The Book of Life Part 7

Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate all men and all inst.i.tutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it, or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to replace them! Beware of party cries and s.h.i.+bboleths, the idols of the forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for your feet. Beware of cant--that paraphernalia of n.o.ble sentiments, artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of cla.s.s conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?

The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called "Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won endors.e.m.e.nts of a great many people who do not give their endors.e.m.e.nts lightly.

This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry, but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently acc.u.mulated and standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop, and it had been found that he was unable to make the b.u.t.tons and the b.u.t.tonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to teach this boy to make b.u.t.tons and b.u.t.tonholes meet; the effort had cost some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers.

Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of testing all the inmates of the inst.i.tution; so by a half hour's examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective.

Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making b.u.t.tons and b.u.t.tonholes meet.

This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child--which may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting separate schools for defective children--replacing the old-fas.h.i.+oned schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little wretches to learn what was beyond their power.

In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for example, those of memory a.s.sociation. The examiner prepares a list of a hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal anything, will give all his a.s.sociations promptly, and the reaction times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the gla.s.s; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each case the first memory a.s.sociation of the criminal will be one which he does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that the conscious mind is trying to conceal.

Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be working in the interest of cla.s.s privilege. The psychologist who is employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field.

To give knowledge to the ma.s.ses of mankind, slow and painful as the process seems, is now the most important task confronting the enlightened thinker.

The method of psychoa.n.a.lysis gives us also much insight into the phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to understand it. At present we are embarra.s.sed because genius is so often closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection with the subnormal--and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own, they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the defects of the master as a subst.i.tute for his qualities. And so there grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting ma.s.ses of facts and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate purpose of all true science.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND

(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of all men.)

Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be, and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done, and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and compelled to deal with modern ideas.

But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained; your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for understanding.

First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods, cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet, never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter sh.e.l.ls--yet I see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions, the lies deliberately maintained--and realize the waste of it all, the pity of it all!

Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs to his bosom and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and never a week pa.s.ses that there do not come to me letters from people who tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct--but I fail to understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the "Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes, and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled--there will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!

Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more deadly compulsions of its own making--from prejudices and superst.i.tions.

The prejudices and superst.i.tions of mankind are like those diseased mental states which are discovered by the psychoa.n.a.lyst; what he calls a "complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each group of men, each sect or cla.s.s, have their precious dogmas, their s.h.i.+bboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a brain-storm.

At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."

You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are better than the inst.i.tutions and systems under which they live; you realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem of social reorganization.

Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is, for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"--and never since the world began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius.

Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child is more wonderful than her child.

In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another, and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which we draw. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must feel towards life and its miracles.

Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high, marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite, and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many universes, and new ones continually discovered.

The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the universe of outer s.p.a.ce, the material world of infinity? Consider the smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the miracles of this world of s.p.a.ce, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars, and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying every which way through s.p.a.ce!

Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then, behold, in the atom there are millions of millions of electrons--tiny particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them, and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."

Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it, he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.

Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it--he possesses not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of the spheres, and--who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St.

Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest conversing!

PART TWO

THE BOOK OF THE BODY

CHAPTER XVIII

THE UNITY OF THE BODY

(Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem of one organism.)

The reader who has followed our argument this far will understand that we are seldom willing to think of the body as separate from the mind.

The body is a machine, to be sure, but it is a machine that has a driver, and while it is possible for a sound machine to have a drunken and irresponsible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, we find the fault to be with the driver; in other words, we find that what is needed for the body is a change in the mind.

If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound as long as possible, the first problem for you to settle is what you want to make of your life; you must have a purpose, and confront the tasks of life with energy and interest. What is the use of talking about health to a man who has no moral purpose? He may answer--indeed, I have heard victims of alcoholism answer--"Let me alone. I have a right to go to h.e.l.l in my own way."

I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition is equally true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health while he has a sick body. It is a good deal like the old question, Which comes first, the hen or the egg? The mind and the body are bound up together, and you may try to deal with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to deal with both. Most physicians have a tendency to overlook the mind, and Christian Scientists make a religion of overlooking the body, and each pays the penalty in greatly reduced effectiveness.

My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, is that it has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and functions, and to overlook the central unity of the system. You will find a doctor who specializes in the stomach and its diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach were a thing that went around in the world all by itself. He will discuss the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook to point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your blood-stream, which is controlled by your nervous system, which in turn is controlled by hope, by ambition, by love, by all the spiritual elements of your being. A single pulse of anger or of fear may make more trouble with the contents of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive ferments can remedy in a week.

Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, and so for a time have a purely local problem. You may smash your finger, and that is a problem of a finger; but neglect it for a few days, and let blood poison set in, and you will be made aware that the human body is one organism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you may hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control your mind.

Some one has said that the blood is the life; and certainly the blood is both the symbol and the instrument of the body's unity. The blood penetrates to all parts of the body and maintains and renews them. If the blood is normal, the work of renewal does not often fail. If there is a failure of renewal--that is, a disease--we shall generally find an abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the blood is controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered pump. One chamber drives the blood to the lungs, a ma.s.s of fine porous membranes, where it comes into contact with the air, and gives off the poisons which it has acc.u.mulated in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is then sucked out of the lungs, and by the next chamber it is driven to every corner of the body. It takes to every cell of the body the protein materials which are necessary for the body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which are to be burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the carriers of oxygen, and an even greater number of the white corpuscles, which are the body's scavengers, its defenders from invasion by outside germs.

There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails and the scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced by the body and pushed out from it and no longer nourished by the blood. But all the still living parts of the body are fed at every instant by the stream of life. Each cell in the body takes the fuel which it needs for its activities, and combines it with the oxygen brought by the red corpuscles; and when the task of power-production has been achieved, the cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon dioxide, but many complex chemical products--ammonia, uric acid, and the "fatigue poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The blood-stream bears these along, and delivers some to the sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the kidneys, and the rest to the lungs.

All of this complicated ma.s.s of activities is in normal health perfectly regulated and timed by the nervous system. You lie down to sleep, and your muscles rest, and the vital activities slow up, your heart beats only faintly; but let something frighten you, and you sit up, and these faculties leap into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a fresh supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and these organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not do so, your muscles would have no fresh energy; they would become paralyzed by the fatigue poisons, and you would be, as we say, exhausted.

All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter and accessory to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is the blood-stream's means of protecting itself and renewing itself. The stomach is to digest and prepare new blood material, the teeth are to crush it and grind it, the hands are to seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to figure out its whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little world as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who lives somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after the welfare of our blood-stream--he has far better reason for believing that all our consciousness and our personality exist for him!

Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly to renew itself or properly to protect itself and its various subsidiary organs.

When you find yourself with a disease, you call in a doctor; and unless this doctor is a modern and progressive man, he makes the mistake of a.s.suming that the disease is in the particular organ where it shows itself. You have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical men have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing you, and convincing you that you are in desperate need of attention.) Your throat is sore, your tonsils are swollen and covered with white spots; so the doctor hauls out his little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and dips it, say in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a ma.s.s of foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he knows that lysol kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle for the same purpose, puts you to bed, and gradually the swelling goes down, and he tells you that he has cured you, and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe the swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. Then he tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature is to blame for your death, but it never occurs to anyone to ask what nature may have had to do with your recovery.

I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now cla.s.sified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas, and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over.

Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before.