amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use. But the very same individual, pushing his energies to their extreme, may in a vast number of cases keep the pace up day after day, and find no "reaction" of a bad sort, so long as decent hygienic conditions are preserved. His more active rate of energizing does not wreck him; for the organism adapts itself. . ... 10. Developing Energy [HALL, G. Stanley, "How You Can Do More and Be More," from an interview by Bruce Barton for the American Magazine, November, 1923, Vol. 96, pp. 14-15.] So the first counsel which the psychologist can give is to analyze your fears. Discover wherein they have their roots. Then begin to build up some habit of positive action. If they are old offenders they do not give up easily; but steady daily education of the will eradicates even the worst of them and opens the way to the larger powers of mind which they obstruct. In the second place, it is a wise rule to vary your routine occasionally, to shake your mind out of the paths which come to be habitual. Our primitive ancestors lived lives of stirring variety feasting alternated with fasting; the stress of battle. with periods of lazy recuperation; the clan dwelt sometimes in the forests, again on the open prairies. Thus, both mind and body were kept flexible. But we modern folk lead routine lives. We easily drop into grooves of doing and thinking. In some directions we are overdeveloped; in others, atrophied. We should make a conscious effort to supply variety. If it is your habit to go to bed at nine o'clock, stay up some night until the wee small hours. If you have lived a long time in one place, make a journey into a far country, where you will meet people whose thinking and customs are wholly different. The stimulus of variety is one of the keys which opens the locked and unused chambers of the mind. In the third place, the psychologist has a profound respect for the power of the emotions. In our modern world, most people pass through life without ever experiencing the tremendous energizing effect of perfect abandon. They feel affection, but they never knew the transforming influence of a great love. They are irritable, but never really angry. To be short-tempered and petulant is merely to fritter away nervous energy; but I pity the man whose spirit has never been stirred by really righteous wrath. Don't interpret But love and wrath Homer immortalized Self-control is a noble achievement. what I have said as belittling it in any sense. can release tremendous powers within us. the wrath of Achilles. The Bible has much to tell us of the righteous wrath of God. Don't carry your self-control to a point where you become colorless. There are times when you need to give your emotions full swing, if you are to achieve anything beyond the ordinary. In the fourth place, one must have a driving interest if he expects his life to carry very far. . . . Somewhere in the world there is work for every man which is infinitely worthwhile. Until a man finds that work he need never expect to use himself to full capacity. You may not need to leave your present position to find it. Possibly all you need is a new vision of your work in its relation to the great machinery of human service, and understanding of the supreme importance and dignity of every useful task which is well and fitly done. Every man has the right to a thrill of real achievement. Seek that thrill. For until you find it you will never put forth all of your powers. Finally, every man must develop for himself some point of view, some philosophy, which will enable him to deal with the petty worries of every-day life and drive through the real results. Lincoln, when his burdens seemed almost unbearable, had a phrase with which he freed his mind. "This too will pass," he said; meaning that, viewed from the distance of another year or of many years, the problem of the moment would seem insignificant. Other men, with other mental calisthenics, have put away annoyance and kept their vision clear. But the problem of worthwhile achievement involves something more fundamental than a mere phrase. One must work out for himself some creed, some faith, some conviction that the life which has been given him to lead is important. The Great Physician said, "According to your faith be it unto you." And every psychologist can testify to the fact that even very ordinary men and women can be more and do more, if they begin by believing that they possess greater powers than they have ever yet called into action, and go forward with the determination to demand a little more of themselves with each succeeding day. 11. What Determines Ultimate Efficiency [JAMES, William, Talks to Teachers, pp. 114, 134-135, 136-137, 142143. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1899.] The total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses,-all are subsidiary to this. No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields of consciousness may be, if he really care for a subject, he will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent sort. Some of the efficient workers I know are of the ultra-scatterbrained type.... This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No elementary measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the long run. A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants, can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late Kavanagh, M. P.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him in his boyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of his motorfunctions have been!-can be an adventurous traveller, an equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life.... Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. What tells in life is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly. . . . Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important. QUESTIONS AND PROBLEMS 1. Some elementary-school teachers alternate "drill" subjects, like spelling, writing, and arithmetic, with "content" subjects, like geography, reading, and nature study. Others place all "drill" work in the morning and all "content" subjects in the afternoon. Is one arrangement better than the other? Do pupils do better work with difficult subjects in the morning? 2. What effect has interest upon fatigue? 3. Do school children actually suffer much from real fatigue? 4. What training can be given children that will tend to immunize them to fatigue. 5. Discuss the topic "Reserves of Energy." 6. Summarize the results of Miss Arai's experiment on fatigue. 7. In what sense may fatigue be considered as desirable? 8. How did Lincoln free his mind from anxieties and worries? How may religion release greater energies in us? To what extent is a soothing and optimistic philosophy of life a spur to greater energy as well as beneficial to one's mental health? REFERENCES ARAI, Tsuru, Mental Fatigue (New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1912). ASH, I. E., "Fatigue and Its Effects Upon Control," Archives of Psychology, No. 31 (New York, The Science Press, 1914). FREEMAN, E. N., How Children Learn (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917), Chap. xiv. OFFNER, Max, Mental Fatigue (Baltimore, Warwick & York, 1911), Translated by Whipple. THORNDIKE, E. L., Educational Psychology (New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1921), Vol. III. Educational Psychology, Briefer Course (New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1914), Chaps. xix, xxi. WHIPPLE, G. M., Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (Baltimore, Warwick & York, 1914). |