chief lines of his future growth and acquaintance before he is twenty-five, and his professional habits before he is thirty; yet to something like this, James believes, physiological psychology points. Our intellectual as well as our moral day of grace is limited. It is of no use to rebel at the facts, it is folly unspeakable to ignore them. We are becoming bundles of habits. With every young person one must, therefore, continually urge: Are you willing to retain just the personal habits you have now? You cannot too quickly change them if you wish to make thorough work. From your early morning toilet, through the care of your clothing and the order of your room, table manners, breathing, tone of voice, manner of talking, pronunciation, gesture, motion, address, study, to your very way of sleeping at night-all your habits are setting like plaster of Paris. Do you wish them to set as they are?

But this insistence upon a general timelimit in habits must not be pressed unduly. As Royce says, "the cortex remains, to a remarkably late period in life, persistently sensitive to a great variety of new impressions, and capable of forming at least a certain 1 Op. cit., pp. 121, 122.

1

number of specialized new habits-such as are involved whenever we learn to recognize and name a new acquaintance, or to carry out a new business enterprise.”1

V. THE EVIDENCE OF HYPNOTISM

The facts concerning hypnotism may be taken as a final evidence of the exceeding closeness of the relation of mind and body. The marked effect of the hypnotic sleep upon memory, and the well-nigh incredible susceptibility to suggestion which it produces, are among the facts which show, as Baldwin says, "an intimacy of interaction between mind and body, to which current psychology in its psycho-physical theories is only beginning to do justice." "

2

1 Outlines of Psychology, p. 66.

Mental Development, Methods and Processes, p. 165.

CHAPTER VI

THE UNITY OF MIND AND BODY— SUGGESTIONS FOR LIVING

WHAT suggestions, now, has this unity of man-mind and body- for wise living? This mysterious unity of man is a reminder that no conditions are really trivial, that no member of this unity can suffer alone, and that character has bodily conditions as well as psychical, that may not be ignored. These physical conditions, it may be repeated, are only conditions, not causes; but they are conditions.

I. THE BODY INFLUENCES THE MIND

There is no help for it. However it may be in the future, one is not yet a disembodied spirit. One must face present conditions. What does this mean?

The Need of Well-oxygenated Blood.- It means, for one thing, that one must plan for blood, good blood, enough blood, and well-oxygenated blood. And this not simply

for physical comfort, but for the sake of rational thinking and righteous living. The facts already given as to the law of diffusion should prove this. One of the first authorities in the country on nervous diseases asserts that many forms of insanity are not due to organic lesions of the brain, but are probably to be attributed to a "functional change in the brain due to disordered nutrition or circulation." Corning's experiments in artificially hindering the flow of blood to the head tend to the same conclusion.2

3

Still later investigations of Mosso on the phenomena of fatigue, as well as those of LaGrange on the physiology of bodily exercise, emphasize the fact that the quality of the blood is an equally necessary condition of normal brain activity. "The substances produced by overworking the brain and all other organs," Mosso says in effect, are drosses," the great part of which ought to be burned up by aid of the oxygen of the blood. "Fatigue, thus, bodily and mental, is a sort of poisoning by the 1 Starr, Diseases of the Mind, p. 27.

'Cf. Corning, Brain Exhaustion, pp. 37 ff,

See Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. II, pp. 267, 268.

chemical products of decomposition." LaGrange, lays emphasis on the fact that the great gain of exercise is that a man "lays up a provision of oxygen" and so produces what he calls "more living blood." And the feeling of drowsiness-brain-workers should note often means need of oxygen rather than need of sleep.

This is no matter of mere bodily hygiene; it is quite certain to become a question of morals. The influence of brain-congestion or anæmia (and only in less degree of the supply of vitiated blood to the brain) upon the temper and disposition is immediate and marked. The language of specialists upon this point is so strong that it would seem to you extravagant if I should quote it. Thus Hammond speaks of the "whole character changed by a slight attack of cerebral congestion."

This means, then, that a man has no business to be too lazy to breathe, and breathe deeply, or to exercise sufficiently, or to fulfil any of the conditions for enough good oxygenated living blood. One may well be reminded that the authorities agree that feeling is no safe test as to the amount of exercise needed. It should not be for

The Physiology of Bodily Exercise.