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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 635 



and efforts, in a word, are what carry us 

 over the dam. 



In those hjT)eresthetic conditions which . 

 chronic invalidism so often brings in its 

 train, the dam has changed its normal 

 place. The pain-threshold is abnormally 

 near. The slightest functional exercise 

 gives a distress which the patient yields to 

 and stops. In such cases of 'habit-neu- 

 rosis' a new range of power often comes 

 in consequence of the bullying-treatment, 

 of efforts which the doctor obliges the 

 patient, against his will, to make. First 

 comes the very extremity of distress, then 

 follows unexpected relief. There seems no 

 doubt that we are each and all of us to 

 some extent victims of habit-neurosis. We 

 have to admit the wider potential range 

 and the habitually narrow actual use. We 

 live subject to inhibition by degrees of 

 fatigue which we have come only from 

 habit to obey. Most of us may learn to 

 push the barrier farther off, and to live in 

 perfect comfort on much higher levels of 

 power. 



Country people and city people, as a 

 class, illustrate this difference. The rapid 

 rate of life, the number of decisions in an 

 hour, the many things to keep account of, 

 in a busy city man's or woman's life, 

 seem monstrous to a country brother. He 

 doesn't see how we live at all. But settle 

 him in town; and in a year or two, if not 

 too old, he will have trained himself to 

 keep the pace as well as any of us, getting 

 more out of himself in any week then he 

 ever did in ten weeks at home. The physi- 

 ologists show how one can be in nutritive 

 equilibrium, neither losing nor gaining 

 weight, on astonishingly different quanti- 

 ties of food. So one can be in what I 

 might call 'efficiency-equilibrium' (neither 

 gaining nor losing power when once the 

 equilibrium is reached), on astonishingly 

 different quantities of work, no matter in 

 what dimension the work may be measured. 



It may be physical work, intellectual work, 

 moral work, or spiritual work. 



Of course there are limits: the trees 

 don't grow into the sky. But the plain 

 fact remains that men the world over 

 possess amounts of resource, which only 

 very exceptional individuals push to their 

 extremes of use. 



The excitements that carry us over the 

 usually effective dam are most often the 

 classic emotional ones, love, anger, crowd- 

 contagion, or despair. Life's vicissitudes 

 bring them in abundance. A new position 

 of responsibility, if it do not crush a man, 

 will often, nay, one may say, will usually, 

 show him to be a far stronger creature than 

 was supposed. Even here we are witness- 

 ing (some of us admiring, some deploring 

 — I must class myself as admiring) the 

 dynamogenic effects of a very exalted polit- 

 ical office upon the energies of an indi- 

 vidual who had already manifested a 

 healthy amount of energy before the office 

 came. 



Mr. Sydney Olivier has given us a fine 

 fable of the dynamogenic effects of love in 

 a late story called 'The Empire Builder,' 

 in the Contemporary Review for May, 

 1905. A young naval officer falls in love 

 at sight with a missionary's daughter on 

 a lost island, which his ship accidentally 

 touches. From that day onward he must 

 see her again ; and he so moves Heaven and 

 earth and the Colonial Office and the Ad- 

 miralty to get sent there once more, that 

 the island finally is annexed to the empire 

 in consequence of the various fusses he is 

 led to make. People must have been 

 appalled lately in San Francisco to find the 

 stores of bottled up energy and endurance 

 they possessed. 



Wars, of course, and shipwrecks, are the 

 great revealers of what men and women 

 are able to do and bear. Cromwell's and 

 Grant's careers are the stock examples of 

 how war will wake a man up. I owe to 



