450 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters 

 in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious per- 

 sonages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his 

 seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less 

 glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for 

 those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted 

 enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a re- 

 laxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions 

 which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the in- 

 ertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never 

 to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing 

 it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least 

 thing in the world — the giving up of one's seat in a horse-car, if 

 nothing more heroic offers — but let it not fail to take place. 



These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular 

 lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to 

 be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions 

 evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating ; so there is reason to 

 suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know 

 it the effort-making capacity will be gone ; and that, if we suffer the 

 wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. 

 Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the 

 same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond, we do 

 not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend 

 on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this 

 fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which 

 is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits 

 of the will, we may, then, offer something like this : JCeep the faculty 

 of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That 

 is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do 

 every day or two something for no other reason than that you would 

 rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it 

 may find you not unarmed and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism 

 of this sort is like the insurance a man pays on his house and goods. 

 The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring 

 him in a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be 

 his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured him- 

 self to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self- 

 denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when every- 

 thing rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are win- 

 nowed like chaff in the blast. 



The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most pow- 

 erful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of 

 which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves 

 in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. 

 Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking 



