their origin is often lost sight of.

As an instance of this, I recently had a case of a boy of 3½ years who suffered from fear reflexes. If a stranger entered a room when the child was present, he would cry and cling to his mother or nurse. At the seaside after asking to be allowed to bathe with other children, he was subsequently afraid to go near the water. And in many other ways he exhibited unreasoning terrors which, according to the general diagnosis common in such cases, were presumed to be the cause of his general backwardness, a symptom particularly marked in his speech, for he was only able to articulate a few words and those very imperfectly.

My first examination of him revealed the fact that he lacked proper control of his lips and tongue, and of one internal physical function, the latter chiefly at night. And that the lack of control in these particulars was the direct cause of his psycho-physical condition was very conclusively proved by my treatment of him. Treated on a basis of conscious guidance and control, re-educated and co-ordinated, the child made rapid advancement, and he progressed towards a condition approximating more closely to what one might call normal, than he had experienced since birth. The fear reflexes became less and less subject to excitement, he grew less irritable, his temper was more controlled, and his outbursts of crying were exhibited far less often.

134I have cited this instance to show what strange psychic effects may spring from apparently purely physical causes,—though, indeed, the complement of psycho-physical is so unified that it is impossible to divide the components and place them on one plane or the other. In this boy’s case, the primary cause of the trouble was probably congenital, but equal and greater troubles may arise from much smaller original defects if the initial habit is confirmed and crystallised by use, as I fear will be the case, if the child is left to develop itself on the lines of the free expression advocates. It is quite certain, for example, in the case just referred to, that no amount of “free” activity could have released the child from his constrictions whilst the influence caused by his malco-ordinations still existed.

But surely I have given evidence enough to prove my case against this last development in education. In an ideal world into which children were born with ideal capacities, Mr. Shaw’s thesis might have some weight. In this rapidly changing world of the 20th century we require, more than ever before, a system that shall guide and direct the child during his earlier years. This implies no contradiction of what I have said earlier anent the method of constant supervision. The necessary correction of physical and mental faults that I am advocating is a very different thing from the attempt to mould a child into one particular preconceived form. I would only insist that the children of to-day, born 135as they are with very feeble powers of instinctive control, absolutely require certain definite instructions by which to guide themselves before they can be left to free activity. And these directions must be based on a principle that will help the child to employ his various mechanisms to the best advantage in his daily activities. These directions involve no interference with what the child has to express; they represent merely a cultivation and development of the means whereby he may find adequate and satisfying release for his potentialities.

It is true that the foregoing principles must and will involve certain necessary prohibitions, but if we select those essentials that deal with the root cause of the evil instead of with the effects, we render unnecessary the continual admonitions and “naggings” which represented one of the vices of the old system, a vice from which it has been the object of the new education to free the child.

To sum up this aspect of child-training, I find that on the whole the methods of the older educationalists, with their definite prohibitions and their exact instructions, were less harmful than the extremes of the modern school that would base their scheme of education upon a child’s instinctive reactions. The older methods failed, I admit, for one reason, because the system was carried too far; for another, because the injunctions and prohibitions were based on tradition, prejudice, and ignorance, instead of upon a scientific principle dictated 136by reason. But the new methods fail because they are founded on an entirely erroneous assumption which is demonstrably fallacious. Can any method be defended that is open to such a charge?

Give a child conscious control and you give him poise, the essential starting point for education. Without that poise, which is a result aimed at by neither the old nor the new methods of education, he will presently be cramped and distorted by his environment. For although you may choose the environment of a nursery or a school, there are few, indeed, who can choose their desired environment in the world at large. But give the child poise and the reasoned control of his physical being and you fit him for any and every mode of life; he will have wonderful powers of adapting himself to any and every environment that may surround him. And if he be one of those exceptional individuals that, by some rare gift of nature or by some force of personality, are able to bend life to their own needs, be very sure that so far from having suppressed his power of free expression, you will have strengthened and perfected just those abilities which will enable the genius to put forth all that is best and greatest in him.

My last charge against the advocates of free expression is that they themselves are not free. So many propagandists and teachers show an unwarranted intolerance towards the exponents of the old systems. They are, in fact, too constricted in 137their mental attitude to give play to their imagination. From one extreme they have flown to the other, and so have missed the way of the great middle course which is wide enough to accommodate all shades of opinion.

For let me state clearly in concluding this comment on a new method, that I am, myself, as strong an advocate for free expression, rightly understood, as any propagandist in the United States of America. But I am convinced by long observation and experiment that the untrained child has not the adequate power of free expression. There are certain mechanical and other laws, deduced from untold centuries of human experience, laws that are only in the rarest cases unconsciously followed by the natural child of to-day. (One of these rare cases that has recently come under my notice has been the billiard playing of Mr. George Gray. I am of the opinion that the mechanical principle of the position adopted by him could be scientifically demonstrated as being as nearly perfect for its particular purpose as any position could be. And according to my observation of him, Mr. Gray manifests in his play the most remarkable and controlled kinæsthetic development I have yet witnessed. But how many George Grays has the world so far produced?)

Over twenty-two years ago in Australia, I was teaching what I still believe to be the true meaning of free expression. My pupils in this case came to 138me for lessons in vocal and dramatic expression. Now by the old methods these pupils would have been taught to imitate their master very accurately in vocal and facial expression, in gesture, in the manner of voice production; and it would have been at once apparent to any one acquainted with the manner and methods of the teachers, where each pupil had received his training. Furthermore, pupils educated by those methods were taught to interpret each poem, scene, or passage on the exact lines that were considered correct by their respective teachers.

My own method, which at that time was regarded as very radical and subversive, was to give my pupils certain lessons in re-education and co-ordination on a basis of conscious guidance and control, and in this way I gave the reciter, actor, or potential artist the means of employing to the best advantage his powers of vocal, facial, and dramatic expression, gesture, etc. He could then safely be permitted to develop his own characteristics. A few suggestions might be necessary as to interpretation, but the individual manner was his own. No pupil of mine could be pointed to as representing some narrow school of expression, although most of them could be recognised by the confidence and freedom of their performances.

And in this connection it may be of interest to my readers to know that in 1902–3 I decided to test the principles I advocated, and to this end I organised 139performances of “Hamlet” and “The Merchant of Venice” for which I gave special training on the lines I have just indicated to young men and women, none of whom had previously appeared in a public performance of any kind whatsoever. I trained all these young people on the principles of conscious guidance and control, principles that I had then developed and practised. My friends and critics naturally anticipated a wonderful exhibition of “stage fright” on the evening of the first performance, but as a matter of fact not one of my young students had the least apprehension of that terror. By the time they were ready to appear the idea of “stage fright” was one that seemed to them the merest absurdity. It may be said that they did not understand what was meant by such a condition. And this, although I would not allow a prompter on the nights of the public performance! I regard this as one of the most convincing public demonstrations I have yet made of the wonderful command and self-possession that may be attained by the inculcation of these principles.

For it must be observed that I sent these tyros to the performance capable of expressing their own individualities. If they had been hedged about or boxed in by an endless series of “Don’ts” confining their performances by a rigid set of rules, the majority of them would almost certainly have broken down within the first two minutes. On the other hand, it is hardly necessary to picture the chaos 140that would have ensued, had I sent them on the stage without training of any kind, poor, helpless, ignorant examples of what they supposed to be free expression.

The foregoing is an example of education in only one sphere of art, but it serves as an excellent indication of the essential needs of education, in general, where the child is concerned. We must give the child of to-day and of the future as a fundamental of education as complete a command of his or her kinæsthetic systems as is possible, so that the highest possible standard of “free expression” may be given in every sphere of life and in all forms of human activity. We must build up, co-ordinate, and re-adjust the human machine so that it may be in tune. We are all acquainted with the expression “tune up” where the automobile is concerned, and when we wish to command the best expression of this machine we avail ourselves of the “tuning up” process of the mechanical expert. And as the human organism is, as Huxley says, a machine, we must remember that if we wish it to express its potentialities adequately it must be “in tune.” This will represent what we consider to be that satisfactory condition of the child’s kinæsthetic systems which will enable him to express himself freely and adequately. It constitutes the “means whereby” of free and full expression, of adaptability to the ever changing environment of civilised life, and to all that these two essentials connote.

141In this note on race culture and the training of children, I have thus far dwelt almost exclusively on the earlier years of childhood. But I have much to say at some future time on the questions of primary and secondary education, that is, of the boy and girl at school between the ages of, say, seven and eighteen. No one who has read so far with attention and has earnestly attempted to comprehend my point of view, will now be able to urge that the question of education, secular or religious, is outside my province, for the mental and physical are so inextricably combined that we cannot consider the one without the other, but, at the risk of being accused of repetition, I will briefly state my case in this connexion once again, as follows:

I wish to postulate:

That conscious guidance and control, as a universal, must be the fundamental of future education.

That civilisation and education, as manifested up to the present, cannot be said to have compelled man to advance adequately from the lower to those higher planes of satisfactory evolution, where his savage animal instincts will not under any circumstances, or in response to any stimuli, dominate his transcendent tendencies, or put him out of communication with his reason.

That mankind should progress by slow continuous processes from one stage of evolution to another. This will be particularly the case when he is 142passing from his animal subconscious stage to the higher, reasoned conscious stages, during which process he will develop a new subconsciousness (cultivated, not inherited) under the guidance of consciousness, likewise an increasing control which holds his animal proclivities in check.

That the evolutionary progress from childhood to adolescence, and so through the vicissitudes of life which follow, is determined by the process adopted, the ratio of progress being in accordance with the standard of efficacy of this process, and that this principle of evolution applies equally to a nation.

That subconsciously developed mechanisms (subconscious guidance and control) function satisfactorily during those stages of our evolution which approximate to the more or less animal plane.

That the old moderate methods of education are not incompatible with cultivation and development on the animal subconscious plane.

That “free expression” principles cannot bring satisfactory results while the subject’s mechanisms are operated by inherited subconscious guidance and control.

For this very reason, all aid to progressive development must conform to the principle of the projection of guiding orders and controls in the right direction or directions with the simultaneous employment of positions of mechanical advantage, irrespective of the correctness or otherwise of the 143immediate result. The result may be unsatisfactory to-day and to-morrow, or during the next week, but if the position of mechanical advantage is employed and orders and controls in the right direction are held in mind and projected again and again, a new and correct complex sooner or later supersedes the old vicious one, and becomes permanently established.

That consciously controlled mechanisms (conscious guidance and control) are essential to man’s satisfactory development and progress to the higher stages of his evolution; and to that continued adequate vital functioning of his physical or mental organism necessary in these advanced stages, where more rapid adaptability to the swiftly and everchanging environment, and the power to see, and comprehend new ideas, are the urgent demands of an advancing civilisation.

That consciously controlled mechanisms are essential to the successful inculcation of the principle of “free expression” and all that it connotes in Education.

Conscious guidance and control, as the fundamental in education, commands the fundamentals of “free expression.” The words free or freedom are herein used in their true meaning, not in the ordinary acceptation. I refer to the point of view which causes one to ask, “Is there such a thing as real freedom?” For we know that we cannot have freedom without restraint, any more than we can have psycho-physical harmony without antagonism.

144It is said that the dividing line between tragedy and comedy is not one that the majority of people readily recognise, and this is also the case in regard to what is called freedom and licence. This is the danger which the new democracies of the world are facing at this very moment, and their dangers will be increased a thousandfold in the near future, when they will be called upon to pass through that critical period of re-adjustment which must follow the present world crisis.

In this matter of education I am, admittedly, an iconoclast. I would fain break down the idols of tradition and set up new concepts. In no matters do we see more plainly the harmful effect of the rigid convention than in this matter of teaching. We speak commonly of training the minds of children. It is a happy expression in its origin, and we still retain its proper intention when we apply the word to its uses in horticulture.

The gardener does, indeed, train the young growth. He draws it out to the light and warmth and leads it into the conditions most helpful for its development.

And so, in teaching, the first essential should be to cultivate the uses of the mind and body, and not, as is so often the case, to neglect the instrument of thought and reason by the inculcation of fixed rules which have never been examined. Again, where ideas that are patently erroneous have already been formed in the child’s mind, the teacher should take 145pains to apprehend these preconceptions, and in dealing with them he should not attempt to overlay them, but should eradicate them as far as possible before teaching or submitting the new and correct idea. I say “teaching or submitting” and perhaps the latter word better expresses my meaning, for by teaching I understand the placing of facts, for and against, before the child, in such a way as to appeal to his reasoning faculties, and to his latent powers of originality. He should be allowed to think for himself, and should not be crammed with other people’s ideas, or one side only of a controversial subject. Why should not the child’s powers of intelligence be trained? Why should they be stunted by our forcing him to accept the preconceived ideas and traditions which have been handed down from generation to generation, without examination, without reason, without enquiry as to their truth or origin? The human mind of to-day is suffering from partial paralysis by this method of forcing these unreasoned and antiquated principles upon the young and plastic intelligence.

The educational system itself is grievously inadequate and detrimental, as all thinking educationalists are aware, but the decision regarding the necessity for physical exercise and “deep breathing” in our schools has added another evil. I wish to say here deliberately that the many systems of physical training generally adopted show an almost criminal neglect of rational method, and of the test 146which can demonstrably prove the practice to be unsound and hurtful.

Some years ago I wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette:

“I will merely point out that in our schools and in the Army human beings are actually being developed into deformities by breathing and physical exercises. I have before me a book on the breathing exercises which are used in the Army, and any person reasonably versed in physiology and psychology, and knowing they are inseparable in practice, will at once understand why so much harm results from them. Take either the officers or the men. In a greater or less degree the unduly protruded upper chests (development of emphysema), unduly hollowed backs (lordosis), stiff necks, rigid thorax, and other physical eccentricities have been cultivated. It is for these reasons that heart troubles, varicose veins, emphysema, and mouth breathing (in exercise) are so much in evidence in the Army. As this is a matter of national importance, I am prepared to give the time necessary to prove to the authorities (medical or official) connected with the Army, the schools, or the sanatoria, that the ‘deep breathing’ and physical exercises in vogue are doing far more harm than good, and are laying the foundations of much graver trouble in the future. The truth is that all exercises involving ‘deep breathing’ cause an exaggeration 147of the defective muscular co-ordination already present, so that even if one bad habit is eradicated many others—often more harmful—are cultivated.”

And again in my pamphlet “Why We Breathe Incorrectly” (Nov., 1909) I wrote:

“Let me make myself clear by explaining that the man who breathes incorrectly and inadequately, does so as an immediate and inevitable consequence of abnormal and harmful conditions of certain parts of his body. The man who breathes correctly and adequately does so as an immediate and inevitable consequence of normal and salubrious conditions of the same parts. It therefore follows that if the conditions present in the second man can be induced in the first, he will then, but not otherwise, be a correct and adequate breather. And the process by which this is achieved is simply a re-adjustment of the parts of the body by a new and correct use of the muscular mechanisms through the directive agent of the sphere of consciousness. This change brings about a proper mechanical advantage of all the parts concerned, and causes, thanks to the right employment of the relative machinery, such expansion and contraction of the thoracic cavity as to give atmospheric pressure its opportunity. Now here we have (a) the directive 148agent of the sphere of consciousness, and (b) the use of the muscular mechanisms—the combination causing certain expansions and contractions, and the result being what is known as breathing. It will at once be seen, therefore, that the act of breathing is not a primary, or even a secondary, part of the process, which is really re-education of the kinæsthetic systems associated with correct bodily postures and respiration, and will be referred to universally as such in the near future. As a matter of fact, given the perfect co-ordination of parts as acquired by my system, breathing is a subordinate operation which will perform itself.”

I stand by every word of this to-day. Hundreds of soldiers every year have to leave the British Army on account of heart trouble directly brought about by the “drill-sergeant’s chest” and its concomitant strains and rigidities. Not long ago, Mr. Punch had a picture of a young boy riding in the Row with his groom and answering that worthy’s question as to how he would salute a Royal Personage—“Same as the soldiers do; hold my hand up to my hat and look as if I was going to burst”! Certainly a straw showing which way the wind blows.

These same soldiers will start on a long route march with chest “well set” and stiff. The strain of marching inevitably brings them later into an 149easier slouching position, which makes continuance possible and at its worst is not so positively harmful as is the tension of the other posture.

Compare the free, loose but more healthy physical attitude of the sailor ashore with that of the “smart” soldier strutting in town like a pouter pigeon for the honour of the regiment. It is your team of sailors that is the readier and the more effective for hard work.

And but a few weeks (now years) ago, I saw with dismay in a popular illustrated daily paper a truly pathetic picture of a class of schoolboys with hollowed backs and protruding chests looking like nothing so much as very ruffled pouter pigeons. And the master was commended for his zeal in producing such results by “deep breathing.” (See photographs facing this page.)

Is it, I would ask, likely on the face of it that the right position in which a man or woman should stand for health’s sake should be one needing positive strain to preserve? The thing is preposterous, and I am convinced that nothing can result from the application of such principles but complete chaos, physical and mental.

To return to my general theory of training, I fear I must not particularise too definitely in some directions, but my instance of right-handedness has its application. On the one hand we are willing to sacrifice reason for such a tradition and convention as this; on the other for an untried and possibly 150illogical idea. The defence for the latter sacrifice is generally based either on the need for enthusiasm or the necessity for proceeding by a system of trial and error. Well, as to enthusiasm, I will claim that no one is a greater enthusiast than I am myself, but I will not permit my enthusiasm to dominate my reason. One day I hope to write an account of how I arrived at the practical elucidation of my principles of conscious control, and when I do, I shall show very plainly how one of the greatest, if not the greatest danger against which I had to fight was my own enthusiasm. It is as vivid and keen to-day as it was over twenty years ago, but I should never have worked out my principles, if I had allowed it to dominate my reason. Again, as to the argument pleading the necessity for empiricism, I admit also that my own methods have been and still are, in some directions, experimental. But with regard to the “free expression” movement, I claim that the error in practice has been sufficiently demonstrated, and further than that, I must insist that we are not justified in experimenting on children. I have never done that inasmuch as I have realised that the error may be irreparable. Could any fault weigh heavier on a human conscience than that by which, however unwittingly, another human life had been distorted?

Wherefore, pleading on behalf of my most important client, the child of this younger generation, I demand that we shall proceed to neither of the 151dangerous extremes that threaten his physical and mental well-being. On the one hand we must avoid the thrusting upon him of fixed ideas, by which you may narrow his mind, for I know that when you limit him, imparting to him deliberately your own mental habits, the effects go far beyond what we are pleased to call the “formation of character.” On the other hand we are not justified in leaving him entirely to himself. Whilst he has the right of choice within certain limits, he has not, unhappily, the ability to choose in his earlier years. We need not bind him to choose this or that, but we must educate him in such a way as to give him the power of choice. In Mr. Allen Upward’s delightful work, The New Word, which I have already quoted, he says: “Give the child leave to grow. Give the child leave to live. Give the child leave to hope and to hope truly.... He is the plaintiff in this case. I say that he is mankind ... and his birthright is the truth.” And to that I would add, “Give the child leave, also, to learn. Give him opportunity to profit by all the knowledge we can give him out of our experience. His birthright, indeed, is the truth, but we must aid him in making the discovery.”

It is full time that we gave more earnest thought to this matter. I cannot in this brief outline dwell on the many phases of proper food, clothing, and physical training, and all those other points which we must consider. The Kinæsthetic Systems concerned 152with correct and healthy bodily movements and postures have become demoralised by the habits engendered in the schoolroom through the restraint enforced at a time when natural activity should have been encouraged and scientifically directed, and in the crouching positions caused by useless and irrational deskwork.

And I may note in this connection that I am continually being asked, both by friends and unknown correspondents, for my opinion concerning the correct type of chair, stool, desk or table to be used in order to prevent the bad habits which these pieces of furniture are supposed to have caused in schools. In my replies I have tried to demonstrate that the problem is being attacked from the wrong standpoint.

Let us consider the problem in the light of common-sense. Suppose, for example, that there is an ideal chair, some wonderful arrangement of perfect angles, hollows, and supports that will almost magically rectify or prevent every fault in the child’s physical mechanism. Suppose further that the child finds great ease and repose when seated in this ideal chair. How then can he avoid suffering the tortures of all that is uncomfortable, when he rides in the cars, or sits down in his own home, or visits a friend, or goes for a picnic on the river or in the woods? I see nothing else for it; when that ideal chair has been found, our child will have to carry it about with him wherever he goes.

153In the second place, how is it possible for this ideal chair to be miraculously adaptable to every age and type of child? Are we to treat children as plastic lumps of clay to be fitted to the model insisted upon by the lines of our ideal chair; or are we to study and measure each individual and have a chair built to his measure, once a year, say, until he is adult?

No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture, but to educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt himself within reasonable limits to his environment, and he will not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits, whatever chair or form you give him to sit upon. I say, “within reasonable limits,” for it is obviously absurd to expect a Brobdingnagian child to use a Lilliputian chair. But let us waste no valuable time, thought, or invention in designing furniture, when by a smaller expenditure of those three gifts we may train the child to win its own conscious control, and rise superior to any probable limitations imposed by ordinary school fittings.

For the problem to be solved in education is that same problem which needs solution in the social, political, religious, industrial, economic, ethical, æsthetic and other spheres of progressive human activity. In every sphere of life we have for years given “effects” the significance of “causes” and have made worthy attempts to put matters right on this unsound basis. In the case of education certain 154symptoms have been recognised as more or less harmful, and the whole blame has been placed upon the method or methods of education involved.

For at least half a century, the method of the social worker was conceived on the lines of giving money, food, and clothing to the poor, in an attempt to ameliorate their condition. The evils of this false policy came home to them in a practical way, and nowadays, the object of the social worker is to give the poor the “means whereby” of general advancement and of getting money, clothes, and food by their own efforts.

The same principle holds good in the treatment of the children. Hitherto educationalists have given them what they considered they needed. What we must do in the future is to give them the “means whereby” they may themselves satisfy their needs and command their own advancement.

The adoption of new methods is a procedure which always demands a due and proper consideration of the thing, person, or persons to which they are to be applied. Investigation along these lines would probably have revealed the real cause of the difficulties to be faced in the education of the child of to-day, which is that the process of civilised life has gradually changed the child’s psycho-physical condition at birth. In this process much has been gained and much lost. From the educator’s point of view the losses have been stupendous as compared with the gains, for the all-important kinæsthetic 155systems have been deteriorated by man’s attempt to pass from the lower (animal) to the higher stages of the evolutionary plane while depending upon a subconsciously controlled organism.

I have still very much more to say on this subject of education, and I hope to have an opportunity in the near future of elaborating my methods and of setting them out so that they may be practically and universally applied. But if by these few remarks I can arouse some interest in this world problem, I shall have done something towards its solution. It is a problem which is very urgent at the present time, and is growing more urgent every day. All that we have done up to the present time is to enforce one rule or another upon the children as an experiment, for all the rules have been rigid in their enforcement, however unscientific in their conception. In place of these rules I look for an ideal which I believe to be comparatively easy of realisation. I look for, and already see, a method of training our children which shall make them masters of their own bodies; I look for a time when the child shall be so taught and trained that whatever the circumstance which shall later surround it, it will without effort be able to adapt itself to its environment, and be enabled to live its life in the enjoyment of perfect health, physical and mental. For, as I have already pointed out, man has progressed towards the higher and more complex stages of civilisation. He has continued to change 156his habits of life and being still far from the highest state attainable he will continue to change. The farther he becomes removed from the primitive uncivilised stage of his evolution the less likely is he to have the opportunity in the daily routine of his life so to exercise the physical machinery that it will be prevented from working imperfectly by the controls of instinct. “Conscious control” will enable man to adapt himself more readily to changing conditions of life. No one who looks out upon this latter day world with discerning eyes can fail to see that the changes tend to become more rapid and more radical than ever before in the history of the world’s progress.

We look towards the goal, and it is best to seek the highest and be content with no less, but at the same time it is necessary that we should consider the practical detail of our journey. What follows in Parts II and III may seem trivial by comparison with the high endeavour I have outlined, but it is the triviality of the essential detail.

I wish to point the road still more clearly, and to show how every man and woman may learn to walk upon it.

In the previous chapters I have dealt briefly with the fundamentals upon which our whole structure of education and civilisation is based, and have attempted to point to the different tendencies developed by the individual in the struggle to progress upon this basis. At the same time I have indicated that which I am confident is the only true fundamental upon which mankind in a state of civilisation may progress and evolve to a condition commanding freedom for all time from those limiting, narrowing, and debasing qualities which belong to the animal spheres of existence.

It seems to me that the present world crisis indicates that this is the psychological moment to make a wide application of my principles, though my reader may consider that I should not enter the debatable ground of hypothesis in a work which has been devoted, up to this point, to arguments almost entirely drawn from personal experiences and observation.

I have dealt with the fundamentals employed in 158the development of the child and the adult, and I have postulated that the evolutionary progress from childhood to adolescence, and on through the vicissitudes of life which follow, is determined by the process adopted, the ratio of progress being in accordance with the standard of efficacy of this process, and that this principle of evolution applies equally to a nation.

It then devolves upon us to consider the different processes adopted by different nations, in order to gauge accurately their different stages of evolution and their possibilities of growth and development towards real individual and national progress.

After centuries of endeavour in the direction of progress in accordance with well-defined processes, founded upon approved educational, religious, economic, political, industrial, ethical and æsthetic principles, and after a century of unprecedented progress in the realm of Arts and Sciences, we are faced with the spectacle, in a supposedly civilised nation, of a debauched kinæsthesia which has manifested itself in such a display of savage instincts as will present us in the eyes of a more highly evolved universe as plunged in the depths of barbarism.

During the past three years the people of the world have been shocked and stirred by events which even four years ago were considered impossible in the stage of civilisation then reached. In consequence, we find that a special and earnest endeavour 159is being made to solve problems of vital importance which have a bearing upon the future development and cultivation of the potentialities of mankind.

It is, therefore, essential to recognise that we have reached a point in the process called civilisation which will be recorded as one of the most critical and vital in the world’s history.

At this moment the great nations of Europe are engaged in the most terrific conflict of force ever recorded, whilst in America, a land of peace, there is being witnessed what is probably the most bitterly contested conflict of opinion ever experienced regarding the conduct, policy, and duty of the American nation where the old world is concerned.

(This was penned prior to American intervention in the war.)

The happenings of the past three years must influence our present and future opinion of the value of our educational, political, moral, social, industrial, religious and other principles where the progress of man is concerned, as he passes from the animal plane of his evolution to those higher planes for which he is undoubtedly destined.

The conclusions thus reached will so influence the future welfare of mankind that the facts from which these conclusions are deduced demand the most serious attention and study of every human being.

It is therefore essential that we make an earnest 160endeavour to discover fundamentals. In this connexion we must consider the available evidence concerning the cause or causes of this conflict in Europe which has shaken our boasted advancement in civilisation to its very roots. What does this recrudescence of barbarity mean when viewed with an open and unprejudiced mind in its relation to the future of those principles which alone make for the real mental, physical, and spiritual growth of mankind in progressive civilisation?

It signifies a tremendous clash of opposing forces, a desperate conflict between the lowly-evolved peoples of the world as against the more highly evolved races, the struggle of an open-minded, mobile idealism for the supremacy of the individual against a narrow-minded, rigid, material automatism which entails the suppression of the individual and the obliteration of his reason in the supposed interests of the State.

Let us take, then, a general comparative view of the compelling psycho-physical forces in the life of primitive and civilised nations up to the crisis. America in this stands apart and must be considered separately.

In Primitive Nations. The compelling forces were chiefly physical and subconscious. The very essentials of life depended almost entirely upon brute force. Daily experiences gave a keen edge to savage instincts and unbridled passions, to an automatic development which opposed the cultivation 161of the faculty of adaptability to new environment. Even the spheres of courage were limited, and when confronted with the unusual these peoples quaked like cowards, and fled panic-stricken from the unaccustomed, as in the case of the negroes in the Southern States of America when the men of the Ku-Klux Klan pursued them on horseback dressed in white.

In Civilised Nations. The compelling forces have become less and less physical and less subconscious than in the case of primitive nations, but the advance from the physical to the mental and from the subconscious to the conscious has not been adequate or sufficiently comprehensive to establish the mental and conscious principles as the chief compelling forces in the progress of the nation or even of the individual. The essentials of life do not depend upon brute force, and daily experiences become less and less associated with factors which make for the development of savage instincts and unbridled passion, or automatic development. But experience has proved that civilised nations have failed to come through the ordeal of adaptation to the everchanging environment of civilisation with satisfactory results. The spheres of courage are still more or less limited, and when brought suddenly face to face with the unusual and unexpected people still exhibit a tendency to panic and loss of control. The progress made by civilised nations from the primitive state to the present has not been 162upon comprehensive lines. The result has been that the majority of the activities of the nation have been limited, and in those few activities where the widening influence held sway, the freedom became licence and led to overcompensation. This condition was sufficiently harmful as long as it applied to the individual and to individual effort, the individual being more or less held in check by collective opinion; but when it applied to the nation and to national effort, that nation which ignored the opinion of other nations developed unchecked, and the national decision to stifle the individual, body and soul, if it seemed to be for the welfare of the State, constituted the most powerful force in the prevention of progress on the evolutionary plane.

For this decision, once it became the result of national conception, carried with it the most damaging and impossible of all mental processes in the sphere of true evolutionary advancement. In the first place the national decision was the result of an erroneous national conception, the outcome of what I have called, for the want of a better name, “manufactured premises.”

Manufactured premises are the forerunners of unsound and delusive deductions—a stultification of reason—and demand the cultivation of a form of self-hypnotism which is fatal to national or individual progress.

A few observant people noted this dangerous habit even in the early literature of the German nation, 163and watched with keen interest its cultivation in all spheres of activity in recent years. This explains the stupendous failure of German judgment in all matters of national and international importance, of the impossibility of the peoples of that nation to see anything from any other point of view but their own, of their crass stupidity in gauging the psychology of other nations, and particularly that of the American nation.

In the foregoing we have fundamentals worthy of consideration. They must occupy the attention of all thinking people who wish to make a contribution towards the uplifting of mankind and the establishment of a standard of reasoned guidance and control which should make another barbarous conflict unthinkable and therefore impossible.

Naturally, every nation is ready enough with a more or less humane reason for its madness. Self-protection, an altruistic regard for the rights of smaller nations, a sense of high duty towards mankind at large, all these pleas have been urged as explaining the single principle which has drawn this or that nation into the whirlpool. And each and every nation must surely have pleaded liberty as their excuse at some time or another, liberty being one of those adaptable terms that may be used to mean almost anything. Before the war Germany was maintaining a right for “liberty” of expansion, a defensive use of the word that has hardly anything 164in common with the American use at the present time.

On the other hand philosophers, economists, psychologists, commercial experts, and the public at large have been busy with a dozen other theories of the primary causes of the war. We have heard much talk of race hatred, of business rivalry, of high commercial and political intrigues, and a dozen other influences, and all of them have been put forward at one time or another as the sole reason for the present welter of blood and fury. We have, in fine, so many reasons from which to choose that we may be quite sure no single one of them can possibly afford us an inclusive and adequate explanation.

But I will go still further than that. For I maintain on grounds which I find logically unshakeable, that if we admit, as seems the only sensible course, that something of all these reasons and excuses has entered into the conditions producing such awful results, we must still seek some explanation of the preceding state that made these conditions possible. All our reasons, in fact, are mere effects, and we are groping for our primary cause among resultant phenomena. We can never solve our problem by such a method as this. We might as well hope to find the origin of a child by dissecting its limbs and intestines. Our only hope is to shift our viewpoint, to cease our muddled examination of the details just in front of us, and try to see our problem 165in the broad terms of one who can stand back and see life moving through the centuries.

With all people, in all spheres of life, we know only too well that certain mental and physical manifestations give an absolute clue to their character, to their aims in life, their ideals, and, what is more to the point, to the stage they have reached in the process called evolution.

Incidentally, I would point out that education as generally understood, even when it implies the most up-to-date methods, does not necessarily mean progress on the evolutionary plane any more than ability as a linguist need denote a high standard of mentality.

This applies also to most arts and particularly to those where music and dancing are concerned. The lower the stage of evolution, within certain limits, the greater the appeal of music and dancing.

When we review the history and general progress of humanity we find the instincts and traits of the animal—the brute force principle—predominating at certain stages. If we go back far enough we find that there was a stage when it was always predominant.

Therefore, a test as to the ratio of progress of nations on the evolutionary plane is to be found in their tendency and desire to advance beyond that stage where the mental and physical forces, which should only belong as inherited instincts to the brute animals and savages, hold sway; and with this in 166view, if we take a survey of the history, ideals, habits of life, mental outlook, and general tendencies of the German nation, it will show conclusively that these self-hypnotised people approximated too closely to the lower animals and savages in their mode and chief aims of life.

The great and noble ideals and aims of mankind making for progress towards the more highly evolved states were cast aside for the unreasoning, brutal, and ignoble principles which make for the debasement of man’s elevating potentialities, and hold him a slave to the cruel and lowly-evolved state of the primitive creatures. That any nation or nations should deliberately adopt, as their highest ideals and aims, brute force in all its hideous aspects, desecration of mind, body, and soul for the State, justification of criminal instincts and acts if employed on behalf of the State, destruction, rape and plunder, murder and torture to terrify innocent civilians; that they should adopt, in short, the brutal principle that “Might is Right” in that special national form in which it has been manifested in the last half century and directed towards what is now known as “Militarism,”—all this is surely proof positive that they have progressed but little on the upward evolutionary stage from the state occupied by the brute beast and the savage. The criminal aspect of the outrage of all that rightthinking human beings hold dear is intensified by the fact that the nations which perpetrated the 167deed were among the most prosperous of the world, and enjoyed, as aliens, the same privileges as the subjects of those nations whose hospitality and confidence they abused.

The nations bearing the brunt of the struggle against this outburst of primitive brutal instincts and desires have long since reached a stage in their evolution which made the methods of Attila unthinkable. If forced into war they conducted it on the evolved plane of the human, and not that of the animal. They treated their captives as honourable men and extended to them every conceivable consideration within their power. Prior to this war the ideals and aims of these nations were the antithesis of those of their lowly-evolved enemies, and they were ideals and aims which made for the right to live in peace with all other nations. They aimed at the reduction of armaments, and gave practical proof of their aims. They opened their ports and their markets to their present enemies and gave them a free hand in every respect in all spheres of activity. They had no desire to beat down the ideals and principles which make for the ennoblement of mankind, they had no wish to dominate the world by brute force and to establish a system of living and a form of conduct which grinds the individual into a mere heartless unreasoning automaton, rigid-brained, driven like an animal, and not daring to claim even his soul as his own.

For many years prior to the crisis of 1914 we 168listened to the blatant outbursts of German professors and other educated authorities of that nation concerning its superiority to other nations. We were asked to believe that certain individuals of that nationality had reached the stage of the superman. These unfortunate and deluded people have for some time been cursed with this obsession.

Thinking men and women of other nations listened and wondered when these claims were made concerning these supermen, and after examining the evidence advanced to support these claims became convinced that they were not justified. The stupendous failure of the supposed supermen in every sphere of mental and physical activity in the present war proves the correctness of these convictions.

It seems inconceivable that supermen could so have guided and directed the whole national energy of Germany that it became more and more narrowed,—like the German mind,—until it concentrated almost solely upon the stupid conception of the domination of the world by Germany. To this end, the national energy was diverted chiefly into two channels:

One of the great features connected with the former was the extraordinary development of machinery, which demanded for its successful pursuance 169that the individual should be subjected to the most harmful systems of automatic training.

The standardised parts of the machine made demands which tended to stereotype the human machine. The limitations of human activity, mental and physical, reached the maximum. The power to continue work under such conditions depended upon a process of deterioration in the individual. He was slowly but surely being robbed of the possibility of development. The very soul of man was crushed to foster an industrial process which was to provide the sinews of the war machine, to support that curse called militarism, and the demoralisation of Germany came chiefly through that nation’s conceptions of militarism which, in the first and last analysis, stands for the worst manifestation of those savage instincts and unbridled passions associated with the lowest stages of primitive race development.

The horrible results of the sum total of the national madness which the foregoing represents are now revealed before us, for to Germany this militarism constituted a rigid plan, a system, and a world-philosophy.

She is convinced, against all the evidence, that her plan, system, or philosophy, is so undeniably right as to constitute an absolute. As a nation she has no mobility, no poise. She is influenced by a stultifying idea, the perfection of her own “Kultur” (a word more properly translated as a civilisation 170than by the word “culture” as used in the English or American sense). She is, in fact, just as badly co-ordinated, as unable to follow the true mandate of reason, as any individual who is dominated by a fixed idea.

For the trouble is that when reason is so far held in check that it loses its power of denial, it must have lost its power of control. The original “idea” formulated in the conscious mind has sunk so deep into the subconscious that it cannot be changed except under the influence of some stronger outside power. For nearly fifty years Germany, in her schools, her gymnasiums, her universities, her civic and her political life, has been inculcating a rigid and mentally demoralising system, and she is suffering now—as the monomaniac in private life must suffer—for her particular form of insanity.

Even in the conduct of her great campaign, this weakness of hers has begun to defeat her. She has lost the power of adaptability in military matters. She repeats the faults of her original plan, despite the endless illustrations that have been afforded by her Western antagonists that that plan can be very considerably bettered. No doubt the Higher Command may realise in some instances the weakness of the old method in conditions that have been immensely modified since August, 1914, but they are impotent to change, in a year or in a decade, the effect of their own teaching on the millions of 171Germany’s army. The massed attack, for example, has been demonstrated to be a disastrous failure—a single well-placed machine-gun can defeat it—but Germany’s soldiers will not advance in a scattered attack. They have learnt to depend upon the nearness of their comrades. Separate a German battalion and it has neither confidence nor courage.

Again, can one reasonably doubt that the German nation suffers from some form of self-hypnotism when one sees evidence of the almost pathetic belief apparently still placed in the campaign of “frightfulness”? The German people themselves are afraid—an inevitable symptom of certain forms of monomania—of the horrible devices they themselves are using, and no evidence can bring home to them the fact, that the plan of terrorising their enemies not only fails but recoils even upon their own heads. London—I speak from experience—is not intimidated by Zeppelin raids by night, nor by seaplane raids by day. The inhabitants of London do not cower under these terrible afflictions and beg for peace; on the contrary each horrible incident arouses afresh their determination to prevent, if possible, a recurrence of such savagery in the world’s history. Any sane nation must have realised this fact eighteen months ago; Germany, blind and rigid in the trance of her self-hypnosis, still staggers on to her own destruction.

In the opposite direction it is interesting to note the methods of the British. In their case, we can 172trace no such clear effort for narrowness and organisation. The general policy of the nation, whether internal or international, had that haphazard air which is so commonly cited as being a characteristic of the English method as a whole. We saw an almost complete inability to govern or even to manage that still largely subconsciously ruled country of Ireland. We witnessed the most astounding blunders of policy with regard to foreign countries (witness Lord Salisbury’s cession of Heligoland to Germany in 1890, Gladstone’s handling of the first Boer War, and a dozen other instances), and even with regard to the treatment of Britain’s own colonies, whilst internally her educational and administrative systems were the result of a method of trial and error which was sometimes well-nigh disastrous.

The British have in them a peculiar kind of empiricism. They are ready to laugh at and to criticise their own defects. They admit quite freely, for example, that they “blundered through somehow” in the Boer War, and that they have blundered again and again (most destructively in Gallipoli) in the present campaign. Their criticism of the rigidity of their own military methods is a proof that if the criticism is sometimes justified, the people at home—aye! and the New Army abroad—have never been infected with that rigidity themselves. But, in truth, that rigidity of discipline is now little in evidence in the field. And how little it has affected 173the British and French plan of campaign may be judged by the fact that every new device of any importance during the war, whether a device of method or of mechanical invention, has been originated by France and Great Britain. Now, from the German point of view, this adaptability to circumstances would be pronounced, a priori, as certain to lead to disaster. I put it to America, on the evidence afforded by the battle-fields of France, which method is the more likely to achieve ultimate success?

Returning now to my single reason for the cause of the present war, I feel that the explanation has already been given. Granted a nation educated and trained as Germany has been, some explosion was inevitable sooner or later. If we have in our midst an individual suffering from a fixed idea, he must in time become intolerable to us. Never in the history of the world have thought and the tendency to organisation been more fluid than they were in the first years of the 20th century. Yet one great and powerful nation interfered with us at every turn, impeding the flow of liberal thought by her obsession with the ideas of her own greatness and the omnipotence of her military machine. Nevertheless the other nations of Europe adapted themselves within limits to the demands of this rigid mechanism in their midst. And it may be that these very powers of endurance and adaptability hastened the crisis. They were regarded by the 174monomaniacs of Germany as signs of weakness, and just as their own philosopher Nietzsche went mad by concentration on his own invariable theme, so at last Germany crossed the bounds of sanity, imbued with a crazy belief in her own omnipotence. She ran amuck in the wide streets of Europe, and even yet she has not realised her own madness. I seriously question whether she will come to anything like a proper realisation of that madness in the present generation. She has allowed a habit of mind to become fixed; and it has fallen into the realms of her subconsciousness. We must treat her as mad, but she is nevertheless to be pitied.

Earlier in this chapter, I separated America from the rest of the world. And my reason for this is that I regard this great nation of the United States as still in its early childhood from one point of view. I have an immense confidence in the future of America. I see that she has potentialities and opportunities such as no other nation has ever had. For her the possibilities of control by reason are illimitable. But at the same time I must issue a very serious warning to every American reader of this book. For already I have seen the imitation of certain habits of thought, habits which, if they are persisted in, will sink deep into the national subconsciousness and prove a source of danger to the body politic.

My wish for America is that she should preserve as far as possible an open mind. She has recently 175entered the Great War for reasons that every right-minded man and woman must applaud and respect. I trust that she will come out of it with the same balance and power of choice, so that when she has to turn again to her own affairs, to matters of education, of government, and of her commercial interests, she will be able to form a national mind, sane enough and strong enough to control the great national body.

No finer ambition is possible than this. The old ambition of dominance, whether commercial or military, defeats itself by its very exaggeration. Such ambitions mount up until they become topheavy, and, even if they could be achieved, the result would be nothing but a decadence such as that which followed the Empire of Rome.

But given such a power of co-ordination and of self-control in the race, as a unit, as could be compared with the balance of a wise and healthy man, that nation would be free, with a greater liberty than history can record, and to such a nation little would be impossible. She would become the teacher of the world by the force of her reason and example. She would inaugurate the coming of a greater and wiser humanity.

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