Outwitting Our Nerves | Page 8

the art of living. Psychology is not life; it can make no claim
to furnish the motive nor the power for successful living, for it is not
faith, nor hope, nor love; but it tries to point the way and to help us
fulfil conditions. There is no more reason why the average man should
be unaware of the instincts or the subconscious mind, than that he
should be ignorant of germs or of the need of fresh air.
If it be argued that character and health are both inherently by-products
of self-forgetful service, rather than of painstaking thought, we answer
that this is true, but that there can be no self-forgetting when things
have gone too far wrong. At such times it pays to look in, if we can do
it intelligently, in order that we may the sooner get our eyes off
ourselves and look out. The pursuit of self-knowledge is not a
pleasurable pastime but simply a valuable means to an end.
KNOWING OUR MACHINE

=Counting on Ourselves.= Knowing our machine makes us better able
to handle it. For, after all, each of us is, in many ways, very like a piece
of marvelous and complicated machinery. For one thing, our minds, as
well as our bodies, are subject to uniform laws upon which we can
depend. We are not creatures of chaos; under certain conditions we can
count on ourselves. Freedom does not mean freedom from the reign of
law. It means that, to a certain extent, we can make use of the laws.
Psychic laws are as susceptible to investigation, verification, and use as
are any laws in the physical world. Each person is so much the center
of his own life that it is very easy for him to fall into the way of
thinking that he is different from all the rest of the world. It is a
healthful experience for him to realize that every person he meets is
made on the same principles, impelled by the same forces, and fighting
much the same fight. Since the laws of the mental world are uniform,
we can count on them as aids toward understanding other people and
understanding ourselves.
="Intelligent Scrutiny versus Morbid Introspection."= It helps
wonderfully to be able to look at ourselves in an objective, impersonal
way. We are likely to be overcome by emotion, or swept by vague
longings which seem to have no meaning and which, just because they
are bound up so closely with our own ego, are not looked at but are
merely felt. Unknown forces are within us, pulling us this way and that,
until sometimes we who should be masters are helpless slaves. One
great help toward mastery and one long step toward serenity is a
working-knowledge of the causes and an impersonal interest in the
phenomena going on within. Introspection is a morbid, emotional
fixation on self, until it takes on this quality of objectivity. What Cabot
calls the "sin of impersonality" is a grievous sin when directed toward
another person, but most of us could stand a good deal of ingrowing
impersonality without any harm.
The fact that the human machine can run itself without a hitch in the
majority of cases is witness to its inherent tendency toward health.
People were living and living well through all the centuries before the
science of psychology was formulated. But not with all people do
things run so smoothly. There were demoniacs in Bible times and

neurotics in the Middle Ages, as there are nervous invalids and
half-well people to-day. Psychology has a real contribution to make,
and in recent years its lessons have been put into language which the
average man can understand.
Psychology is not merely interested in abstract terms with long names.
It is no longer absorbed merely in states of consciousness taken
separately and analyzed abstractly. The newer functional psychology is
increasingly interested in the study of real persons, their purposes and
interests, what they feel and value, and how they may learn to realize
their highest aspirations. It is about ordinary people, as they think and
act, in the kitchen, on the street cars, at the bargain-counter, people in
crowds and alone, mothers and their babies, little children at play,
young girls with their lovers, and all the rest of human life. It is the
science of you, and as such it can hardly help being interesting.
While psychology deals with such topics as the subconscious mind, the
instincts, the laws of habit, and association of ideas and suggestion, it is
after all not so much an academic as a practical question. These forces
govern the thought you are thinking at this moment, the way you will
feel a half-hour from now, the mood you will be in to-morrow, the
friends you