Up From Insanity

I

HERE is a narrative of my adventures in the land of insanity.

They are vital and real to me, but all such ‘stories,’ as we newspaper men call them, of a personal and psychological nature are mighty hard to make clear and readable. They usually get all tangled up in the telling, for we are apt to stress the wrong things. Happenings that mean much to us sentimentally oftentimes have no value in a narrative. And, secondly, inasmuch as rebuilding a mind presupposes rebuilding the whole life, it would take a genius in narration to put over anything approaching a concise picture of the enterprise in five or six thousand words.

However, in my poor way (you, Mr. Editor, and you, the reader, must not expect too much of me), I can at least tell you something of what it means to reconstruct a mental and moral organization.

It has now been something over twenty years since, for me, the curtain went down, and I am just emerging into something like a right relation to my fellow beings.

Roughly, my fight has resolved itself into four phases. First, I had to struggle to reconstruct my mind — to bring order out of chaos in thinking. It required about fourteen years to effect this change, which, viewed in the fight of certain of my experiences, seems to have involved the renewal of at least a part of the tissue of the brain.

I realize that I am almost a pioneer in this field of written experience of insanity. It is a privilege conferred upon few men in this world to return from this dark and weird adventure to five a normal life, and of this handful, comparatively fewer still are equipped to write about it. So that I feel some responsibility to be accurate, and not to make random statements designed to startle the reader rather than to instruct him.

I shall later point out why I believe my brain-tissue was renewed, and also show that some evidence exists that the functions were merely arrested.

Secondly, — going back to the four stages of my rejuvenation, — my will had again to be brought into action, for you must understand not only that insanity is a paralysis of the mind, but that in my own case the will was equally weakened. And I am convinced that the major portion of insanity is just that — a failure of the will to control the mind, which, running rudderless, so to speak, goes on the rocks.

A friend of mine 'lost his mind’ last year — and had n’t found it at last report — from thinking too much about his income tax. The impulse to think about his dwindling fortune was greater than the power of his will to check.

I shall attempt seriously to show that the centre of the will is distinct from the centre of the mind; is a separate functioning organ. We have been accustomed to talk about a strong will, — a self-willed person, the old folks used to say, — knowing little or nothing about it. Some men, posing as authorities, seem to think that the will is the sum total of the personality. But my experience is that personality is an accumulation of experience, whereas will is a force. I became sane four or five or six years — it is hard to draw definite lines in a world so shadowy — before my will came into action, during which period I was as ineffective for service as a derelict at sea.

Thirdly, — coming back again to the periods of my advance, — my moral life had to be rebuilt. When the mind went, everything went with it. During the years of my ‘come-back’ I was as unmoral as a savage. I alienated every friend from me, and every relative but my mother, — it is something to say that not even the antics of an insane man can wreck the affections of a true mother, — and I was compelled to beat it up and down and across the country, fleeing from an adverse reputation.

Fourthly, my physical health had to be restored. Such a strain was placed upon my nerves and organs generally that, if I had not originally possessed almost superhuman vitality, I should long since have been pushing daisies, as they say over the water, in an unhonored grave.

II

I suppose, first of all, you would like to know how it feels to be insane. Well, it is indeed a melancholy sensation. There is a great deal of morbid curiosity about it, and a great deal of misconception. Like most conditions, the more we know about it, the less awe-inspiring it is. The American Indians used to believe, I am told, that when one of their number went off his head, he was possessed of the Evil One, and they would kill him — which was fortunate, probably, for the poor Indian. On the other hand, lately a movement has arisen to change the name of insane asylums to mental hospitals. We now recognize former ‘ madmen ’ as merely sick people. We used to think of insane people as wild-eyed humans, gnawing at prison bars, or raving in a straight jacket. That was very melodramatic, but, like most melodrama, untrue. To-day we have with us the ‘nut,’ which is the recognition by society of the man of impaired mental faculties in our midst.

I personally violated on one memorable occasion the conception of insanity of a well-known New York publisher. In the depths of despair — nothing else would have driven me to it — I went to New York, visited the great man in his office, told him my story without a blush, and requested slight financial aid while I put the story on paper, He listened to me with apparent deep interest, and was about to enter into a contract with me to write the book, when a partner of his happened to walk into the office.

I had known this partner personally for several years; I had played golf with him, and he had heard me lecture on my explorations in Africa. When he heard at second-hand, and very much abridged, the story I had told, he turned to his partner and said, with a friendly smile, that I was the biggest liar alive — that what I was trying to do was to put over something unusual and sensational; that he had known me for years as the sanest of his acquaintances. And he queered my deal completely.

It was to him inconceivable that an insane man could play golf, go to Africa, or talk about his experiences. And he considered himself very shrewd and wise, and to this day he believes that he saved his house from exploiting a yarn which he thought was a fake. But he was simply ignorant, that was all.

I will endeavor to tell you how a man feels when his mind fails him. There are several sorts of insanity, or diseases of the mind, brought on, in a large percentage of cases, by wrong thinking somewhere down the line. You will probably come back at me at once with the assertion that drink is a prime cause of insanity. Yes, surely; but a man who is thinking straight, with a developed will, does n’t drink himself into any such condition.

I came into an unstable mental state through influences which I knew nothing of until as late as two years ago. I was always at high tension, and on edge mentally, but this tension became very acute in my twenty-first year. You will notice, as I go along, that all the epochs of my mental career happened at or near the expiration of a seven-year cycle. I 'lost my mind’ at maturity, made a material advance at twentyeight, became what I considered sane at thirty-five, and now, as I approach my forty-second year, as definite a change for the better is coming over me. I mean that my will is coming into play.

Like Tolstoi, who noticed and wrote rather fully about the relationship of this cycle to his own advance, I believe that the renewal of the bodily tissue (or some physical change) sums up, as it were, more or less suddenly, all the tendencies and efforts, or the degenerating processes, as the case may be, of the seven years immediately past.

Looking back, I believe that I was consistently going down the mental incline, my mind becoming more and more unstable, during the entire period from my fourteenth to my twenty-first year. At any rate, I more or less suddenly observed that my mind had the tendency to wind itself up, become stimulated to spurts of furious activity, when thoughts, pictures, memories, imaginary experiences— with the ego central in every one of them — would whirl through my brain with furious speed, under the highest stimulation, supplied from what source, I know not.

Inevitably a reaction would set in, and I would fall into mental sluggishness and the depths of woe. Whereas, during one period I seemed to be all life, all vibration, with every good fortune possible, during the reverse I was to all intent lost irredeemably— doomed to suffering and to death.

This sort of thing went on — I was conscious of it, at least—for about three months. Then nature turned the trick.

I was, at the time, a traveling person, going from village to village in a buggy, the period of the ubiquitous automobile being not yet upon us. On this never-to-be-forgotten day in March it was raining, and not only raining but blowing — cold and raw.

I got down from my buggy before a store in a cross-roads village, and beat it to the shelter of the interior. Outside that wet and homely threshold, I left my old self. In a twinkling, when I came face to face with a group of men seated around a stove in the dark, gloomy store, a weakness came over me that marked the fatal division in my career. All day long, more or less, my mind had been going at fever pitch, running in ‘high,’ with never a break.

When the reaction came, I underwent a slump in consciousness, which left me totally unable to speak, and so weak that I had to lean against an upright in the store to keep from falling. Even as I leaned there I was conscious of my negro driver saying to the merchant, whom he evidently knew, and who was inquiring my mission, ‘Yes, an’ he’s as sharp as a steel trap.'

Yes, as sharp as a steel trap with the spring broken.

Behind the counter, where I attempted to talk with the merchant, the best I could do was to grin diabolically. There is an old saw, — you have heard it hundreds of times, — ‘Keep a stiff upper lip.’ The fact, it seems, has long been recognized, that some relationship exists between the upper lip and the mentality. It does. In my case that poor weak grin was the symbol of idiocy, and the merchant knew it and so did I. But I could n’t stop grinning. All power of control was gone.

I dare say that simple country bumpkin of a man had never before been face to face with a man suddenly gone insane. It is, in a sense, quite an experience. But he rose to it nobly. He put his hand on my shoulder like a father; talked to me kindly, God bless him! helped me into my buggy, and stood in his wet doorway and watched me drive away into the cold gloomy world.

Some day I am going to visit that store again and stand again on that threshold. I dare say the kindly man who supported me in my first agony is dead, but I shall say a little prayer for him in his distant world.

My destination was a hotel seven miles away. We drove and drove through the torrential downpour. I crouched down in my corner of the buggy, a poor, shrunken, lifeless figure. Doubtless the negro beside me realized that something had gone wrong with the steel trap, because he kept his peace. We came at last to a long avenue of poplars leading into the town, and I have never forgotten how agitated they were in the terrific wind, with streaks of rain driving through them.

Just as dusk was enshrouding the wet, bedraggled town, we drove up to the hotel, as cheap and crude a joint as you could find in seven states. The proprietor of the place, with commendable enterprise, came to the buggy and stood under the drip of his tin porch-roof and took my bag and helped me out. He was very profuse with his welcome, but I could merely hold out my hand to him and grin like a Cheshire cat. When I walked into the lobby, — he had gone before me, and I fear winked at the company of his pals around the stove, — I encountered a deadly silence, and every man’s eyes upon me. I suddenly became terrified, grinned horribly, and trembled like an aspen leaf.

Men in other walks of life might have had more respect for a fellow being in the throes of a stroke so terrible. But that raw bunch, to a man, burst out laughing right in my face. The horrible part of it was, I seemed to have lost all power of locomotion, and could only stand and stare at them, their eyes being a magnet for my own which held me in a mental vice.

When I finally got to my room, — which I did by the grace of Heaven, — I fell across the bed — done for.

There was a dull sensation in my head as though a mass of débris — I have never been able to separate that word débris from the feeling — were there. The feeling in the frontal part of my head, over my eyes, was just as sensible to me as it would be in my cheek if I caught up some of the flesh and pinched it. Undoubtedly some collapse of tissue had occurred. Mingled with the present sensation was a certain dull and faded consciousness of the old ego. But all power of guidance over that consciousness was gone.

I fell asleep as I lay there fully dressed, and some time in the night awoke, and feeling stronger, got up, found a match, and lighted a little lightning bug of a lamp which I found on a faded old bureau. By this flickering light I viewed my new self in the mirror — a person I had never seen before, a horrible caricature of a man, whose eyes had gone back into the head until they appeared at the bottom of deep black holes in the face. The cheek-bones had risen into hills of pallid flesh. But that was not the worst: from the features some vitalizing thing had gone, so that what I looked upon was a mere skull with almost expressionless flesh upon it — a ghost in the dim light.

From some cause, whether from the effect of the reaction of the picture upon me, or for some more physical reason, an intense nausea came over me as I stood there before the mirror, and I became violently ill.

II

That, my friends, is insanity, the ultimate curse of God. From that condition it is a long and thorny road up to be your instructor. Let us consider the foundation for the cure, with the words as a preface, — which is the moral of all this, — that if from such material the human will can mould a man, there is hope, high hope, for you to become anything you want to become.

But everything in the world is qualified, and there is a destiny for the human soul. So that we need to analyze optimism rather keenly. The key to my rejuvenation was the goal set in the wreck of a mind, which, as I kept it in sight, enabled me to steer a course.

Consider me for three months an imbecile, with a demoralized mass of brain in my head, in which, as I have said, a dim consciousness of my state persisted, plus a weakened vitality of the whole physical organism,—I dropped in weight from one hundred and sixty-five to one hundred and nineteen pounds, — plus again a desire, welling up from somewhere in the personality, to 'come back.'

I do not wish to be over-mystical. I realize acutely that your interest in this narrative as an element of instruction to be taken seriously is very tentative. You are from Missouri, when it comes to a man who has been insane really opening your mind to new thoughts. So that I, more than others, must be careful to keep on an even keel. But I want to say to you that from the beginning nature seemed to make me a promise of survival which I relied upon. They say God lakes care of idiots and children. Of course, I can prove nothing; I should be a fool to try. I am not certain myself of any so-called occult influences in life, although I shall tell of one experience which gave me a severe jolt; but after twenty years of living in a different world from yours, one of the messages I bring back is, that for me there seemed to be some thread of destiny running through the web.

You will probably say that all men who survive profound and stirring experiences feel the same way: witness the soldiers in the war. And I have no reply.

One day, after I had been at home in the country for three months, and after my new state had become settled, and my daily mental experiences had been stabilized, as it were, into a certain programme of collapse and partial revival, during one of my lucid moments I got on a horse to take a ride, and the brute ran away with me. Up to that time I had deluded myself with the thought that I wanted to die; but I was suddenly aware, as the animal dashed madly under me, that I did n’t want to die that way. After fifteen minutes of frenzied struggle with the animal, I checked him, and rolled ingloriously off his back, physically exhausted.

But, lying there in the dirt of the road, with the horse grazing nonchalantly up the way a bit, I was suddenly conscious of a renewed mental vitality. The sensation in my head was as though someone had poured cold water through my brain, washing out the debris from the rotten mass.

Don’t be dismayed by my being dull. The most illuminating experiences in the world are not always dramatic. The picture of that weak figure in the road is not stirring; but right then, in that poor moment, occurred the thought that saved me and made it possible for me to sit here in the bright sunlight by the sea to-day, and contemplate a useful life.

What had happened to me? Simply this: my attention had been focussed, and the random thoughts had been for one brief part of an hour concentrated. I was, for a few minutes, until the old aimless, disintegrating mental processes reasserted themselves, a new man.

Alas, what a lesson! My mental energy had poured, as it were, through a lens and burned an idea into me. The essence of that idea was, that what my will lacked the power to compel, circumstances had compelled for me.

Aye! now for a gigantic thought. I would force circumstances to do my bidding further. If I could not control my mind, I would force circumstances to control it for me. I would put myself into dangerous situations, like the one from which I had just escaped, to compel me to concentrate my faculties upon measures of safety.

So I went to Africa, with a wellknown Southerner as a companion, to hunt big game.

Let me tell you something that occurred in connection with that trip — something odd, after the way events sometimes fall out in this world.

On my way through New York I called on a celebrated specialist who lived on University Heights. It was a stormy December night, and I found the great physician seated before an open fire in his library, with his wife, who was one of the most beautiful women I ever looked upon.

The great man talked to me intimately, with a fine show of friendliness, for half an hour, and as he talked, I could not help but contrast his condition with my own. There he was, a man less than forty, rich, famous, living in an elegant home amid exquisite surroundings, reposing on a stormy night in the soft and soothing atmosphere of his library, before a leaping fire. And there was I, alas! destitute of every consolation.

He told me, that doctor, that I had only six months to live, and his advice to me was to go out and hunt and roam the world and make the best of the passing hours. ‘Life is sweet,’said he, proclaiming a startling philosophy to a dying man, ‘and I am glad you are going, not I. And yet, my boy, if we were to change places to-night it would n’t matter a whole lot to me. The main thing is to be a man, and act like a man, and you have the opportunity.’

General Grant opened his autobiography with a sentence like this: ‘Man proposes and God disposes.' The ways of nature are inscrutable, and sometimes, indeed, the race is not to the swift. When I returned from Africa, I learned that six months after I left the United States that great physician had died — insane.

In his own words, we did change places in many regards. He became insane and died in six months, and I became sane and lived to marry a woman quite as beautiful as the statuesque blonde whom I thought so astoundingly lovely on that stormy night.

And I have lived to say — how many times I have thought of his words — that nothing matters so very much after all, if a man only plays a man’s part.

IV

I came back from Africa much improved. I had lived in the open, roamed the wilds, and so enhanced my general health that my periods of slump were not so terrifying as they had been. I had been doing interesting things and dangerous things, so that, as I planned, circumstances had, in a measure, focussed my thoughts for me. And as I dealt with actual things and actual vital conditions, the experience had brought my mind down more to earth from its ethereal wanderings.

But I struggled in the dark for seven long years before there came a time when I could say that I was actually improved. These seven-year periods were mile-posts, or, better still as a simile, platforms, where I could cease the struggle for a time, feel a sure footing, and, as it were, look around the landscape and say, 'I am thus far up the mountain, anyway.’

I wish I could write this first experience of known improvement in a way that you would understand and remember; for an actual experience of this nature must indicate a law of mind to which all may give heed with profit.

I was sitting one day in the old Astor Library in New York, reading, when all at once I noticed that the ideas from the printed page were going deeper into my head than ever before. Theretofore, all my consciousness — my whole mental life—had been lived right in the very front of my brain, and everything existed as impressions. There were no definite ideas or thoughts in the mind, at all. If I read anything it left an impression merely, and I could never recall anything concrete upon which that impression was based. In other words, the mind lacked the vigor to separate the units, so to speak. But on this particular day — it was a red-letter day, indeed — I suddenly began to experience thoughts going into my head as separate units, individual and apart from each other — as separate mental impulses, almost as material things.

I was only seven years up from insanity; still queer, still weak, still unmixable in the great compound of life; but for all that I had discovered a great law of thinking.

I know now, — which I discovered then, — and you must know it, too, if you are a student of this subject of mind, that effective thinkers are precisely those who have the power to separate ideas into their component parts — to deal with thoughts as units of plans and ideas. Many men now conceive of thoughts as physical things, and you need go no further than my own homely countenance to demonstrate how thoughts can modify the physical. My face has been transformed from pudding to iron under the influence of more and more rigid thinking.

The power came to me that day in the Astor Library to think, and after that new fields opened for me.

Out of an ambition to write I became a newspaper man. That ambition to write came along shortly after my mind went bad, and grew almost into a madness in itself. I am going to tell you something about that before I close this article, as it brings out an experience with occult phenomena which I believe is unsurpassed as 'proof’ of an abiding unseen influence in human experience.

But we will contemplate first my development in the intervening years, when, as I have said, I became a newspaper man, a reporter. Now you must understand that when Nature, Providence, or God, deprives you of one sense, of expansion in one direction, it makes up the deficiency to a degree in another. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about it. The deaf, the blind, the dumb testify to the truth of this law.

Now, I was cut off largely from physical life. It was natural therefore that I should project my personality, as it were, into life which was non-physical, or the spiritual, if you please. You see there are many and multiplying phases of this development from insanity.

As a reporter I developed the sixth sense to a startling degree, and it assured me a success which otherwise I never could have commanded. For I was, and am, the poorest mixer in the world. Men look upon me, with my odd ways, askance to this day. In any company I am the fifth wheel to the cart, the unknown quantity.

But when it came to gathering news, I was the equal of any of them. As an example of the superlative working of this sixth sense, on one occasion I was in New York on a mission for my paper, which was one of the great journals of the East, when I learned that Doctor Cook was out of the North with the claim to the Pole.

I instantly abandoned what I was doing, and caught the first train home; and that night, while the linotype machines were still in the throes of the big story, went to the managing editor’s office and told him to go slow on the yarn — that Doctor Cook was a fake.

The managing editor had confidence in my judgment, and the result was that the next morning my paper was, I believe, the only one in the United States which qualified the doctor’s achievement. And we straightway launched a fight on him which terminated in driving him from the country.

I once wrote a murder story in such a way as to implicate a woman, and she was arrested on the strength of my statements, and tried. I was put on the witness-stand, and the attorney for the defense made me confess that my ‘newspaper instinct’ prompted me to write what I had written. The jury apparently took no interest in ‘newspaper instinct, ’ and acquitted her. But a year later she confessed the crime, and was sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary.

I became very deeply interested in the spiritual side of life during those years, but I cannot say that I learned anything new from my own experience, except an ability to ‘sense’ a happening, or the state of mind or the state of being of an individual. My mind seemed to possess tentacles stretching out into the unseen. Which may account for an experience which I am now going to relate, concerning which a note I made of it at the time states that a personality attuned to the unusual may catch messages unknown to more normal minds.

This incident goes deep into the subject of the occult.

It occurred in the winter of 1917, when I was living in California, and revolves around the ambition to write which had taken hold of me. That ambition had ridden me for years like a madness, urging me on, and ever on, to write. And I wrote. But it was impossible, it was unthinkable, that a man whose mind was in the condition mine was in could really do any creative literary work.

You will understand that it is one thing to write a newspaper article, giving off from your immediate investigations, and spurred by an immediate impulse, certain facts; but quite another to evolve from your own mind a plot, arrange events in logical sequence, and produce a unified result.

The incident centres around a woman — I might almost say the most insignificant little woman I ever saw. One can never tell, I might say in passing, who is insignificant, if any are, in this world. She arrested my attention and held it for weeks because she persisted in ‘cutting’ me. I am rather used to having people shy off from me. Carlyle remarks, in an essay on Burns, that a miserable man makes more enemies than friends. And heaven knows I have never been popular. But this little creature rubbed it in, as we say. She was a friend of my mother and used to come to the house, but every time she saw me she acted as a cat I once owned did when she saw a clay statue of a pug dog which reposed on the corner of the hearth. That she did not want my company was the most evident fact to me concerning her.

But one day she surprised me by calling while I was alone, coming up on the porch, and sitting down with a show of friendliness which amazed me.

‘You are alone,’she said, stating a fact rather than asking a question, ‘and I have come to talk with you.

She then told me, after a few preliminary remarks, — this ‘ insignificant' woman to whom I would not have given a second thought if she had not hurt my feelings, — that she had come to me through promptings she had received; that prior to her marriage (to a rich lumberman of the Middle West) she had been a professional medium.

‘But,’ she added, ‘since my marriage I have given up that life; not one of my present friends knows of it, and I am giving you more of my confidence than I have ever given anyone else.’

She continued: ‘Now, I am sacrificing my feelings to come to help you. I never come near you that the experience does n’t almost put me in bed, — your mind is so agitated, — but I am going to brave the consequences to tell you something you ought to know.

‘I am acquainted with your whole past history. Heaven knows it is black enough. But I am going to tell you something that you don’t know. Your uncle-’ — mentioning the name of my mother’s oldest brother — ‘ died insane. It was his life’s ambition to express himself in literature, but he could n’t master his mind enough to put it over, as you say. He died with his message pent up in him. Now ——’ — mentioning his name again — ‘ is trying to express himself through you. So you must recognize that you have a purpose in the world, and stop worrying and prepare to do your work.’

Then she went on in a light way: ‘You so-called literary men amuse me. You imagine that your own mind and your own experience are the source of your stories. It has never occurred to you that, to be really successful, you must get into touch with the great reservoir of experience, which is psychic — has it?’

Now, in the light of that bolt out of the blue, let me impress this upon you. No living soul, not even my mother, knew of any ambition of mine to write. And no one in California, not in three thousand miles, perhaps, knew that I had ever been out of plumb mentally. And, as for my uncle’s condition being common knowledge, I myself had never heard a hint of it, and I was verging on forty years of age. He died, by the way, when I was five years old.

I asked my mother one day about this uncle. She camouflaged the facts by telling me that he fell downstairs and hurt his head, and was n't ‘quite right’ afterward. There is a possibility, of course, that my little friend wormed from my mother the facts she told me, but I don’t believe it; my mother, like most Southerners, takes too much pride in her family to tell facts like that. And even if she did, the further incident which I will relate could have, I believe, come from no source on earth save some mysterious power that this ex-medium possessed.

I saw her again this past winter, 1919, for the first time for two years. Her first words to me were, ‘My, how you ’ve improved! It is the first time I have ever been able to come near you without suffering a pain in my head.’

It was the first time I had ever met her when I was free from a pain in my own head! That was one effect of my trouble — a dull, ceaseless ache of the brain.

V

Now let us return to my own intimate experiences of mind, for we approach, as we near the period of my cure, one of the most remarkable facts connected with my experience.

What occurred to me in the Astor Library was accentuated as time went on. About the period of my thirtyfifth year, which was fourteen years after ray collapse, there opened for me a still greater depth of mental sensation. Let me endeavor to make this clear. First, all my sensation — as I have said, my whole mental life — was confined to the frontal area of my head. Then a new area of the brain apparently was opened up, and I began to think deeper, and to feel and know that I was thinking deeper, because it was an actual physical sensation. Then, when I was thirty-five, my entire head seemed to clear up. That brought about a very notable change. Prior to that time my words, when I spoke, seemed to issue from a shallow area at the roof of my mouth, in thin weak utterance. After the change they came from deeper within me, and had more carrying force, and had a far sterner quality. My memory improved, and my ability to express myself improved.

But — strange thing! — it appeared that the saner and more normal I grew, the further worldly success, the realization of my dreams, receded from me. When I was insane I turned a great trick in Africa, and lectured to learned audiences in New York and other parts of the East. During some of my most turbulent years, when I actually had to wear blue glasses to hide my tell-tale eyes, which I could not control, I wrote some of my greatest newspaper stories — the series on Doctor Cook, for example.

But now that I was actually sane and normal, I could n't do anything out of the commonplace. I could n't write an acceptable story. I could n’t get a job worthy of a man’s efforts and one to enlist my enthusiasms. In the language of a friend of mine, I heard the breakers on the shoal of mediocrity. I made up my mind that Nature had tricked me: had made me a promise that she would not fulfill.

Then I concluded that it was impossible for a fallen man to rise above a certain height in this world, because, it seemed to me, all my enthusiasm and punch had been exhausted in gaining sanity. And in the matter of reputation my past hung around my neck like an anchor. I could n't get away from it.

It appeared that I had got just so far, and there I would stick. And I grew disappointed and bitter, and fretted and worried and complained and planned, and was ceaselessly agitated.

I was, I believe, far more miserable during the past six years than I was even during the worst periods of my old life.

Let me make this condition perfectly clear, because I believe it has a lesson for many strugglers in the night. I had a family, I had responsibility, and what little money I possessed at one time was practically gone. The future loomed before me as a problem for me to solve alone, and it scared me. I worried and planned ceaselessly. My nerves were taut even during sleep, I who so needed repose.

I was so anxious to do something, that I did nothing. I was past forty, and the clock was ceaselessly ticking out the precious moments of my life.

My friends, let us give thanks to the man who takes enough interest in us now and then to tell us a word of truth. One day, not so very long ago, I was walking the streets of one of our cities and met one of the country’s greatest physicians. Many of these men are my personal friends.

This man stopped me right there on the crowded thoroughfare, and said, ‘Boy,’ — they always call me boy, for some reason; I suppose I am still really immature,— do you know what you remind me of? You remind me of a piece of rubber that we stretch this way' — extending his two hands apart — ‘and hold it taut. Do you know what happens to a piece of rubber if you hold it that way long enough? It breaks. Slack up.'

Just then a little child passed with a basket of flowers, and he bought a bunch. ‘Get out,’ said he, holding up the blooms, ‘and study and cultivate these and learn a lesson from them.'

He handed me the bunch he had bought and passed on. If a lesser man had invited my attention to them, I should probably have laughed at him. But the words of the great simplephysician hit me where I lived, and I took the bouquet and studied it. It was the first time I had really looked at flowers in twenty years, and to my intense surprise and delight I found a quiet beauty about them that invited me to think of serene and beautiful scenes — of green fields and running brooks — of repose and peace.

I went back to my hotel and thought about what the man had said to me, and thought of the lesson of the flowers, and made up my mind then and there really to ‘slack up,’ to stop fretting and worrying and planning, and to take the days as they came and live according to the logic of events.

If, I concluded, I cannot do great things I will do little things. I had been the most selfish of mortals, always putting off until some happier day to do for others the little kindnesses that life offers. I made up my mind that I would put off my services to others no longer, that I would be a decent friend and a decent father, and let it go at that. And the words of the dead doctor I had met on the eve of my trip to Africa came to me — ‘Nothing matters so very much after all, if a man only plays a man’s part.’

Listen to me —

This is not religion. I am the furthest removed person from a religionist in this country. But that day I gave my life away; I dedicated it to unselfish service, and right then I found myself.

A calm repose settled over me, and the nerve-energy that I had frittered away — the energy that had been sapped from my vital organs, shriveling them up and rendering me weak and anæmic — returned into the old channels and nourished me.

Within a few days I observed that a double nerve-centre at the base of the spine had been aroused, and the function of these centres brought balance and poise and strength that was instantly reflected in my every movement and thought.

This is really the pith of what I have to say to you. We speak of a person lacking balance. What is it? Too much heady thinking. We speak of a deep man. Who is he? The man whose strength wells up from some centre deeper in him than the brain.

I have told you how my thoughts went deeper into me continually as I grew better. At last, it seemed, I had tapped the very basic nerve-centres, which I believe are the centre of the will. Certainly I now know that mysterious force called will-power, which I never knew before.

I am not alone in believing that personality exists in layers, which may be penetrated and the force tapped. Some such reason must exist for the difference in men which we observe. One man is deeper and more powerful than another, and for this condition there must be a cause.

But I have never come upon the theory that will is a function of particular nerve-centres. That was my experience. I may be wrong. I may be misled. But you know and I know that mental development does not necessarily develop will-power, any more than experience does. And certainly I was as will-less as a clam on the Sound shore until mind penetrated me, arousing the nerve-centres which I have described.