6o TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTE LY 



fact that misfit, inadequacy and failure cause so many people to suffer 

 from an inhibition of the powers of right perspective, and to such an 

 extent that they necessarily come, in time, if slowly yet most surely, to 

 the point where they can not see the comparative virtue of the strength 

 they still have, and the work they still can do, even as they think upon 

 and especially feel upon so uncomfortably, what they originally ex- 

 pected of themselves in the great battle of life. 



From these and many another supporting observation, easily and 

 everywhere to be had, it is perfectly legitimate to conclude, beyond 

 reasonable doubt, that mental pain and its resulting invalidism is quite 

 naturally the necessary outcome of a great variety of causes, which may 

 be contributed to, usually, by almost every influence that either bad 

 heredity, accident, disease, wrong education, personal over-stress, or 

 failure, or future uncertainty, may happen to afford. Besides, in many 

 instances, we may unhesitatingly believe that these causes may be 

 almost viciously, if never so unwittingly, supplemented by parents, 

 children, relatives far and near, neighbors and friends, clergymen and 

 physicians, gossips, fools and scandal-mongers, and all others who may 

 as potently as unwittingly conspire to produce and prolong it. More- 

 over, we may note that there often exists constitutionally, or that there 

 has been developed through disease or accident, certain definite phases 

 of an imperative tendency toward an abnormal sensitiveness to every 

 painful or unusual impression, so much so that when this comes to be 

 actually coupled with an over-developed fear of consequences, it may 

 most unexpectedly make the sufferer all too ready to fall in with almost 

 every possible kind of trend toward this form of invalidism, and to 

 gradually become most thoroughly a coward, or even quite panic- 

 stricken, from the very first suggestion of subsequent trouble. That 

 with such a constitution and with such a " push " from untoward influ- 

 ences of so many kinds, every temporary attack of mental pain, from 

 no matter how insignificant a cause, may help the sufferer eventually to 

 slide into the chronic state of mental disease, especially when day by 

 day serious measures for relief are unsuccessful, is plainly beyond ques- 

 tion. Thus, a pain in the back, not overcome by sufficiently strenuous 

 or prolonged measures, may quite as easily become evidence of " spinal 

 disease," as pain nearer the front may become a surety of " ovarian 

 cyst " ; or higher up, of " cancer of the stomach " ; or at the back of 

 the head, of " disease of the brain." And once let such a wrong notion 

 become fixed in the mind, especially of both patient and attendants, as 

 it often does, and then be reinforced by reference to it, or by any set of 

 persistent untoward circumstances, as all too often is the case, tem- 

 porary or permanent disease of mind may follow, in the natural course 

 of events, as surely as night the day, and with scarcely ever a bright 

 morning in prospect. 



