March 1, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



J23 



are making use of only a small part of our 

 possible mental and physical resources. 

 In some persons this sense of being cut off •> 

 from their rightful resources is extreme, 

 and we then get the formidable neuras^ 

 thenic and psychasthenic conditions, with 

 life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, 

 that the medical books describe. 



Part of the imperfect vitality under 

 which we labor can be explained by scien- 

 tific psychology. It is the result of the in- 

 hibition exerted by one part of our ideas 

 on other parts. Conscience makes cowards 

 of us all. Social conventions prevent us 

 from telling the truth after the fashion 

 of the heroes and heroines of Bernard 

 Shaw. Our scientific respectability keeps 

 us from exercising the mystical portions of 

 our nature freely. If we are doctors, our 

 mind-cure sympathies, if we are mind- 

 curists, our medical sympathies, are tied up. 

 We all know persons who are models of 

 excellence, but who belong to the extreme 

 Philistine type of mind. So deadly is their 

 intellectual respectability that we can't 

 converse about certain subjects at all, can't 

 let our minds play over them, can't even 

 mention them in their presence. I have 

 numbered among my dearest friends per- 

 sons thus inhibited intellectually, with 

 whom I would gladly have been able to 

 talk freely about certain interests of mine, 

 certain authors, say, as Bernard Shaw, 

 Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G. 

 Wells, but it wouldn't do, it made them 

 too uncomfortable, they wouldn't play, I 

 had to be silent. An intellect thus tied 

 down by literality and decorum makes on 

 one the same sort of impression that an 

 able-bodied man would who should habitu- 

 ate himself to do his work with only one 

 of his fingers, locking up the rest of his 

 organism and leaving it unused. 



In few of us are functions not tied-up 

 by the exercise of other functions. G. T. 

 Fechner is an extraordinary exception that 



proves the rule. He could use his mystical 

 faculties while being scientific. He could 

 be both critically keen and devout. Few 

 scientific men can pray, I imagine. Few 

 can carry on any living commerce with 

 'God.' Yet many of us are well aware 

 how much freer in many directions and 

 abler our lives would be, were such im- 

 portant forms of energizing not sealed up. 

 There are in everyone potential forms of 

 activity that actually ai-e shunted out from 

 use. 



The existence of reservoirs of energy 

 that habitually are not tapped is most 

 familiar to us in the phenomenon of 

 'second wind.' Ordinarily we stop when 

 we meet the first effective layer, so to call 

 it, of fatigue. We have then walked, 

 played, or worked 'enough,' and desist. 

 That amount of fatigue is an efficacious ob- 

 struction, on this side of which our usual 

 life is cast. But if an unusual necessity 

 forces us to press onward, a surprising 

 thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up 

 to a certain critical point, when gradually 

 or suddenly it passes away, and we are 

 fresher than before. We have evidently 

 tapped a level of new energy, masked until 

 then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. 

 There may be layer after layer of this ex- 

 perience. A third and a fourth 'wind' 

 may supervene. Mental activity shows the 

 phenomenon as well as physical, and in ex- 

 ceptional cases we may find, beyond the 

 very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts 

 of ease and power that we never dreamed 

 ourselves to own, sources of strength 

 habitually not taxed at all, because habitu- 

 ally we never push through the obstruc- 

 tion, never pass those early critical points. 



When we do pass, what makes us do so? 

 Either some imusual stimulus fills us 

 \vith emotional excitement, or some unusual 

 idea of necessity induces us to make an 

 extra effort of will. Excitements, ideas, 



