THE INFLUENCE OF JOY MIND AND HEALTH SERIES Edited by H. Addington Bruce, A.M. 'THE INFLUENCE OF JOY BY GEORGE VAN NESS DEARBORN INSTRUCTOR IN PSYCHOLOGY AND IN EDUCATION, SARGENT NORMAL SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE ; PSYCHOLOGIST AND PHYSIOLOGIST TO THE FOR8YTH DENTAL INFIRMARY FOR CHILDREN, BOSTON; ETC. BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1916 1916, BY LITTLE, BROWH, AHD COMPANY. All rights rctenxd Published, May, 1916 Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Gushing Co., Norwood, Ma., U.S A Prewwork by S. J. Parkhil' ft Co., Boston, Maw., U.S.A. THIS LITTLE BOOK WITH WHATEVER IT MAY MEAN IS DEDICATED TO MY WIFE DOMINI 3573 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION IN a general way it has long been recognized that joy has a stimulat- ing, tonic effect on the human or- ganism. The so-called "New Thought Movement", of which so much has been heard, has as its basic principle this revivi- fying power of joy, in contrast to the para- lyzing power of such emotional states as fear, envy, worry, and anxiety. "New Thought" literature, to-day so abundant, rightly emphasizes the importance of joy as an aid in healthy and efficient living, and reinforces its insistence on this funda- mental truth by the citing of numerous evidential instances from everyday observa- tion. In the main, however, the literature of "New Thought" has generalized rather than specified with regard to the influence vii EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION of joy. It has done this, not from choice, but from necessity. For it is only of recent years that science has made any exhaustive use of its marvel- ous methods of research to ascertain the specific effects of joy and other emotions on bodily states. The great impetus to systematic investigation in this important field came from the experimental work of the late Professor Pavlov, appointed in 1891 chief of the then newly organized Institute for Experimental Medicine in Petrograd. In this institute Professor Pavlov fitted up a laboratory specially equipped for investigation of the processes of digestion, which, by ingenious devices, he was able to study, in the case both of animals and of human beings, more thor- oughly than they had ever been studied before. A direct result of his studies, con- tinued through a long term of years, was an increasingly precise demonstration of the manner in which the digestive mechanism viii EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION is affected for good and for evil by emo- tional conditions. Further than this, the publication of Pavlov's observations had the consequence of intensifying scientific interest in the general subject of the physiological effects of the emotions. In various countries, and not least in the United States, able scientists followed Pavlov's example. Some studied, as he was studying, emotional effects on the functioning of the digestive organs, confirming and extending his find- ings. Others investigated the influence of the emotions on the heart, arteries, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc. This work of research still is in progress, and will long be in progress, owing to the vastness and com- plexity of its subject-matter. But already many discoveries have been made, of far- reaching importance as regards the conser- vation and restoration of health. With scarcely an exception, unfortu- nately, these scientific investigators of the ix EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION emotions have reported the results of their labors in writings magazine articles, pamphlets, books of too technical a char- acter to be serviceable to the general public. Often, too, their reports have appeared in periodicals not accessible to the majority even of medical men, a class particularly interested in the work done in this field. There is accordingly a real need for a con- venient, compact, and authoritative survey, and this need the present volume aims to meet, constituting a handbook that will he of practical value to any man sincerely desirous of enlarging his knowledge of fun- damental principles in the art of living. The author of this book, Professor George Van N. Dearborn, has the double advantage of being both a psychologist and a physiologist. He has himself made a special study of the physiology of the emo- tions, his interest in which dates from the nineties, when, as a graduate student at Harvard and Columbia Universities, he EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION prepared as his thesis for the Ph.D. degree an essay on this same subject of joy. He has in particular studied the influence of joy on arterial pressure, and on "kinesthesia", the "feeling of movement", the im- portance of which from an educational point of view is only now beginning to be appre- ciated. Also he has specially studied the relation between joy and creative efficiency, as the reader will find. But in this book Professor Dearborn is careful to subordinate his own special researches and contribu- tions in the interest of a well-proportioned, comprehensive survey of the work done by all who have shared in the task of scien- tifically studying the effects of emotional states on the organs and processes of the body. The result is a volume which should exercise a marked influence for good. It gives precisely the information essential to adequate appreciation of what active ac- ceptance of the "gospel of joy" will xi EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION mean in the way of increasing personal health and power. No man who would achieve, no man who would live long, happily, and prosperously, can afford to disregard or remain in ignorance of the facts here set forth. And for this reason, for the sake of contributing directly to the promoting of human welfare, it is to be hoped that Professor Dearborn's soundly scientific book will have a wide and care- ful reading. H. ADDINGTON BRUCE. XII PREFACE ONE of the many unhappy circum- stances of this life of ours (which, after all, numerous really intelli- gent people rather dislike to leave) is the fashion prevalent in superior circles of deeming conscious and obvious happiness undignified. This harsh but permeating spirit of the old Bay Colony is not yet wholly dead among us, although echo of a day when to kiss one's wife or to smile on the Sabbath was a fault. At its very best it is all, of course, a part of the sadly mistaken notion of Brother Giles, for example, that the body, that miracle ! , is " a devil's knight fighting against salvation ", a prejudice which for fifteen centuries has kept the fair appreciation of the body and its vic- tories far below its just valuation in the xiii - . PREFACE world's common mind. Joy, on the con- trary, is the empirical index of the normal activity of unified mind and body, the life man was meant to live, rational and unafraid. And it is not the sincere and frank phi- losopher, truly learned in things as they really are, and wise, who belittles the adult's gladness of life, but the pretender, the pedant, whom, however, there are few to contradict. To him childhood with its pri>- tine gladness, like womanhood, is at least a bit inferior, and childhood's joy a thinir which man and woman should once for all put by. But the garrulous pessimist is al- most always a weakling, a dyspeptic, or a melancholiac ; and the vain gentleman too dignified to smile frankly, sometimes even when alone, makes others laugh aloud at his egotism. God is no dispiriter of man; and Nature, even at her utmost horrors, wears always a compensating sympathy to him who sees beneath her moods into the XIV PREFACE glad reality of our common but always transcendent life. The present volume is an essay intended to set forth some of the hygienic and therapeutic sanctions of organic happiness. Some of its readers will find that it sub- stantiates their belief, already firm, in the reality of joy's bodily influence ; and a few of them may be originally convinced of it, those especially to whom "cold facts" appeal; while still fewer may see in the endeavor a slight but sincere contribution to the science of the relationship of mind and body, the two glistening sides of our soul's shield. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, February, 1916. XV CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION . . vii-xii PREFACE xiii-xv PART ONE THE POWER OF JOY I. AN OUTLINE SURVEY .... 3 II. THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION . . 41 III. THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION 82 IV. THE INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, ETC. . . . .111 V. THE LOVE-LIFE 143 EPITOME . . . ... . . . 153 PART TWO THE NECESSITY OF JOY VI. WORK AND PLAY .... 159 xvii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOI VII. WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THK WORLD 171 VIII. THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS . .194 IX. PERSONALITY 209 INDEX 219 XVlli PART ONE THE POWER OF JOY THE INFLUENCE OF JOY CHAPTER I An Outline Survey THREE conceptions and their rela- tionships form the subject of the present volume, namely, mind and health and joy. These we need not at- tempt to define, not only because they are each inherently indefinable save in their own terms, but also for the reason that every possible reader knows in advance more or less exactly what they mean. It will, however, be the privilege of the book to try to make as explicit as already it is implicit the definition and nature of joy and happiness, for to do so is to under- stand and accept as real the "influence" 3 THE :Me gained." Since then, as we shall learn, these paths have been well trod, and many rich landscapes of psychologic insight are seen for the first time, landscapes, however, which are, in the absence of photographs, so to say, far too complex to be described at present. There are two matters recently discov- ered in these physiological and neurologic a 1 16 AN OUTLINE SURVEY travels that must at least be mentioned. One of these is the demonstration that secretions play an almost surprising part both in the action of the vegetative ner- vous system (at least) and therefore in the inner vation of the feelings. The other discovery in these internal jungles of life is the functional opposition that has been shown to obtain within the autonomic system itself. It is reasonable to expect that this contrariety has some kind of basic representation in the emotional as- pect of behavior. If this be so, however, and it certainly is a priori likely, the mode of the relation is not yet even in sight on the psychological horizon. The nerve-influences directly connected with the action and active restraint of the muscle tissue that is under the personal will's control are even shorter in their description. 1 1 G. V. N. Dearborn, "A Contribution to the Physiology of Kinesthesia", Journal fiir Psychologic und Neurologic, XX, 1, u. 2; January, 1913. Illstd. S. 62-73. 17 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY Just as, psychologically considered, vision is undoubtedly the "queen" of the senses, so physiologically the processes inherently relating to movement, posture, weight, spatiality, etc., are assuredly the most important. In the universal inte- gration of sensations, vision in a way may even be considered the mental counter- part of the bodily kinesthesia, as a little thought readily shows. Only now are ed- ucators beginning to realize the indispen- sable usefulness always and everywhere of kinesthesia, the "feelings of movement." Kinesthesia, however, is about to come into its own as the primary and essential sense. Without it, co-ordinated and .nl.iptrd bodily movement and strain, connected with every kind of mental process, is inconceiv- able, for the (psycho)motor centers in the brain have no known clairvoyant powers, and therefore their function of carefully co- ordinating the distant muscles, e.g. of foot or hand, is entirely dependent on their 18 AN OUTLINE SURVEY continual reception of detailed informa- tion as to the relative tonal and contrac- tional status of all the active parts to one another. Simple as this idea is, its im- mense practical importance has as yet hardly begun to seep into the minds of educators. If we thus or similarly understand the nature and use of the joint-muscle-tendon- skin-bone sense, we all shall be ready to admit that the parts of the body not innervated or (by our tentative hypothesis) mentalized, so to say, by the autonomic nervous system, are pretty thoroughly rep- resented motorially by the other system, by this, in short, the king of the senses. Its precise relation to emotion will appear later when other preliminaries have been set forth. At present, let us be content to understand that the very material es- sence of the body-life is motion and that every organism has throughout it adequate mechanism by which each bit of every 19 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY molar movement and every strain and stress and shear may be indicated to the con- trolling nerve centers. Thus all these adaptive reactions are made useful to the individual by their work of furnishing active means by which his inherent per- sonality may be advanced by an ever bet- ter adaptation to an environment, material and spiritual, ever more complex and therefore always new. Emotion has a large part in this essential adaptation for evolution and personal development; in- deed it seems sometimes in all of us and always in some of us to provide the dom- inant dynamic incentive of our lives. Kinesthesia thus appears^ as the second of two factors making the mental basi^ <>l emotion, the other subconscious and more "theoretic", because, so far as actual ex- perience goes, less obvious. The "muscle- joint" sensations immediately represent activity, bodily movement, and by their group-uniqueness in eaeh feeling and emo- 20 AN OUTLINE SURVEY tion provide the variety of affective expe- riences with which every one is familiar. On no other suggested basis is their respec- tive uniqueness understandable. As we have already seen in the brief account of the sense of movement, actual experimental evidence implies a duality of kinesthesia: an inhibitory and voluntary phase, and another phase, representative of impulsive bodily motions in both the vegetative and the voluntary organisms. In this duality of impulse and its control, the humanity of man seems to be repre- sented as well as several significant lesser matters of scientific interest not new, but forgotten. Kinesthesia may be considered the dynamic index of organism always in motion in relation to mind, and in emotion this principle is more obvious than else- where. Whatever be the technical interests and difficulties in our present relative ignorance of the nervous system, the practical thera- 21 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY peutic concerns are based, as we shall see better anon, in the dominating influence of natural activities over, on one hand, the emotional tone, and, on the other, I lie roads to a common goal of life sufficiently long. The dynamic index of these is the body's basis of sensation, subconscious and conscious, and we may best, as heretofore, term it kinesthesia. Its more immediate relations to emotions pleasant and un- pleasant later chapters will endeavor to suggest, but the temperament of the reader alone will determine if the attempt to reconcile a search for mechanistic explana- tions with a deep-lying belief in an Ani- mism which, like Acadian affection, "hopes and endures and is patient," succeeds or fails. By all means let us welcome the soul "returning" as Muensterberg says, into philosophy, but let us meanwhile try to understand how the soul is related to the rest of our experience, scientific as \vell as personal. 22 AN OUTLINE SURVEY Autonomic and cerebrospinal influences both, then, are concerned in the bodily phase of emotion. What this statement means in the complexity of bodily effects produced, one familiar with anatomy and physiology can readily understand. The total effect is perhaps nothing short of change in every organ and in every part of almost every tissue of the body, through the complete unification made possible by the nervous system. The indefinite num- ber of combinations possible between these physiological elements explains the enor- mous complexity of the emotional expres- sions and their immense variety, both in kind and in degree or intensity. These bodily changes constitute the physical " basis ", so called, of emotional phenomena. The sense of pleasantness or of unpleas- antness, the affective tone of an emotion, needs a word or two of discussion, because practically it may be the dominating ele- ment of feeling, just as theoretically it may 23 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY be wanting in consciousness because for some reason masked or balanced in certain \vcll- defined affective experiences. Into the psy- chology of pleasure ami pain, of plraily confused with pain. Such being a rather technical idea of emotion, let us glance again briefly at some of its more general properties. In the 24 AN OUTLINE SURVEY first place, feeling (and here emotion is in- cluded) is that sort of consciousness, that aspect of the mental process, which is closest to the soul or ego of the individual. It is, one might claim, the most personal mode of consciousness, that in which the subject takes most interest. To account for this, consider its inclusion, usually, of an affective tone, of a sense or experience akin to pleasure or to pain. Of all bio- logical principles, scarcely any is more universal than that every animal, be it worm or man, seeks satisfactions and avoids dissatisfactions, seeks pleasantness and shuns unpleasantness, strives after pleasure and evades pain in all its normal inclinations. When it does not do so, the presumption is warranted that the animal, almost always man, has gotten beyond the biological into the range of satisfactions with which we here have no concern. It is, then, because affective states more than other sorts of consciousness have this tone of 25 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY pleasantness, or of unpleasantness usually, that these feelings and emotions control the conduct of the individual more than do other sorts of experience. One vividly remembers the emotion that gnawed his soul, and it seems a criterion, the occasion, or else the deterrent, of future action. Again, the emotions, theoretically as well as introspectively, are largely interwoven with the instincts, many emotions being, one might usefully say, minor instincts, more temporary as a rule, but otherwise of the same general nature, although, of course, different in particulars. One can speak of the feelings and emo- tions, in an important sense, as the re- actions of the individual personality at the same time to its environment and to the cenesthetic fabric of sensations, unique for each feeling and emotion and so characteristic for each, both in ex- perience within and in manifest bodily movement. 26 AN OUTLINE SURVEY Feeling then is the aspect of mind (will- ing and thinking being the other two aspects) that is closest to the very soul, so to say, of the individual. The reason for this lies, it is clear, in the nature of pleasantness and of unpleasantness, the "affective tone", characteristic of all feel- ing. Here (be it repeated for emphasis) is the fundamental fact of life; every sentient being seems to seek inevitably his possible maximum of satisfaction. It often is not pleasure, and sometimes is not pleasantness, but it always is, apparently, the logical limit of this kind of experience, a limit always to be expressed as satisfac- tion. In emotion and affective experience generally, this phase of experience is most obvious and most characteristic. The therapeutic and physiologic value of this general state of mind, this inevitable and universal desiring, in the long tun are quite beyond easy appreciation. But the reason lies in the universal stimulation, perhaps, 27 Tin; IM u ENCE OF .JOY which feeling of the pleasant sort produces in the organism as an uniquely delicate and sensitive "machine." As we have noted above, a chief < liai- acteristic of emotional events is the uni- versality of their physical influence, that is in the body. Whether consciously not, an emotion unrestrained concerns more or less every part of the frame, thus getting the richness which is characteristic of the typical emotions. The supposition explains, too, the uniquely complex "ex- pressions of emotion ", their great variety, and consequently their interest for the observer. Thus the emotions, by means of their bodily side (as in all other phases of mind), become modes of social com- munication of great importance, second in value only to written or vocal speech. Much care and pain- are devoted to teach- ing the child the various proper usages of speech, while the "language of the emo- tions" is relegated to poetry and to scnti- 28 AN OUTLINE SURVEY mental relations. It is our intention only to suggest what a large, practical, even monetary, worth an acquaintance with emotional expression may sometimes have, thereby speaking a word for the worth of knowledge other than that of facts and abstract theories. It has been already suggested that the two aspects of emotion, the mental and the bodily, are parallel to each other, more or less, and wholly and mutually dependent. The details of this correspondence (really, we may presume, an interrelation) are as yet vague, but the general fact seems clear and certain enough. As a consequence of this relation, one sees that bodily "ex- pression" accompanies the mental experi- ence; one feels an emotion, and simul- taneously his body takes the attitude, or does the things, or exhibits the expression peculiar to that degree of that particular sort of emotion. For example, seeing a mad dog rushing about a street, one feels 29 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY frightened, looks frightened, and runs away. On the other hand, if one artificially imi- tate the "expression" of an emotion (pro- vided it be done with the requisite accuracy and vigor sufficient to raise the needful excitement in the mind), the corresponding feelings are experienced also. (James.) Thus most actors who produce truly i imitations of nature, that is, the really great performers, thoroughly feel, almost always, the emotions they pretend to feel on the stage. Imagine Mrs. Fiske or Eleonora Duse playing one of their re- markable parts without feeling, to tluir soul's depths, what they make us feel. The pedagogical and therapeutic appli- cation of this principle (that, taking an attitude with the natural vigor and pre- cision, the mental side accompanies, and vice versa) is common knowledge, and in the schoolroom gets its recognition in the universal attention given erect positions, "shoulders back," "heads up," etc. This 30 AN OUTLINE SURVEY is not a matter only of proper physical development, for it directly influences beneficially the mental attitude of the pupil toward things in general, and toward him- self as person and as agent in particular. Gladness is expansive and extensor in its bodily expression, while sorrow and self-abasement are contracted and stoop- ing. Joy, too, is active and progressive, strenuous (sthenic is the technical term), while grief and pain, its opposite, are quiet and obstructive of real living. Thus phys- ical activity stimulates mental activity, more or less, when not overviolent, and develops latent mental vigor. It is im- portant, then, to insist that the young student shall conform to the rules of bod- ily posture which experience has taught give the greatest physical and mental freedom. To hold one's head up, other things being equal, is, we may be sure, to hold one's moral and perhaps mental standard higher, too. This principle is basal in medicine, 31 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY Turn this matter quite about, and one also sees relations of value everywhere. Just as mental attitude accompanies phys- ical attitude when part of an emotion, so of course bodily expression, in the techni- cal sense, is concomitant with the mental side of affective states. Good humor means physical vigor and liveliness and useful bodily functioning; therefore good humor has a very practical value. The best educators, like the best popular lec- turers, appreciate this relation and put it continually into practice. The object of the lecturer in this is to give his auditors pleasure, for which they have paid him in advance. The object of the educator should be to interest his students and so inevitably to draw their attention and secure vigorous effort to learn. Whatever gives one pleasure (ethically, satisfaction) interests above all else. In a like, and more important, way, the object of the physician should be to take ad van 32 AN OUTLINE SURVEY of the invigorating influences of pleasant emotion in every possible instance and at every possible moment when it is not contr aindicated . Once more, An emotion is a system or set of reactions which tend to occur on the presentation to the individual of the proper stimuli under the necessary sub- jective conditions. In the young child and in the savage, as well as in the brute in his natural state, one sees these emotional reactions very generally carried out in their theoretical form. In civilized communities among adults, we observe, on the contrary, comparatively little of affective expressions ; in some nationalities, however, more of it than in others. The tendencies which have been at work thus to modify and mollify the natural emotions of men are various. They, however, all tend to the same end, namely, toward re- pression or inhibition of the bodily side of the emotional dual process, and regularly, THE INFLUENCE OF JOY we may suppose, partly at the expense also of mental affective experience. This inhibition of natural tendencies or "expres- sions" for the benefit of other tendencies more generally useful, is part of civiliza- tion, a function of every phase of education. This is indeed perhaps the hardest prob- lem and certainly the most important as one starts out to educate a child : so to interest him that he will gradually learn to control extraneous and especially affective influences, so that he can devote his atten- tion and energies to useful systems. In a similar manner it is becoming recognized as a basal therapeutic necessity in medicine to teach one's patients the resistless force of harmful influences becoming habitual, and especially when (as is usual rather than unusual) an emotional tone is in- volved with its persuasive tang either pleasant or unpleasant. The educational element of his obliga- tion to society the physician is especially AN OUTLINE SURVEY prone to forget or to ignore: he as yet knows no psychology, save in a few in- stances. 1 The very least the intelligent practitioner can do, however, on the sound principle of noblesse oblige, is to see to it that every patient who can benefit thereby receives from his entire environment the curative influence of a happy, or at least pleasant, emotional tone. Modern psy- chology and physiology are now engaged, in part, in making us really understand the scientific basis of this familiar old idea. It is an important phase of modern therapeutics, at whose foundations are the theory and facts of emotion on a strictly sound scientific basis. However contrary and repugnant the fact may be to certain traditional preju- dices at a time when intellectualism is still dominant, far more of us are more habitually ruled by our feelings than by, 1 G. V. N. Dearborn, " Psychology and the Medical School," Science, N. S. XIV, 343, pp. 129-136, July 26, 1901. 35 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY our ideas. The wide prevalence of some evil things is hard to prove because so secret and ill-reputed as to be denied; the affective dominance of human (as of brute) behavior, it seems likely, is one of these things. But it seems probable too that it is the disrepute and not the dominance that is to be deplored and, some day, outgrown. At any rate, it is now more and more gen- erally recognized by psychologists that that aspect of the mental stream that we term emotional or affective supplies the energy, the motivity if not the "motive"! of our more usual life-process. Of com reality, the behavior is all one thing and its "aspects" have no modifying power either way or any way, "an emotion" being hut a period of the continuous series affectively tinged, but determined otherwise. On this obvious account every factor of both the bodily and the mental conditions enters our special problem. It is time now in our argument to begin M AN OUTLINE SURVEY to specialize on the joyful side of the affective balance, and to point out some of its many particular conditions in the uni- fied human economy. In order to accomplish this, we must consider whatever we can find that makes for a general increase of gladness, delight, or happiness in the individual, not of course particular objects or acts, but tendencies common to our human animal life. At least nine or ten such condi- tions, reasonably distinct (although al- ways parts of a whole separated only by science), can be discerned and must be briefly noted if we are really to under- stand the influence of gladness over our days. To try to arrange these joy factors, technically called "euphoric," in the order of their relative importance would be pedantic, so complex and varied are they all ; but if there be a real trend either way in this matter, perhaps the following ar- rangement represents it. As contrasted, 37 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY then, with a period of the mental and bodily "stream" felt to be unpleasant, an agreeable period, a pleasant feeling or emotion, has, we may assume, 1, An increase in the kinesthesia from the ex- pansive and extensor movements of the body; 2, Increased action of the cranial (and of the sacral) autonomic nerve cen- ters; 3, A lowering of the inhibition ex- erted by the upper layers of the cerebral cortex; 4, General personal excitement ; 5, An increase of circulating fat; (>, Vaso- dilation in sundry regions of the body; 7, An increase of sugar in the blood; 8, Increased secretion in sundry bodily re- gions; 9, Biologic naturalness of the func- tions of the skin; 10, A lessening of weariness. It is not to be supposed that all of these have any degree of constancy in plea emotion, for, as we have seen, the feelings are many, and no two are alike ! Some of these factors are prominent in some af- 38 AN OUTLINE SURVEY fective states and inconspicuous in others. At the same time it is doubtful if any one of them is in 'health wholly absent or actually negative in a plainly delightful experience. Here as elsewhere, then, we are trying to "strike the average", to de- rive a general idea of joy applicable to any of fifty unique feelings. These ten factors at least are in every case complex technical processes or con- ditions for psychology and physiology to describe. Other factors of general pleasantness than these ten there are aplenty without a doubt ; some of them have not been discerned as yet in the complexities of life, and some of them are temporary or local or unreliable as to their trend. But after all, these ten are ample for our present purpose of demonstrating the primal import of natural activities in the conduct of the happy life. That these processes as mentioned and suggested are on the average truly pleasantness-pro- THE INFLUENCE OF JOY ducing I think will scarcely he denied: it remains, then, to point out the scientific basis of the "moral", of its practical sig- nificance or interpretation in a workaday and play-a-day world. The reason why joy and its congeners exert a beneficial influence over life, why life loveth a cheer- Jul lircr, lies hid, for some readers at least, in the relations of these ten factors to the organic process, in short, in their dynamic basi<. Let u- try to understand clearly, then, what this is and what, for us now, it means. It would be well were it as easy to express as to appreciate it. 40 CHAPTER II The Influence on Nutrition IN its material aspect, the human in- dividuality is primarily metabolic or chemical, and its metabolism or pro- toplasmic life underlies of necessity all other bodily processes. Our first search, there- fore, in our present endeavor to illustrate the influence of happiness, organic and personal, on the human life, is to understand in what manner it affects nutrition. For our im- mediate purpose, this term nutrition shall include digestion, absorption, excretion, and "assimilation" (metabolism) and shall im- ply something of personal dietetics, appetite, weight variations, and so forth. The gist of this understanding is part of the deep common wisdom of the world, as may be seen in the habit in practice all 41 Till- [NFLUENCB OF JOY tho way down from the Old Empire on tin- Nile to our banquet of yesternight, to have all things pleasant, attractive, and sedative when we eat ideally. This re- lationship is not of course epicureanism only, ignoring life's real values, but is rather a matter of practical workaday importance to long and happy life. Per- sonal experience, fortified perhaps by an- cestral counsel, has shown us all that at picnics, on holidays, and during vacations, in each of' which, ordinarily, the joyous index is higher than usual, our appetite, like our digestion and bodily nutrition, is more than usually energetic. We all know, too, as first-hand knowledge, that it the care-free, holiday spirit last only two hours (during the meal and after), our nutrition profits, being performed with- out discomfort and with dispatch. This well-known principle, for reasons just suggested, is in a way the very heart of this book's thesis. It means, as one 42 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION may clearly see, that the state of "free- dom from care," as Saleeby expresses it, contentment, organic happiness, somehow yields energy for the use of the body ; while it implies at least that the opposite unhappy states such as worry, hurry, vexation, grief, envy, jealousy, even pure anger, lessen the power available for organic maintenance. The principle is, then, so fundamental that to understand it, so far as may be, is essential. Although more or less confusing with the factors of organic happiness just noted (the personality, despite its dual aspects, is normally one perfect integration), there are certain processes, fundamental in our living, which represent more precisely just these dynamic nutritive conditions. For the sake of clearness, these must be made more explicit, even if the recency of our physiologic knowledge in some cases makes certainty impossible and detailed relation- ships at present unstatable. 43 THi; INFLUENCE OF JOY The first of these nutritional dynamic processes apparently depends on an already famous internal secretion of the interior of a (li/i-tlt'xx ijlnmL the adrenal. This secretion is adrenin (called also epinephrin, adrenalin, and suprarenin) ; it is not to be confused with the product of the adrenal gland's cortex or rind, about which less is known but which appears to be of opposite action. 1 1 is to Biedl especially that we owe our original knowledge of adrenin, but Dreyer, Cannon and his colleagues (especially per- haps Hoskins and De la Paz), and Elliott have done much toward relating thi> in- formation to the vital machinery. The ground fact is that a slight increase of this powerful substance in the rapidly circulating blood constricts the arterioles, the smaller blood vessels, an effect of far- reaching importance; and, furthermore, it brings about, as has been noted already, a rise in the sugar-content of the tissues, especially muscle. This general vasocon- 44 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION striction, as it is called, raises the blood pressure, and this in turn is undoubtedly an important factor in increasing the ac- tivity of the voluntary muscles generally over the body, thus adding to the "ex- citement" of the individual and making the muscle, about one half of the body's mass, fresher, more apt for exercise, less fatigued. The increase of sugar in the blood, again, result of the influence of some substance, probably adrenin, on the liver, storehouse of carbohydrate energizers, acts directly to feed additionally the muscle cells and to animate them to immediate and more strenuous action. In a more general sense than this, im- proved bodily nutrition is a second dynamic factor of joyfulness. Gastronomic imag- ination and association of ideas ; appetite ; digestion ; absorption ; elimination of refuse; and probably, though unproven as yet, assimilation, each and all are allowed to proceed in their "mechanical" 45 THi; INFLUENCE OF ,IOY vigor and speed and certainty by an ab- sence of disturbing influences. "Fletcher- ism", so called, the emphasis on the need of really using the teeth and jaw muscles and saliva, furnishes an example of the increased nourishment, as measured by Chittenden, coming from leisure employed unhurriedly and unworriedly, in m;i-(i- cation. This, too, is an element in the abolition of the feeling of fatigue. A third invigorating process underlying agreeable emotion is yrncrultzcd bodily ex- ercise. The well-known Fer6 showed us fifteen years ago that of all stimulants to physical exertion none is more effective, as none is more natural, than physical exercise itself. In athletics this principle has long been in practice in the universal habit of "warming up." The influence here is apparently a specific one on the muscle tissue (and nerve tissue?) itself, and not simply the obvious raising of the heart 46 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION rate, of the blood pressure, and of the spirits and courage of the individual. Much, indeed most, remains unknown in regard to the details of muscular contrac- tion and relaxation, and true explanation of the stimulation of exercise itself on the action-system, lies hid in this uneloquent physiologic silence. The fourth and last of the dynamic nutritional factors we are considering was the third in our list of contributions or conditions, namely, some degree or other of abeyance in the restraint of instinctive, emotional, reflex, or habitual actions, in short of the motor factors of what Thorndike terms "the original nature of man." Les- sening of a restraint of course allows action. We may now turn to this important ele- ment of our argument, postponed from the time of its previous mention (page 21). No one of the other conditions has perhaps quite as much practical moment as has this one. Few things indeed in the search 47 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY for happiness are of more account than habitual rejuvenation and '* holiday" so pro- duced, whether derived through knowledge and spur from without ("suggestion") or through intuition and knowledge and initiative within. And all of these an* inherently joyous. Let us examine a little into their common biologic nature. From the evolutionary standpoint (and no other satisfies one's reason) the human mind as implement of the inherent and per- haps "immanent" personality or soul, has gradually appeared, in a period variously guessed between say two hundred thou- sand years and five hundred thousand. It is not only because it is our mind, hut because it is truly so, that we suppose the human mind to have in it factors both more complex and nearer to the divine than has the mind of any brute, that is, of any animal save man. The idea of personality, then, implies n than the more or less mechanistic individ- 48 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION uality of the brute. That difference, that excess, is our humanity, our humanness. If we analyze it by the methods of modern psychology and anthropology, we find it mostly composed of language, therefore of reason, therefore of mental and moral prog- ress, therefore of civilization, and therefore, finally, of personality and "character" with its mathematic "limit" in God Him- self. There must be some distinct ele- ment, it would seem, which fundamentally marks off a difference so profound as this and so boundless in its possibilities from the apparent limitations of the brutes, the "speechless" animals. This something I believe to be control, restraint, "inhibi- tion." Its difficulty and its consequent biologic unpleasantness, it may be, corre- spond to its overwhelming valuation in the scale of ultimate things. Personality, however, with this inhibi- tory endowment as its characteristic sign, shares with our "poor" relations, the 49 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY brutes (and the trees?), the obvious neces- sity of close and adaptable relationship with an environment which is material as well as spiritual. This materiality de- mands that part of the life-process shall be body, and body demands in its turn nourishment and replacement when, in the eternal flood and ebb of life, the in- dividual Paracelsus shall have "attained." Such in trite, but briefest, contour is the simple enough yet tremendous philosophy of the personal and of the supporting and reproducing organism which combine to constitute the essential parts of human nature: adequate means of control over much which is strong and impulsive. The mechanism of this essential strength and impulse of the actual individual man or woman we have termed the vegetative apparatus, that system of autonomic and spinal nerves and smooth muscle and glands already indicated in the first chap- ter. Broadly considered, its object is to 50 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION provide the energy and the push for the entire organism, primarily, it may be, for its own common vital events, but, philo- sophically speaking, for something else also which fares both further and higher. This ulterior something is of course the volun- tary life, human and personal rather than brutal and racial, particular rather than general, intensive and not extensive in its action, devoted to developing (although it be often unconsciously) an ultimate personality, and to meeting conditions which for that personality at least are generally new and therefore difficult. Per- sonality involves of necessity, it seems to me, two such logically opposed but practi- cally complementary phases ; one is rela- tively new because human, but the other is as old as Life itself, richest and oldest category of the human mind, and the best known. In the basal need of universality of these vegetative factors of the personality, 51 THi: INFLUENCE OF JOY there is implied either a common agree- aMeness of experience, a distinct, conscious .satisfaction, or, at the very least, a sub- consciousness that in the long run must not be unpleasant. To me this activity- pli asantness relationship is part and panvl of the rationality of the Cosmos, a pre- sumption of agreement so overwhelmingly universal in experience that its contrary cannot be believed. To me, at any rate, for one, a million years of life-evolution gradually developing an affective balance that should start with a tilt of pain or of unpleasantness yet persist and continually prosper and evolve, is quite unthinkable; one can imagine it or fancy it, but one cannot think it. Thus, in application to our need, the impulse to activity normally is always easy and, at least by contrast, pleasant; just as it is easy to be a not unfortunate brute animal, or to be a care- free child or, being adult, to make holiday. But the very impulsiveness and ease of 53 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION action of the autonomic and spinal vege- tative machinery implies that something other must be at least less easy since actual human life is notoriously difficult at times to nearly all of us, and to some of us nearly always so. This that is less easy, it is obvious, is the control of the more easy the voluntary and personal, in short, which has oh so gradually ! al- ready set itself as over-lord above the vegetative and impulsive. Here indeed come in the "associative memory" of the biologists, experience, intelligence, reason, the flower and fruit of age-long mental and moral evolution. The essence, in a word, of the mode of action of this habitual power over the impulsively vegetative is inhibition. Its machinery, one would a priori expect, perhaps, would be closely related to (or even identical with, it may be?) those parts of the action-system which represent intelligence, civilization, culture, most 53 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY closely, namely, the great cortex of the brain and the wondrous mechanism of the voluntary muscle. There is scarce a rea- sonable doubt that this deduction of com- mon sense is wholly corroborated by the inductions of modern physiology. We may presume then that this essential restrain- ing power is intimate on the one hand with the will, the personal, individual human will, and on the other with the brain-parts devoted to the human intelligence. The author has already set this matter forth in sundry places, 1 and even had he and others not done so, this small volume were no place for it. It must suffice here, with a little exception soon to appear, that it be granted that voluntary move- ment, through its oeea-ioiiin^ kinesthesia, is generally inhibitory with its integrating mechanism, chiefly the cortex of the brain. 1 G. V. N. Dearborn, e.g.. "Kmeatheaa and the Int. Will. ' American Journal cf Piycholon, XXIV, 2, April, 1013, illstd., pp. 204-255. 54 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION It has five billion nerve-units to do it with! The general impression that the cortex of the brain represents in broad terms the restraining control of sundry impulses (au- tomatisms, reflexes, habits, instincts, emo- tions, etc.) has in recent years been rapidly gaining ground, we might say not only trench after trench, but in actual territory miles at a time. One thinks of Ribot's revolutionary work on attention as de- scribing an essentially inhibitory process, and of his predecessors and successors from Des Cartes in 1662 to the most recent researches of last year on the inhibitory internal secretions and on the inhibitory nerve fibers and nerve cells. On the pres- ent basis of inhibitory kinesthesia and of the resultants of cortex association (Sher- rington's "final common paths "), all these related matters are beginning to integrate, to fuse into real comprehension of the bodily basis of skill, efficiency, civilization, 55 HIE INFLUENCE OF JOY and culture, the human successors of bruteness and of impulsive savagery. The important principle reduced to its commonest and lowest terms is that of our grandmothers in the home: "One thing at a time and that done well." We now know that our nervous systems, in so far as voluntary and conscious, act \vith skill precisely on that rule: we can v<>! untarily attend only to one movement, one bit of deliberate behavior, at a time. It it is to be consciously done well, it must be "one thing at a time"; and it must involve, moreover, the correlation of the forces of the entire cortex (more or less) so that their result involves all (more or less) of its stored experience, wisdom, -kill, civili/ation, culture. Now this singleness of mind and of action means several things essential to our argument, to which we will refer, how- ever, only by mere mention. One thing implied is the general consciousness or al- 56 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION tention of the entire voluntary personality. Otherwise, at least, the action is not a truly voluntary movement, but is in some degree already habituated, as indeed are nearly all our acts. This implies a second characteristic of voluntary action, namely, its novelty; a strictly voluntary move- ment, theoretically speaking, has never been made before or at least only a few times before, not often enough at any rate, by definition, to have become in any degree habitual. On account of this nov- elty of a "deliberate" action, thirdly, its performance is difficult. This is an uni- versal experience and needs no illustration. Its physiologic explanation may perhaps be found in the common supposition that a wholly new movement involves the pri- mary forcing of a new association through or "along" unaccustomed nerve paths by the hundred or, it may be, by the many thousand, at a time. It needs no argumentation to have it 57 TIII; INFLUENCE OF JOY plain that this difficulty, due to the novelty of the brain's activity, should be, lastly, unpleasant. Rationally thus unpleasant in itself, because of its conscious perplexity, it may be also unpleasant by mere contrast with the ease and smoothness of vegetative, reflex, and habituated movement. But whatever, in strict physiologic science, be the cause of the disagreeable- ness of organic restraint of things that are habitual and therefore easy and hence pleasant, there can be no doubt in any one's mind that its unpleasantness, even if often little more than a sense of difficulty, is a real power continually acting and therefore of great total import in the groundwork of behavior as the long de- scent of man has made it. This is seen to be especially emphatic as a basis of 1 Be- havior when one considers that by cont with the habituated processes, vegetative, and therefore immediately satisfying, and often positively pleasant or pleasurable 58 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION even to the acme of human experience, this whole class of actions of restraint would be deemed especially disagreeable, in general and in particular, in universal repute. But after all, it is not the pure restraint process, unpleasant or even almost painful as it may be (has the gentle reader ever tried to allow a fly to gyrate undisturbed on the end of the reader's nose, or has he ever stepped without jumping on the point of a broken clam-shell hidden in the mud ?), it is not this especially by itself which is the* importantly unpleasant element in inhibition, but the complex of emotional factors which uses this as its physiologic basis. Indeed, this matter is so important in our explanation of the influence of joy, that we shall pay especial attention to it in the second part of the book, under the head of worry, for example (page. 174). To the thoughtful reader it has probably already occurred that in his experience self-control and in general this very re- 59 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY strain! of vegetative impulses is sometimes a delight, and even one of the most plea>ant, it may chance, of his entire motivity. As a fact of pure exprrit regardless of scientific value, I am willing to admit that this optimistic fact is, for some persons and some periods, sometimes real, but I must immediately insist, not on fural basis as yet, but on an artificial one, not biologically or physiologically, but as a matter of religion, of ethics, of sug- gestion from without from an environ- ment over-cultured, over-civilized, yes, even over-humanized, never by any means the environment of the average man or woman, but that of the over-evolved few, far from (he scientific basis of our common human- ity. Asceticism, on one hand, shows it, typifies it; ascetieism certainly is good and the anchorite honest with himself - but only when the joys of our common life have withered into the ground or evapo- rated into the sky ! 60 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION But this matter surely leads us too far afield from our task, which is at once a scientific and a practical one, bending its back to the biological problem as it af- fects us all until in the slow but certain melioration of mankind our bodies and their heaven-sent impulses, our natural life, shall no longer need restraint. This era will surely come. Now then, at length, the two weights of the affective balance are before us : one vegetative and active and impulsive, but the other personal and restrictive and deliberate; the former inherently always pleasant, the latter, in the long run, diffi- cult and disagreeable. If I have not failed wholly to express my meaning, it is clear that a personality consists in part of two processes which might be characterized as a center of restraint with much to restrain or even as a process of restraint, provided the vegetative be fully implied in the vol- untary, the impulsive in the deliberately 61 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY inhibitory, for the personality certainly includes both. On the one side of the balance in the affective scale-pan lies the pleasant normal activity, so far as Lift is concerned, expression; in the other pan, repression. Activity has as its symbol Joy ! Youth ! Re j uvenation ! Repress ion suggests - - Hope. So much (and scientifically in far too concise a form) for the dynamism or en- ergism orkineticism for the "push" -of joy. If these facts be kept in mind, the applications to the theory and prarfi< \\cll-living cannot be difficult for any reader who cares to make them. To report anew the observations of Beau- mont, Pavlov ! in Petrograd, Cannon Boston, Carlson 8 in Chicago, Crile, and 1 J. P. Pavlov. "The Work of the Digestive Glands ' , son, translator, London, 1002. *W. B. Cannon, "The Mechanical Factors in Digestion", London and New York, 1911. Also his "Bodily Changes" already referred to. 'A. J. Carlson, "Contributions to the Physiology of the Stomach", American Journal of Physiology, 1912-1915. M THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION of others before these, may seem perhaps superfluous to certain readers. But Can- non's earlier (1898) observations on the cat are at once so germane to our purpose and so "classic" withal, that we should not omit to repeat them : "In my earliest observations on the stomach," says the able successor of Bow- ditch at Harvard, "I had difficulty, because in some animals peristalsis was perfectly evident, and in others there was no sign of activity. Several weeks passed before I discovered that this difference in response to presence of food in the stomach was associated with a difference in sex. The male cats were restive and excited on being fastened to the holder, and under these circumstances gastric peristalsis was absent ; the female cats, especially if elderly, sub- mitted with calmness to the restraint, and in them the peristaltic waves took their normal course. Once a female with kit- tens turned from her state of quiet con- THE INFLUENCE OF JOY hutment to one of apparently restlos anxiety. The movements of the stomach immediately stopped, and only starhd again after the animal had been petted and had begun to purr. I later found that by covering the cat's mouth and nose with the fingers until a slight distress of breath- ing occurred, the stomach movements could be stopped at will. Thus, in the cat any sign of rage, or distress, or mere anxiety, was accompanied by a total cessa- tion of the movements of the stomach. I have watched with the X rays the stoinaeh of a male cat for more than an hour, dur- ing which time there was not the sligl beginning of peristaltic activity, and yet the only visible indication of excitement in the animal was a continued to-and -I'm twitching of the tail. What is true of the cat has been proved true also of the ral>l>it, dog, and guinea pig. Even slight psychic disturbances were accompanied by stop- page of peristalsis. . . . Lommel found N THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION that small dogs in strange surroundings might have no movements of the stomach for two or three hours. And whenever the animals showed any indications of being uncomfortable or distressed, the movements were inhibited, and the dis- charge from the stomach checked. . . . " Fubini observed that fear occasioned more rapid peristalsis [in the intestine]. . . . There is no doubt that many emotional states are a strong stimulus to peristalsis, but it is equally true that other emotional states inhibit peristalsis. In the cat the same conditions which stop the movements of the stomach stop also the movements of the intestines," etc. When it is realized by the reader that these cessations spoken of mean acute in- digestion if long continued, with the pain, decomposition of food, intestinal irritation, toxemia, malaise, etc., so familiar to mul- titudes of folk, the basal importance of the facts as stated does not need addi- 65 'II IK INTM i:\CE OF JOY tional demonstration. We may be prac- tically sure that in man, owing to his more sensitive and psychical nervous system, these effects and relations are even more conspicuous than in these brutes. 11 ic important thing is to realize as certain that the general unpleasant atti- tude of mind, the angor animi of the writers of the Middle Ages, is incompatible with vigorous and complete digestion. A > of feeling in a hurry is by itself ample oc- casion of an indigestion, this being physio- logically a worry lest one be late. In like manner every vexatious and depres-in^ state of mind, all being emotional states, be it observed, are apt to lessen or even stop the autonomir rhythm of the stomach and duodenum at least, and in every probability to lessen the amount of the digestive juices provided for the pro* Hundreds of illustrations of this fact are in the books for any one to read; and the quick-lunch counters and the inferior board- Go THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION ing houses and the commoner restaurants are rich fields for observation of its truth. It is necessary to understand then that this is a real bodily influence, and equally essential to appreciate its vast underlying importance in the lifelong welfare of mil- lions of men and women. It is a trite subject, to be sure, but none the less es- sential because thus hard to drive into the effective control-mechanism of men's lives. Dyspepsia, which means difficulty in di- gestion, in the passing decades and cen- turies is more momentous than wars even, unthinkably awful as they are, and worse in its retardation of universal civilization and culture than all the oldtime plagues, taking millions as they did sometimes, with woe unspeakable, out of Europe's life. For here is something that goes on day in and day out for a score or two of years, in the large majority of every coun- try's workers. It is such expenditures that are important, not the occasional 67 i in: IM u KVI: OF .JOY ( \f ruvagance, as every economist knows, as every medical man preaches in its applica- tion for example to the use of alcohol. As we appreciate better how literally one are mind and body, aspects of some tertium quid that science does not as yet dr-ei-ibe, the better do we realize the therapeutic value of psychologic principles like this. One hears of late no end of dietetic wis- dom sounding in the air, but the matter of diet is of small moment in coinpari-on to the simple command of Nature: "Eat in good humor not too much of ordinary food." Dieting often means little, but the digestive effect, easier to arrange, often means very much. Sadler, in a recent popular-styled book l of much practical usefulness, has in these terms summari/ed the effects of "faith" on digestion : W. S. Sadler. "The Physiology of Faith and Fear", Chicago, 1913. The author of this book owes much to Professors W. S. Hall and R. U. Gault of Northwestern Unix 68 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION "The gastric secretion is produced in abundant flow by expectant hunger; the quality of digestion is increased [sic] and there is normally balanced juice; the digestive strength is excellent : * holiday digestion' is always good; psychic dys- pepsia is entirely cured ; stomach move- ments are strong and regular as in normal digestion ; digestion-time is shortened ; nervous dyspepsia is relieved and re- moved; the vomiting center is quieted and controlled; intestinal secretion is increased in quantity, copious, and its quality is strong and active, and its flow regular; the intestinal movements are regular and normal; and constipation is decreased." These statements are probably well within the truth, although it is likely that Sadler would be somewhat hard pressed to give the exact authority by whom each of these results was actually observed. 69 THE INTU KNCE OF JOY To any who has read to good advantage the opening chapter of the present volume, explanation of such statements and of such a command need be no more than a word : Good humor, joy, is the index of activity; the ingested food, putrefactive bee moist and warm and bacteria-laden, H to be digested and used quickly, if at all ; therefore, in our syllogism, "joy" is neces- sary for nutritive health, Q.E.D. Joy means kinetic energy, the great normal activity, both mechanic and chemical. Life loveth a cheerful, not a melancholy, liver. "Melancholy" of course means "black bile" and comes from a time of myth and of ignorance even darker than our own concerning the real workings of our wondrous organisms. Bile to the people of that time was a harmful agent, while to us now it is a lack of bile which tends toward nervous dyspepsia and all its factors of unpleasantness. No man perhaps has understood these subtle in- 70 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION fluences better than Henry Maudsley, 1 and he thus characterizes the two "tempera- mental" elements of the affective balance : "However miserable, they [the joyous] have not the least inclination or desire to end their sufferings by death : so long as they breathe, it is a happiness to breathe. Little as they can conceive it, however, there are persons afflicted with a constitu- tional melancholy who have no sense of a positive enjoyment in living, who go through with life as with a task that is to them at best indifferent, at worst burden- some and painful, and who at certain times when more out of tune than usual, are oppressed with a desponding sense of the dreary emptiness of life, with a deep disgust with the meanness and the mean- inglessness of its strifes, with a weary apathy from all its interests." 1 Henry Maudsley, "Pathology of Mind." This work, with its complement, "Physiology of Mind", is still a classic description of "mental fundamentals." 71 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY The great lyric of melancholia and spair, James Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night," expresses in quite other words (his same temperamental contrast : 44 Yes, here and there some weary wanderer In that same city of tremendous night, Will understand the speech and feel a stir Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight. * I suffer mute and lonely, yet another Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother Travels the same wild paths though out of sight/ "Oh sad Fraternity, do I unfold Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore ? , Nay, be assured ; no secret can be told To any who divined it not before : Nonr uninitiate by many a presage Will understand the language of the message Although proclaimed aloud forevermore." These quotations sound like the adol< -- cent melancholy and pessimism common to nearly all widely read and intelligent young persons, but it is more than that and more lasting. Closely allied to "psycli- 72 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION asthenia ", it represents in all probabil- ity a badly nourished and little exercised nervous system, especially the autonomic, as we shall see more fully later. Guthrie Rankin has put much in small space in a little part of a recent article in the British Medical Journal: "Poor innervation of the alimentary canal occurs in persons with hereditary nervous instability, and in those who have , over taxed their nervous capacities. All such cases are accompanied with the un- derlying symptoms typical of neurasthenia. The chief dyspeptic symptoms may be extremely variable according to the severity and duration of the disturbance. They may at first amount to little more than a fear of certain forms of food, associated with distress after eating. In the later stages acid eructations, severe distress two to four hours after meals, epigastric burn- ing and pain, a sense of great fullness, etc., make their appearance. . . . The taking 73 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY of food between meals at times relieves the > m fort for a short while. Physical ex- amination in the early stages may show nothing referable to the digestive trad, but later there is often considerable gastric dilation, tenderness and rigid iff/ in the right epigastric region, and often a dis- tt mled and filled colon. [Atonic consti- pation thus suggested is in itself a source of great and lasting discomfort and in- jury, especially in women.] The general physical signs of neurasthaiin* toother with some loss of weight and some anemia, accompany the picture." I have italicized the words which sug- gest the well-ni^h universal discomfort or unpleasantness of this extremely common condition. Here certainly are the typical symptoms of chronic bodily discomfort. What heart has a man suffering from conditions like these for the free and joy- ous work and play activities of the bu-y, contented life until indeed he escape- 74 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION its vicious, circling round of malnutrition, pain, and weakness, and pain, malnutri- tion, and weakness, years on end, and for the "vicious circle" substitutes the benign circuit of complete and rapid digestion and enjoyment and strength both of muscle and of nerve, perhaps even till death them part ? Some readers at this point will have in mind the natural and familiar How? But the important question has been an- swered so very often of late that we do not venture to do so again. Indeed, too often is the self -protective and efficient initiative, based on plain common sense, of the aver- age man or woman, ignored. It is the present supposition that science has done its duty when it has presented the living facts as a base on which each may work out his own salvation. If it were a medic- inal specific which were in question, hard to obtain and difficult to administer, the matter would be a different one, but in this 75 Till; INFLUENCE OF JOY case I IK- therapeutic process is scarcely K common or more specific than common >ense normality of living itself. Normal mind is active and contented, if not happy, mind ; and normal body, mind's homologue, is inevitably active and progressive. Many have not stopped to think how intimately the enjoying mind and the feeding body, both in prehension and in minute cellular assimilation from the blood, are integrated and how helpful to each other (if for a moment we may be duali It is now well known that no sense-ex- perience is too remote from the in ner- vations of digestion to be taken into its associations and serve as a stimulus of digestive movements and secretions; these facts are familiar as Pavlov's "conditioned reflexes", 1 but did multitudes of hurried 1 J. P. Pavlov, " Die Psychische Erregung der SpeichoMn : Ergebnitse der Phytiobgie. 1904. I Abt., S. 182. See also .! H WaUon's interesting continuation of the matter to the muscular reflexes of man: "The Place of the Conditioned Reflex in Psychology," PtychoUyical Review. XXIII, 2, March, 1916. 76 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION and worried men and women, with "no time to eat" in mental peace, know these things effectively, in their subconscious minds which guide their actual behavior, life would be sweeter to them, and more useful. When one is hungry especially, every mental process that in any degree touches or can associate with the innervation of digestion starts going the complex nu- tritional machinery. A thought of some past gastronomic satisfaction, the visual memory of a temptingly arrayed meat market or bakeshop window, is quite enough to make one's mouth water with saliva, first link in the digestive chain. Here comes in the influence and the physi- ology of the sometimes highly lauded pleas- ures of anticipation, often indeed greater than the anticipated reality, for, alone, the mind is free to enjoy, but the body has conditions which oftentimes conflict in the affective balance. 77 mi: IMU I:\CE OF JOY But this anticipation, that of eating when one is hungry, prepares and starts the digestive mill, and meanwhile is de- lightful. Wholly in like manner, the ac- tual sight of food, or its pleasant odor, actuates the nutritive process, and we may be reasonably confident that the more strictly physiologic as distinct from psy- chologic be the mode of stimulation, the farther does its influence immediately ex- tend down the alimentary canal. Cannon has pointed out how well connected are the processes in the different successive gastro-intestinal portions of the tube, al- though previous work, that by Meltzer, for example, had described the preliminary complex interdependent function of swal- lowing. Actual contact with the mouth's mucous membrane seems to be necessary for the starting of the gastric hopper's movements, while the proper grinding begins by influence from the hopper; the pyloric valve (between the stomach and 78 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION the intestine) is opened by acid material below it, thinks Cannon at least; the common bile duct and the gall bladder really appear to be actuated by food in the duodenum. The direct observations on the movements of the absorptive villi made by Hambleton 1 (foretold by the pres- ent writer in The Psychological Review, XXI, 3, in May, 1914, in an article entitled "Cer- tain Further Factors in the Physiology of Euphoria"), led him to believe that motions of the contractile variety at least were under control of the peripheral nervous mechanism and so subject to numerous modes of control from places not yet de- fined. In short, it is likely that the whole nutritive mechanism is integrated normally to the utmost. So that it, like the other sets of machinery in this wondrous, self- repairing, chemical mill, is one with the mental process, especially in its subcon- 1 B. F. Hambleton, "Movements of the Intestinal Villi*', American Journal of Physiology, XXXIV, 4, July, 1914. 79 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY M ious phases, and each in a degree is at once subject to and master of the otli and all are working vigorously, when thr conscious attention or the general dis- affection does not prevent, for the common personal benefit. We are probably only just at the be- ginning of the accumulation of information that will show every one ever more con- clusively that mind and body are aspect-, in practice "mutually dependent to any assignable degree " because in reality one thing. From this viewpoint, consciousness is the experience that we have of our re- action to environment, and when the re- action is favorably adapted, it is pleasant ; but unpleasantness, whatever its source, disturbs the adaptation. Why indeed, as the astute Hack Tuke l inquires, following Shakespeare, 1 D. Hack Tuke, "Illustrations of the Influence of the Min.i upon the Body in Health and Disease", London, 187*. p. * This is one of the early treatises of the kind, and by a fain London physician. See also Robt. Burton's "The Anatomy of 80 THE INFLUENCE ON NUTRITION "Why should a man whose blood is warm within, Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster ? Sleep when he wakes ? and creep into the jaundice By being peevish ? " Melancholy ", London, 1652, an important but forbidding classic even to a student of Latin. 81 CHAPTER III The Influence on the Circulation THE blood is the chief means of ma- terial distribution and collection in the body, supplying oxygen and food and drink to its many billions of evils and taking away the various waste from each of them. Nothing can enter a tissue ((11 save from the circulation, which is therefore seen to be the immediate arbiter of good and evil, yes of life and death, to each of the vast multitude of riti/cn-cells in this teeming and busy body-republic. In modern physiology as in ancient law, tlir circulation is t he criterion of life as it is the proof of death. When a man's heart stops heating, then only is he legally dead, and for physiology the protoplasm of the tissues ordinarily dies with the lym- H THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION phatic flow around it. Thus, if a heart be made to stop short suddenly, the animal drops dead, because the cessation of nour- ishment in certain neurons (nerve cells) of the cerebellum and the corpus striatum in the brain, and perhaps of others in the spinal cord, has instantly lowered to zero the tonus of the trunk-supporting muscles. From this lower logical limit up through every grade of anemic influence to conges- tion and even to apoplexy, the bursting of a cerebral artery, the circulation and the nervous system are in the most inti- mate possible sympathy, qualitative and quantitative. The same concert is true of the blood and the glands, and of the blood and the muscles; these, blood, neurones, glands, and muscle, constitute the action-system integrated with the mind and together so as to be one single mech- anism. Nothing is easier to demonstrate, yet few things in psychology certainly are more frequently forgotten or ignored. 83 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY Since Dunlap's little "Psychobiology" l appeared, the first book of its kind, there is no longer any great reason for the widespread neglect of this essential organic integration* Its general outline, moreover, would seem to be part of the birthright of every boy and girl, this knowledge of the momen- tous mechanism of efficiency, for only so, appreciating its wonderfulness, will it be properly used and protected and repro- duced. In no other single case than this, far and away the most important of all to every one of us, are people expected to safeguard properly complicated machinery that they do not at all comprehend. How can one wonder that under this common condition the mechanism gets over-heated in parts, rusty in some, bent in others, 1 Knight Dunlap, "An Outline of Psychobiology ", Haiti- more, 1914. Invaluable to students of psychology, philosophy, physical education, and to educators of all k'm-U. including man- ual trainers. See also the present writer's "Movement, Genes- theaU, and the Mind " in the Piyckological Review, May, 1916. 84 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION occasionally broken here and there, and altogether worn out and "scrapped" by the managing Director long before it has done its best work in a busy world ? Cer- tainly, an outline of psychophysiology, of the structure and action of the human mechanism of efficiency at least, is every child's plain birthright, and before long public educators will appreciate the obvious fact. Not the least important part of this in- tegrated apparatus by which we do things and become, technically speaking, per- sonalities, is the heart, the compound duplex suction- and force-pump of the circulating blood and lymph. Not only physically thus, however, but psychologi- cally, is the heart a paramount factor of our life, for the term stands for much more than a pump! Just this "more" is its essential emotional content and meaning with which we here are chiefly concerned. As we have seen already, by implication 85 HIE INFLUENCE OF JOY chiefly, the heart is ordinarily controlled by the autonomic balance, the famous truth cranial nerve, the pneumogastric (see Eu- gene Field's famous poem) serving to regu- late it and to increase its force, while the sympathetic proper "furnishes" its rela- tively irresponsible impulse to activity. But the pneumogastric "nerve" (in reality it is a whole complex system of pathways) receives influences from practically all over the body except directly the four limbs. Stimuli come to it from the brain centers of emotion (optic thalamus), of muscular tone (corpus striatum), and of intelligence and association (cortex cerebri), as well as from the entire abdomen and thorax and all their busy and sensitive viscera. Occa- sionally a road more open or more direct than usual between the voluntary cor- tex and this nerve gives the individual a dangerous deliberate control over the heart, so that it inay be slowed at will or even stopped. This is a douhtfully useful 86 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION faculty, comparable to that possessed by a student of the author's (Mr. S.), who can voluntarily, by force of will for ten seconds or so, erect the hairs on his fore- arm, producing to perfection the phenomena of "goose flesh", ordinarily purely an in- voluntary sympathetic function, the arrec- tores pilorum muscles being of the smooth variety. We thus see that while, under ordinary functional (and structural ?) conditions, the heart is an autonomic, vegetative organ, beautifully innervated from all sides so as to do well its supreme work, adapted to every breath of variation in the hydrau- lic and the nervous conditions, it yet has at its elbow, so to say, ready for instant development and use, direct connections, we might say (see page 55 above), with the personal will of the individual. This is an important circumstance for our pur- pose and without a doubt is typical of other easily developed voluntary powers 87 TIII-: INTU KNVI; or .iov perhaps throughout the entire vegetative organism. Herein is the physiologic ground of hypochondria and a tagging host of knavish followers down the hill to a false neurasthenia and on to a fancied and then sometimes a real invalidism. There seems no assignable limit to the de- velopment of deliberate control and inter- ference with functions which are Imilt to work automatically, and which, left alone to a wholly normal life, will do so with marvelous perfection, year in and out until the individual's end of time. The application of this foundation fact and principle to the influence of joy plainly i- indirect (however germane to the theory and practice of neurasthenia and of hysteria), but because indirect no less essential. It means, for our immediate purpose, that the general affect, pleasant or unpleasant, and the particular emot : are under voluntary control, or at least that they always may be, the normal or- 88 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION ganism having ample means for making the normal human being "captain of his soul", creator of his destiny. The body has the complete machinery for preserving the happiness of the individual. In practice, then, this becomes a matter of will-power and of training, which means energetic habituation. This factor of habit makes practically "all the difference in the world", for habit readily and continu- ally usurps the throne of will and enslaves the king past all ennobling. Failure to adequately appreciate this fact is what makes Eddyism (properly Quimbyism) absurd, and the oriental doctrine of the will frequently unfruitful and misleading. That the heart is very sensitive to affec- tive influence the child begins to realize often in his fifth or sixth year, and the relation remains a dominant fact, in his subconsciousness at least, always after. The physiologic basis of this emotional sensitivity as well as the heart's sus- 89 THE INFLUENCE OF M>Y eeptibility to depressing idea-complexes 'tinged with feeling, we may be sure) was exemplified in some simple but im- portant experiments performed by Lynn and Quails l on seventeen male medical students. The research was in two parts: 4 'Part A. The pulse rates of a group of thirteen students were counted. They were then given milk-sugar pills. They were told that they had taken a heart stimulant. To make the case more vivid, the possible action of such drugs was discussed during the time intervening between the first and the second counts. After forty to sixty minutes, the pulse rates were counted again." Part B. was similar in its procedure, save that seventeen students were studied, that they were told that they had taken a new synthetic cardiac depressant, and that 1 E. P. Lyon and G. P. Quails, "Experiment* with Ca and Cactin ", Journal of the American Medical Association, LY. 6, August 6. 1910, 455-459. M THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION the time between the pulse counts was "from twenty-five to forty minutes." Of the thirteen hearts in A, nine beat faster, three more slowly, and one did not change its rate. Of the seventeen in part B, thirteen beat more slowly after taking the imaginary depressant, three beat faster, and one showed no change. The "average" increase (a specious thing, the average !) was four and two tenths beats per minute, nearly six per cent; the "average" decrease was four and four tenths beats per minute, a trifle over six per cent. When we come to discuss the theory of suggestion in the next chapter, we shall refer to these experiments again, and indeed they serve as a valid starting point for a number of different psychologi- cal investigations. Just here the results are interesting because they illustrate es- pecially the principle, worth noting in our argument, that idea-complexes, formed and maintained without any emotion, readily 91 THI; IM-I.I I:\CK OF JOY influence, and cither actuate or inhibit, the autonomic nervous system, and through these they influence the vegetative life, hut only to a minor extent as compared irith conditions predominantly emotional. Not a man among those seventeen but could at will readily have raised his heart rate by a "pretended" but real feeling of excite- ment of some kind from twenty to forty per cent. Increases of one hundred and eighty per cent are common enough in male athletic contests, and as every physician knows, the rates usually found in normal F JOY his "Creative Imagination" l at least an outline of the method which, if folio in the ways of our modern laboratories of psychology and of physiology, may ex- plain many things most scientific men to-day deem fanciful or mistaken or irra- tionally mysterious. Personally I am of the firm and deliberate opinion that, in the light of recent work on the one hand in neurochemical physiology and on the other hand in more or less speculative physics, no assignable limit can be set, even by hard science, to the influence of the "mind" over the "body" or of body over the mind. The category Life has values of its own which no man really wise can longer dare to ignore and hope to retain a reputation for mental breadth. As an example at hand, and withal as good as another, take the following personal observation of W. S. Sadler, M.I)., from whom I have already quoted: "We were 1 Th. A. Ribot, " Essai BUT 1'imagination creatrice". Paria, 1900. THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION summoned to the bedside of a patient whose heart-action was almost suspended as the result of a frightful hemorrhage. The pulse was not perceptible at the wrist, and the heart had all but given up the struggle [?]. While the attendants made ready to inject salt solution and administer restoratives, we spoke to the patient in very positive and assuring terms, in answer to her question as to whether or not she was dying, and immediately, almost instantly, before a single material thing had been done for her, she began to rally: the heart began to beat with in- creased vigor, in less than one minute the pulse could be distinctly felt at the wrist, and in but a few minutes she had almost completely rallied from a threatened col- lapse. This was very evidently a case of heart rally in response to certain stimuli and nervous energy, originated and directed by that potent and powerful mental force, faith." It is easy to imagine what might 95 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY have been the outcome had powerful suggestion of the opposite tenor been offered to such a patient As a physiologist, I see nothing in this effect hard to understand to-day; as a psychologist, I find in such a case a deal of new meaning of future use to the world when we have learned to make it practical r<>r general application. Joy, however, especially if it be sudden, that is, unexpected, frequently so influences the heart as to overthrow its nervous ;md hydraulic equilibrium and thus cause i ting or, possibly, even death; and nothing could better suggest the reality of joy's cardiac effects. Tuke cites the case of Lucretia Davidson, 'the precocious American poetess who died at seventeen: Her susceptibilities were so acute, and her perceptions of beauty so exquisite, as to cause her to faint when listening to some of her favourite melodies from Moore. Yet notwithstanding this serious impn 96 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION sion, she would beg to have them re- peated, so delicious were the sensations produced." The influence here, however, thinks Tuke, was both emotional and sen- sory, with the former as "the proximate cause of the heart's temporary failure." Several authentic cases are in the literature of death from supposed heart collapse, due to joy, but none are near enough in time or in space to convince one that they were not in reality due to apoplexy, or to the bursting of an aneurism, or to other special dangers dependent on a sudden great rise of arterial blood pressure. Only in a phil- osophic discussion of teleology and the like would the matter be of importance; certainly not here, for no one has ever shown that the danger is due to physiologic rather than to pathologic conditions. The heart, however, is not all there is to the circulation, but only one of its five or six causes, although the chief. The arteries 97 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY are also important organs and have note- worthy, active, emotional influences. Ac- tivity of an organ always demands an increased blood-flow thither which, a> in the case of voluntary muscle, may be as much as five or six hundred per cent. Blood, like other liquids, being practi- cally incompressible, this increase must be made possible by dilation of the periph- eral arteries or by hastening the blood- stream through them, or by both. The last is the most likely, dilation lessening the blood's friction and the increased out- put from the left ventricle, due to I lie in- creased rate always seen in emotion, cir- culating the blood more often. At any rate, the circulation is an important factor in the bodily aspect of emotion, as we have already seen. The whole matter, however, needs careful study, as does indeed the whole prime function of vasomotion, so vital in emotion. Especially would we like to understand better than at present that U THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION vasomotor reciprocity which appears to be universal, the muscles, the omenta, the skin, and the brain being the four chief users of blood and respective receivers of it when, by widespread vasoconstric- tion, it is expelled from some other place. Thus, acute joy (contrast it with fear and grief!) means congestion of the skin, es- pecially of the head and neck, and of the locomotor muscles and those of personal expression in general. But the congestion lessens and becomes more general in the more chronic forms of pleasant emotion. It is not to be doubted that in this general stimulation of the essential circulation in all constructive parts of the body, such as the brain, the muscles, and the digestive organs, joy exerts one of its most conspic- uous benefits, and one that no one can doubt or ignore. Little though we know as yet about blood pressure in its relation to emotion, we can suspect that it, like blood supply, means 99 I UK INFLUENCE OF JOY much in the physical aspect. It is cer- tain that the average physician in taking at random and only once or perhaps twice the blood pressure of a patient, is running great risk of being misled in at least a tenth of the cases, and from that ratio up in proportion as the autonomic nervous system is worried, fatigued, or unstable, from any other cause. 1 As we shall see, I hi- condition is just the negation of joy and is therefore relevant here. Joy, on the other hand, and happiness, certainly make for a firm, sustained blood pressure, not high, but higher than the atonic and depressed condition some unpleasant emo- tions exhibit. On the other hand it seems likely that 1 G. V. N. Dearborn. "The Blood Pressure in the Leg in Various Positions; the Brachial Pressure after Short Maximal IMS; and the Normal Pressure in Physically Trained In- dividuals; With an Appended Preliminary Note regarding the Blood Pressure's Autonomic Rhythm", American Phyrical Education Review. XX. 6, 337-35*. and 7, 414-423. (June and October, 1915.) The "appended note" contains a suggestion that the blood pressure is mysterious yet, and a generally mis- lrnliiitf fad. 100 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION the depressive states of " antijoy " exert on the vasomotor blood-pressure rhythm some sort of far-reaching confusion com- parable to that which they impose upon the digestive rhythm as observed by Can- non and others. As for acute variations in blood pressure in affective states, the author is at present of the opinion that the two generally opposed sides of the emotional balance act for once similarly, and cause a rapid rise of pressure. Thus in one case an ^imaginary kiss caused in ninety seconds a rise of at least twenty millimeters of mercurial pressure; while in another in- dividual a suddenly recalled grief raised it in less time thirty per cent more than that. In a bright girl (A. K. B.) of thirteen the chance recollection of breaking a highly- valued plate belonging to her mother caused a quick rise of twelve millimeters in the arm- blood-pressure. Office-readings are regu- larly higher at first than ten minutes later. 101 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY I have seen the pressure rise from one hundred and thirty-five millimeters to two hundred and thirty by one hundred and fifty seconds of breath-holding, and in the same man (Dr. J. G. S.) have seen it fall twenty -four millimeters below its base of one hundred and thirty-five in a few minutes by voluntary bodily and mental relaxation after the useful man nor of the Hindus. This is a total voluntary difference of one hundred and nineteen millimeters of mercury within three min- utes in the blood pressure of a normal man. With such a range controllable from the voluntary cortex of the brain, who is going to deny the importance of this blood-pressure factor in the general com- bined emotional and deliberate control characteristic of the invigorating self- possession of joyous behavior? On the other hand, anxiety continued for many weeks or even days produces, as already hinted, a variability in the blood 10* THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION pressure which I have named its autonomic rhythm, and which is now under investiga- tion in the institutions where my research work on normal people and on the nervous is done. I have almost come to regard a well-defined rhythm as in some degree diagnostic of something akin to an anxiety- psychosis in the individual. It is obvious that in persons with brittle arteries, a con- dition normal to advanced life, a large variation of this kind might endanger health or cause death from apoplexy. Hack Tuke, already referred to (page 80), cites evidence, very appropriate during this the Great War, to indicate the prev- alence of apoplexy when men in general are anxious or otherwise for long deeply troubled, that is, joyless : " Doctor Rush in his essay 'On the Influence of the Revolution upon the Human Body' states that more instances of apoplexy occurred in the city of Philadel- phia in the winter of 1774-1775 than had 103 HIE INFLUENCE OF JOY been known in previous years. He a 4 1 should have hesitated in recording this fact had I not found the observation sup- ported by a fact of the same kind and produced by a nearly similar cause, in the Appendix to the practical works of Doctor Baglivi, Professor of Physic and Anatomy at Rome. After a very wet season in the winter of 1694-1695, he informs us, "apo- plexies displayed their rage; and perhaps some part of this epidemic illness was owinjj to the universal grief and domestic cue occasioned by all Europe being engaged in a war. All commerce was disturbed, and all the avenues of peace blocked up, so that the strongest heart could scarcely bear the thoughts of it." [Cf. A.D. I'M .>.] The winter of 1774-1775 was a period of uncommon anxiety among the citizens of America. Every countenance wore the marks of painful solicitude for the event of a petition to the throne of Britain, which was to determine whether reconciliation, 104 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION or a civil war, with all its terrible and dis- tressing consequences, were to take place. The apoplectic fit which deprived the world of the talents and virtues of Peyton Ran- dolph, while he filled the chair of Congress, in 1775, appeared to be occasioned in part by the pressure of the uncertainty of those great events upon his mind. To the name of this illustrious patriot several others might be added, who were affected by apoplexy in the same memorable year/ ' Almost every reader, if he hark back over his observations of acquaintances, can readily recall some who have un- accountably died soon after the access of a vast grief, a commercial catastrophe, disgrace, or some other personal disaster intense enough to depress more or less chronically the emotional tone and make joy impossible. It is likely that a majority of such victims of Nemesis, if not all of those in any small group, "passed on", as they who avoid the word death would 105 Tin; IMU i:\ri; or JO1 say, from conditions of the same gei nature as apoplexy, oozing of blood from perhaps a multitude of cerebral arterinlcs thus congesting and deranging perhaps a large region of the dominating brain, and leaving the vegetative, impulsive life to unknown impossibilities. Such mental attitudes are typical opposites of that attitude we express in this book by the more or less symbolic term joy, organic happiness. Robert Burton in his famous "Anatomy of Melancholy", 1652, lends good advice for the cure of " melancholy " under which our state of antijoy would be included : "Mirth and merry company may imi be separated from music, both concerning and necessarily required in this business. 4 Mirth', saith Vives (de anima te/ ///\v> the crushing or the crumbling of a soul ! and the finger of death from a broken heart or mangled life-hopes or shattered coum writes in symbols that all understand (but which it were hard to describe and in detail account for) the imminent loosening of " the silver cord." People have often been known to " grow old" in a month, in a week, in a night. Tuke quotes from a letter of Doctor Boggs, written in Paris during its sic to the London Lancet and dated 21 June. 1871 : 4 The only hope of the Parisians which they fondly cherished, and which, in a great measure, kept them alive during the siege was most cruelly blighted, and you may imagine their disappointment when the capitulation of the city was announced ; the mental shock to some was such tli 108 THE INFLUENCE ON THE CIRCULATION they almost lost their reason. . . . But the most remarkable effect of the siege was the aged appearance of some of the inhabitants ; men and women alike seem to have passed over at least ten years of their existence in half as many months. A friend of mine, a distinguished practitioner in this city, nearly fifty years of age, has become so gray and wrinkled, and such other changes have taken place in his constitution, as to give him the appearance of a man of sixty." Many a face (and head and figure), we may be sure, bears the plain impress of the crisis of August, 1914. These things are real and count in human values. We must let them teach us what they can. Finally, consider that nothing in the world or above it can develop vigor and promptness and certainty and adapta- bility in one's circulatory mechanism (im- portant and correlative factor in all our living as it is in all our joy) like abundant, 109 Till: INFLUENCE OF JOY gross, outdoor exercise, the richest pi of purely bodily activity. We shall lm\r occasion to refer to this again in our few and simple therapeutic suggestions for those who seek them. no CHAPTER IV The Influence on the Nervous System, Etc. BEFORE considering this influence of joy on the nervous system, a clear understanding of one matter, at once physiologic and psychologic in nature, must be attempted. Its physiological difficulties must neither repel nor discourage us, chiefly, it must be admitted, because we shall leave them to some ingenious future phys- iologist to explain! The matter to which we refer we may not inappropriately term the affective balance. No modern psychological discussion has been more widespread in range or less satisfactory in accepted result than that concerning the real nature of what is fre- quently termed pleasure and pain, includ- ing pleasantness and unpleasantness. The 111 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY reason for this seems at least twofold: On one hand, some psychologists and more philosophers have somehow failed to ap- preciate the modern evidence that tin* problem as stated of old is not in reality one problem but two, very different, namely, that of pleasure and pain and, second, that of the affective balance as we have called it, of the feeling of pleas- antness and unpleasantness. The actual physiologic evidence may not be presented here, but it is the assumption of this little book that pleasure and pain are separate sensations, each with its own nerve ap- paratus. Pleasure and pain proper are powerful incentives to and arousers of emotion ; and often are casual elements of the total emotive behavior and conscious- ness, just as are sensations of smell or of heat or of sound. But the affective bal- ance, the feeling of pleasantness or of un- pleasantness, certainly is an integral part of the emotional phenomena, however 112 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM closely it may be masked, and moreover (especially germane to our present pur- pose), it serves to link the feelings as physio-psychological periods to the general welfare of the personality with an inborn right to be healthy as well as happy, happy as well as hale. No one has formulated the most ad- vanced point of view of the individual as a conscious and dynamic unit better than Harald Hoffding of Copenhagen in his "Outlines of Psychology": "The unity of mental life has its expression not only in memory and synthesis [the "associative memory" of the biologists], but also in a dominant fundamental feeling character- ized by the contrast between pleasure and pain, and in an impulse, springing from this fundamental feeling, to movement and activity." This "dominant funda- mental feeling characterized by the contrast between pleasure and pain" and this "impulse springing from this funda- 113 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY mental feeling" are emphatically the key- notes of the recent sciences of behavior and of psychotherapeutics, and relate the personality closely to its dynamic environ- ment, thereby, to a degree, explaining both. This contrast between agreeableness and disagreeableness has been variously named, and is often spoken of when the usage is unilateral, as the emotional tone or the feeling tone. The most recent expression, perhaps, is affect, but this term in practice leads to some confusion with the familiar word effect; its use, however, generally is expedient, because it tends to emphasize the theoretically im- portant independence and substantiality of the emotional tone, pleasant or unpleas- ant, and so to lend it the due value. The various feelings (including the emo- tions) may be arranged roughly in throe groups according to the tones of i "dominant fundamental feeling", and if 114 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM we do so, we have a table like that which follows : THE AFFECTIVE BALANCE PLEASANT NEUTRAL OR VARIABLE Joy ] Indignation Anger j Emo- Contempt 1 Emo- Intoxication Surprise J tions Love | tions Magnanimity Awe Pride j Mirth Cruelty Admiration Mockery Grewsomeness Arrogance Modesty Haste Audacity Recklessness Humility Avarice Recognition Indifference Benignity Repentance Malignity Condescension Satiety Pity Confidence Security Pusillanimity Courage Curiosity Self-love Self-satisfac- Defiance tion Desire Sensuality Disdain Sympathy Emulation Vanity Enthusiasm Veneration Esteem Vengeance Generosity Glory Greed Hope Impatience UNPLEASANT Emo- tions Fear Grief Hate Shame J Anxiety Apprehension Chagrin Chill Cowardice Desolation Discord Discouragement Disgust Distrust Ennui Envy Irresolution Jealousy Misery Moroseness Nausea Regret Remorse Timidity Vertigo Weariness These lists include all the separate feel- ings which I could find and they are as- sorted strictly according to their respective tones of pleasantness or unpleasantness to the individual "having" them. Inspection of the three lists makes it obvious that nearly all the feelings and emotions have 115 THi; INFLUENCE OF JOY a distinct emotional tone, on one side or the other of the great balance of sentient experience, which above all others whatso- ever divides our mental world --on the one hand the pleasant, on the other the unpleasant. Moreover, it is clear from in- spection of the two longer lists that the self-pleasing feelings in general represent a larger degree of activity and energy expenditure than do the unpleasing feel- ings, which suggest, most of them, limita- tion of movement, depression, relative in- activity. Conspicuous apparent exceptions to this principle (which I have elsewhere (hiistened the stheneuphoric index) are anger and hate and especially fear. But fear, when extreme, is actually paralyzing in its depressive influence. Hate and anger are true exceptions apparently, for special reasons suggested in the next chap- ter, although hate is not inherently and diaracteristically an activity-producing emotion at all. 116 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM The proper biologic standard of the bodily aspects of emotion are to be seen only in the relatively uninhibited, in brutes namely, and infants, and low-grade sav- ages, each naive in his own way. This matter, so essential if we would really understand the nature of emotion, the author has already set out in a little mono- graph on "The Emotion of Joy", 1899. To repeat what was there said : Pursuant to the conditions of civiliza- tion and in particular of man's necessary struggle for existence, an intricate system of restraints and artificial restrictions has been gradually and inevitably developed by many centuries, how many no man dare say, of constantly acting motives leading to continually deeper-fixed modes of will- ing and conduct. Many of these motives for restraint have brought about habits which are in effect instincts, and so numer- ous are these that in civilized lands it is uncommon to find any emotion expressed 117 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY in the case of adults in that perfection of naturalness which elsewhere and among wild animals regularly obtains. In the infant the restraining process is begun regularly in its earliest months, and continues, either by deliberate instruction or by example or else imitatively, through life, none escaping wholly and few in any considerable degree from the all-mastering force of this ad- vantageous restraint of once-natural bod- ily functions. Even the domestic animals display something of this universal influ- ence. . . . The restraining motives are in reality complex and inter-involved to a degree proportionate to the social intri- cacies from which they have arisen ; we can, however, suggest a few of those which art directly to restrain such of the emotional expressions as would be manifestly harm- ful to some degree to their subject, and some of these are here listed, as applicable to ten of the commonest, most pronounced, and well-defined of emotions : 118 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM MOTIVES FOR BODILY RESTRAINT Fear. Desire to be thought brave. Disadvantage of displaying fear to adver- sary. Better power of defense through muscular and other bodily control. Anger. Knowledge of personal and social advantages of peace. Habitual po- liteness. Cowardice. Policy. Sympathy. Love. Modesty. Prudery. Coyness. Honor. Grief. Fear of ridicule. Fear of pity. Modesty. Resignation. Vanity (wrinkles). Policy. Pride. Hate. Advantages of peace. Policy. Politeness. Benevolence. Cowardice. Self- respect. Shame. Pride. Arrogance. Pride. Fear of ridicule. Policy. Politeness. Surprise. Policy. Politeness. Pride. Contempt. Cowardice. Policy. Pride. Sympathy. 119 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY Jo//. - - Dignity. False politeness. Mod- esty. Policy. From reflection, by contrast, on grief and pain. Other-worldliness. Pessimism. Vanity. From such reasons for restraint, of which these are but a few cursory examples, it will be obvious to all that actual objective behavior is not an adequate criterion of subjective emotion. It is, rather, the sym- bolic innervations probably which count, even though they lead scarcely even to an increased tone in the parts of the ad ion- system which they supply. The most important use, perhaps, served by the emotional states tabulated a few pages before is that it makes explicit that a contrast does in general exist in flic feeling-world, with joy at the top of one, the agreeable, side, and terror (paralyzing fear) at the bottom, so to say, of the other. Our next discussion will concern the neural energetics of this dominant contrast, of the affective balance, and will attempt to e\- 120 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM plain the mode of operation of the affects on the nervous system, especially that of joy, so deep at the foundations as well as so prominent on the battlements and ban- ners of the human castle of personality. THE STREAM OF MiND 1 Attentive Consciousness Subconsciousness iiitteis ' - Unconsciousness 1 The figure is from the chapter on the mental process in the writer's "Text-book of Human Physiology." Philadelphia and New York, 1908. 121 I UK INFLUENCE OF JOY The great pedagogical usefulness of James's famous metaphor of "tht stream of cofMcioiUfidM" has not been, as a general thing, fully realized, although noticed sufficiently to be classed by some gical psychologists as one of the " Wundtian myths " ; and fairy stories are good for the soul. The foregoing sketch may repre- sent a vertical transverse section of the stream called Mind, deep and active and complex, with many recondite features. Deter- mining the direction of the stream, to some extent, is the material ground, but this latter is also much influenced and affected by the stream through it. The stream itself comes from some place above its channel and ground, but is inseparable from the latter while it flows. The surface of the stream is not a little like the ever-varying film of attentive consciousness, cognisant of the heavens above and of the earth beneath, and with a continuity, however diaphanous and variable. Beneath the conscious film is the subconsdousness, and this constitutes the more sob* stantial "mass" of the mental stream the portion which has momentum and inertia in relation to the material conditions of the living world. In its "lower" strata, as, indeed, everywhere else, the subconsciousness is in the closest relationship with the body, and fuses with it, considered as *iuryy > n the neurility of the integrating system. The subconsciousness influences and is influenced by not only the bodily energism but by the at t conscious surface above, so that these two are continually in the most active and complex reciprocity. Midstream at the bottom is an obstruction to the flow, and this (a deformity or a cancer, say) influences greatly by disturbance both the subconsciousness and the consciousness (as well as the body itself) by mental eddies, etc. In one corner of the stream-bed is suggested a hidden and secret cave, into which the subconsciousness and even the clear consciousness may at times flow and be deranged thereby ; this is the "family skeleton" or the fixed, bad, instinctive habit. Crawling about on the bottom and more or less undermining it and roiling the water are extraneous creatures of many sorts, all interesting, but frequently, to an unfamiliar understanding, loath- some fixed ideas, obsessions, vagaries, eccentricities, etc. INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM On the other hand, disturbance of the mass of flowing water itself is sure to disturb more or less permanently the "clay" to which it is so closely related. We have thus to think of an acute indigestion from anger, or cardiac paralysis from fear (only that in this correspondence the theory would involve a franker animism than many would readily accept). Various qualities and conditions of the stream and of its banks, the "material" body, likewise suggest themselves. For example, we might usefully compare the feeling-tone, the affect, of the subconscious and conscious mental stream to the relative tem- perature, color, freshness or saltness, clarity or roiliness, etc., of the water in so far as determined by its own nature or by its confining banks. Its momentum and its speed correspond somewhat to the varying impulse to activity, its dynamic status. Its varying influence by the breezes or the gales above it, sunlight or moonlight or the dimmest starlight, rippling over its surface only or shining boldly into its depths, represent but inadequately some of the influences that come from Nature into our wondrous Life. The whole makes an Unity whose only invariability is unend- ing change yet always with a progress ; but whither, as whence, we do not know. "Enthusiasm is the thing which makes the world go round. Without its driving power nothing worth doing has ever been done. Love, friendship, religion, altruism, devotion to career or hobby, all these, and most of the other good things in life, are forms of enthusiasm." These senti- ments, expressed in the words of R. H. Schauffler, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, 123 THE INFU KM K OF JOY suggest the burden of the present chaph r. We may almost summarize this c hapter in the simple statement that joy greatly in- creases and sustains the operative enthu- siasm of the nervous system and of its effectors, the muscles and the glands. Our task now is to tell how. Unless our present neurology be vain, an inner portion of the brain, the "optic thalamus ", at once great, receptive depot of sensory influences and "center" of emotional reaction, distributes nerve im- pulses to the entire cortex of the hemi- spheres, although its means of doing so effectively are by no means understood as yet. The corpus striatum too, another interior brain center across the way from the thalamus, now known to be the regu- lator of voluntary muscular tone, must here have a part, and in this respect is probably the correlate of the adrenal me- dulla, whose secretion (adrenin), as we have seen, adapts the tone of the vegetative 1*4 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM mscle. We may thus think, at least ^ntatively, of the great brain cortex, imposed of nine or ten billion nerve mits, or "neurones", as in continual sceipt of that very complex mass of af- ferent or at least of ascending influence rhich represents every part of the always loving body, and which we term cenes- .thesia including kinesthesia. This energy may be in part environmental, sown in the "receptive fields" of the sense organs and coming more or less directly from them ; in part, however, it must represent fusion products in the spinal gray matter, and come from the mutation of vital energies in the body itself and the central nervous system. 1 In these matters much research is needful for certainty, but the probability in general seems to be as stated. On this hypothesis, it is obvious that 1 For a somewhat new view-point see G. W. Crile: "The Kinetic System" in his "Origin and Nature of the Emotions", Philadelphia and London, 1915. THK INTU i;\( K or JOY the cortex with its billions of interknittcl nerve units represents the nmfhig place, so to say, of gladness and of activity, of rapidly expending energy and of joy. Here is a direct influence of some aspect or other of bodily and mental liveliness or vivacity on the pleasant side of the affect ive balance, since, other things being equal, unusual activity is in itself a delight. The cortex, then, the commonly supposed seat of consciousness because of its preeminence in integration, becomes the direct corre- lator of activity and joy. But more explicitly the nerve-cell bodies have been actually seen to be in some mode each a store of energy, either proprrly neural or nutritive or both. This has been demonstrated especially by Hodge, Dolley, 1 Austin and Sloan, and by others. 2 1 D. H. Dolley. "The Morphologic Changes to Nerve-Cells Resulting from Over-Work to Relation with Experimental Anemia and Shock ". Journal of Medical RtMarch. 1910, XVII. 95-113. 1 See footnote, page 142. 1S8 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM Ample nourishment stands on the one hand for good humor, other things equal, and on the other hand for plump, normal nerve cells eager for action, we may almost say "enthusiastic." But fatigue means fundamental unpleasantness, shrunken, depleted nerve cells, and a strong tendency to bodily and mental rest ; and that last is most agreeable. This general subject of fatigue is an essential one in our present purpose, for in probably an actual majority of cases it is the primary condition of "antijoy." Many have been misled by the studies of the earlier modern physiologists (Mosso, for example) on "muscular fatigue." In the actual living organism, this does not occur ordinarily, for it is one of the func- tions of the nerve cells to serve as a com- plex safety valve for the body and mind and especially for the nervous system it- self, lest they become unduly tired even to exhaustion ; and nutritional depletion is not 127 Till: INFLUENCE OF JOY quickly repaired. This safety-valve action, as already has been hinted, brings about discomfort, then weariness, then sleep! n< under fully normal conditions, and so tends to restoration. Were not most people con- linuously under the stimulation of caffein (from tea or coffee), theobromin (from cocoa and chocolate in liquid or solid forni\ or nicotin (from tobacco), this natural resting-mechanism would be seen to be far more efficient and more nearly universal in its action than it appears to be under present restless conditions. But aside from the omission of these three chief alkaloidal principles from one's diet, there is another efficient means for securing abundant sleep that is open to all who are not already beyond its use, namely, gross muscular exercise, especially tramping and skating in the open air and swimming in the open water. (Auto- mobiling will not answer the require- ment.) Such exercise normally fatigues 128 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM at least two thirds of the entire muscle- mass of the body and thus demands sleep by a sensation of fatigue which, be it noted, is a distinctly pleasant experience, wholly unlike the wretchedness of nerve fatigue proper, containing elements of nervousness. In 1913 C. M. Gruber made observations (presumably under Cannon's direction) which add an element wholly new to our physiology of fatigue and rest. It sup- plies one more function to this seemingly very versatile and puissant secretion that we have spoken of usually as adrenin. This is known to be a doubly rotating substance closely related chemically to some of the putrefactive products from meat. This last is a fact highly sugges- tive, it may appear, to the shouters for consistent vegetarianism, for it may have much importance in explaining the lack of initiative, obvious as "Oriental passivity" and fatalism, and in the persisting rela- Till: INFLUENCE OF JOY tive barbarism or worse, in races of long- standing vegetative habit, they are inert from necessity, it appears, not from choice. This relatively new scientific material on the physiology of adrenin, supported by ample and exact work on the irritability of muscles and its loss and recovery, sho^ says Cannon, 1 that the substance has "a very remarkable action, that of restoring to a muscle its original ability to respond to stimulation, after that has been largely lost by continued activity through a long period. What rest will do only after an hour or more, adrenin will do in five min- utes or less/* Applying this statement in our present argument for the continual expediency of good-humored busy-ness, t energetic and joyous activity of mind and of body, as a cure for dullness of spirit of whatever origin, we find it a new expla- 1 For the privilege of making this quotation from "Bo- lily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage*', we are greatly in- debted to the publishers of the book. D. Appleton & Co. 130 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM nation of the general pleasantness of emo- tional experiences, however fatiguing on the ordinary basis of widespread neuro- muscular activity. Did space allow, we should here con- sider certain organic factors of the theory of music that are not yet common knowledge nor even enough appreciated in the technical science of music; but the consideration of these must be post- poned to a possible exposition elsewhere. Just here it must suffice to point out how primary and how universal and (usually) how intense is the joy in real, that is, re- actionary, rhythmic music, and that too whether it come from the single series of sounds of one violin or from the mighty complexity of the orchestra, with its ninety or more instruments. The aberrations of the artificialists pass one after the other and are forgot, save by musical historians, but the harmonies that penetrate our brain cortexes and by that door our glad- 131 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY dened souls, which make our muscles throb and dance in response, be it even a "dead march" or a requiem, will endure forev and rejoice the world. In such music, joy and activity (unless artificially inhibited on the common principle already explained, see pages 57, 126) actually coalesce, and their essential identity is directly observable. In the dance, which is music personified or personality musicized (may we devise the word), as one pleases to state it, this identity is still more obvious but in theory masked by sundry extraneous conditions of dancing. In both the dance, however, and in our enjoyment of music of the strongly rhythmic kind, the kinesthelie and cenesthetic factor is obvious enough, and kinesthesia is the kinetic mental index of the body's general activity. The epithelium, or gland tissue, in simi- lar way, but to a very much less degree psychologically, is concerned with the re- lations of joy to the nervous system, one INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM of whose "effectors", in the fashionable neurology of the day, it is. The reader need only observe this factor of his or her emotional behavior for a few days, to ap- preciate the part played by the digestive, mammary, sexual, sudoral, and lachrymal glands. Secretory adaptation, as we have seen, is a duty of the autonomic nerves. Here, too, to be systematic, our remarks on the proven direct relationship between adrenin and the action of the sympathetic (see page 13) must be recalled, especially the circumstance that the action of the concerned nervous system, the consequent contraction, in some cases, of smooth muscle, and the putting forth of adrenin, are all indispensable parts of the one and the same process of increasing certain vegetative activities. The adrenin, then, like the dextrose of the blood, is a factor in the influence of pleasant emotion through the agency of the nervous system. There is undeniably a strong element 133 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY of autosuggestion in many cases of con- tinued dissatisfaction and unhappiness, often rising to an obsession, or to what ^ I < > r ton Prince l terms a subconscious psychosis occasioning it may be a "fear- neurosis." "Old Chremes" ("Heauton- tim", I, 2) reminds us that "Parents, friends, fortunes, country, birth, alliance, etc., ebb and flow with our conceit; please or dis- please, as we accept and construe them, or apply them to ourselves." Of course auto- suggestion and habit really are frequent elements in contentment, many having fallen into this slough without ever realiz- ing they are there and many others without the means to climb out or the psycho- therapeutic friends or advisers to pull them out. Says Prince (page 368): "It is ob- vious that in everyday life, when by argu- ments, persuasion, suggestion, punishment, exhortation, or prayer we change the view- point of a person, we do so by building up 1 Morton Prince, "Tlic Unconscious", New York, 1914. 134 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM complexes which shall act as settings and give new meanings to his ideas. I may add, if we wish to sway him to carry this new viewpoint to fulfillment through ac- tion, we introduce into the complex an emo- tion which by the driving force of its impulses shall carry the ideas to practical fruition." The ideal emotion for this purpose, both as a matter of personal pleasant experience and as a matter of scientific theory, in part set forth in this book, is joy, organic happiness. Both through the psychology of interest and by its own physiologic conditions, it may be, gladness makes more effective all kinds of suggestion. This becomes, therefore, a plainly important matter, how- ever far from plain itself, in the beneficial action of joy, and to suggestion we may properly, if briefly, turn our attention. Its theory, like its practice, has been very largely discussed since the days of Braid and the early hypnotists, but its precise 135 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY neurology awaits real knowledge of the brain's mode of action. With its large practical importance in many directions of life no one can for a moment be in dispute, education, therapeutics, indus- trial publicity, at least, are already greatly its debtors. Whatever Eddyism may do toward making its devotees happier and healthier it accomplishes, it is likely, through suggestion and a habit of joyous- ness! On the perhaps obsolete theory of the human cortex which maps it out wholly in horizontal areas, some motor, some sen- sory, and some (entirely because they arc electrically irresponsive!) "associative", no satisfactory theory of suggestion is at hand. On the more recent embryologic supposi- tions of Brodmaiiii, Kolton, 1 etc. (namely, that the architecture of the cortex should ' J. S. Bolton, "A Omt ri!,,,t i..n to the Localisation of Cerebral Function, Baaed on the Clinioo- Pathological Study of M Diaeaae". Brain, XXXIII. 1't. 139. 136 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM be considered in layers from without in- ward rather than in more or less homo- geneous areas side by side), suggestion has at least an imaginable neuronic basis, and its close relationship to pleasant emotion as well. It will be recalled that the two logically opposed yet practically complementary phases of the individual (vegetative im- pulse and voluntary control) have been insisted upon as a fundamental principle essential in most psychological discussions. In the case of suggestion, this opposition is vital. Ordinarily, the action, "enthusi- asm" supplied by the vegetative mechan- ism (and mentalized by the lower layers of the great cortex, perhaps ?) is made more rational and personally adapted by the continuous supervision and restraint of the personal will and intelligence and feelings. In suggestion, on the other hand, the personal-control apparatus is for the time in abeyance, oftentimes by deliberate 137 HIE INFLUENCE OF JOY (OHM nt and often too unconsciously, but then for the most part only when the "aura" of the suggested idea or behavior is enjoyable, at least to a slight degree. Keatinge, 1 in his admirable work on peda- gogic suggestion, notes as the fifth of the required characters of a suggestive idea that it fc< must bring pleasure or pain", and most of the conditions of successful sug- gestion noted emphasize likewise the neces- sity of an affect, an emotional kick or tang, to give the idea vigorous effectiveness. Suggestions inherently pleasant furnish di- rectly their own affect, while it is only under conditions where fear may be used as a threat (as in an English boys 9 school) that the unpleasant suggestion commonly exists at all. Pleasantness therefore, it is seen, is generally a conspicuous part of successful suggestion ; it may even be not 1 M. W. Keatinge, "Suggestion in Education ", London, 1907. A pioneer book to which there should be many successors, for it is an almost un tilled 6eld. 138 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM improperly considered one of its inherent factors. Suggestion then is the more or less im- pulsive determination of a motive through influence exerted on the associative "re- sultants" of the cortex, and implies a less- ened control from the more purely volun- tary and personal correlations as well usually as a narrowing of the field of consciousness. These conditions would seem to be met neurologically, were one bold enough to suggest it, by supposing on the Brodman-Bolton idea of the cortex a strong afferent or ascending flood of neural influence through the optic thalamus (emo- tional "center") into the cortical mid- layers so as to impair somewhat for the time the personal restraint, with the sub- stitution therefor of partial motor control from the incoming neurility. Problems of hysteria, of subconsciousness, and of Freudian suggestion, sublimation, and submersion would seem to be easier of 139 'I Hi: IM'l.t KNCE OF JOY understanding, should ever this neural basis be generally certified. Already we have noted briefly the con- ditioned secretory reflexes (page 76)
  • - red in a way and described by Pavlov. The matter conies into th< present con- nection as a demonstration for the use of all and sundry of the ease with which even the most arbitrary and unnatural associ- ations are developed and fixed even in the least voluntary parts of the nervous system. During the last year Watson, 1 psychologist at Johns Hopkins, has demonstrated not only how readily such senori-secretory com- plexes are created and fixed in man, but also that the same enlightening facility belongs likewise to the motor reflexes (as well as to the secretory). Such work is making the framework of the subconscious mind so solid and sub- stantial, so plain and obvious, that no 1 J. B. Watson. "The Place of the Conditioned Reflex in Psychology", Psychological Review, XXIII, *, March, 1916. 140 INFLUENCE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM old-fashioned psychologist, even one who still limits mind to consciousness, can cavil. For the sufferer from bad habits of emotion, "temperament", worry, neu- rasthenia, "antijoy", all this work must in- evitably serve as a rock of salvation, so that no one of them henceforward can doubt that his relief lies in his own personal persistence in the effort to be renewed. Thus, even in such sketchy and utterly inadequate outline, pleasant emotion, or- ganic happiness, is seen indubitably to further the all-essential functions of the nervous system in its work of integrating the parts of the body and the body as a whole with its ever-changing spiritual and material surroundings. To any one familiar with the supremacy of this integrating fabric of energy paths in the individual organism, this phase alone of joy's influ- ence were almost enough to show its prac- tical value in our life. But, as we have seen, the musculatures, both voluntary 141 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY and vegetative, are part and parcel, func- tionally speaking, of the nervous system, and so are all the glands. Thus almost the entire mechanism of efficiency directly benefits by the "enthusiasm" which good humor and happiness involve, and it is this mechanism which at once conditions and makes possible the progressive per- sonality of man and woman. Professor C. Judson Herrick, "An Introduction to Neurol- ogy/* Philadelphia and London. 1915, is judged to be the best book on neurology for laymen so far published. w CHAPTER V The Love-Life E are authoritatively told that "the Lord loveth a cheerful giver ", and surely love is the very index of generosity, and love and joy are so closely interwoven that normal life forever must be full of wonderment, and of a degree of admiration which merges into active gladness. De Morgan puts it well: "All is not Vanity, preach whoso might ! So long as Love itself the mystery of all mysteries shall remain unsolved, there is an immeasurable music beyond the 'octave-stretch forlorn' of our fingers, an unfathomable ocean beyond our little world of pebbles on the shore." And " Think, when our one soul understands The great Word which makes all things new, 143 TIII-: INTUTAC i: OF JOY When earth breaks up and heaven expands, How will the change strike me and you In the house not made with hands? 44 Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine. Your heart anticipate my heart, You must be just before, in 1 See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the divine ! " But who could have expected this When we two drew together first Just for the obvious human bliss, To satisfy life's daily thirM With a thing men seldom miss : [ROBERT BROWNING.] "Love watcheth", we find in "The- Imitation of Christ ", "and, sleeping, sluni- bereth not. Though weary, love is not tired ; though pressed, it is not straitened ; though alarmed, it is not confounded ; but as a lively flame and burning torch, it forces its way upwards, and securely passes through all. If any man love, he knowrth what is the cry of this voice." 144 THE LOVE-LIFE No one in the world has more beautifully or strongly stated still another aspect of love than E. R. Sill: " A troop of babes in Summer-Land, At heaven's gate, the children's gate : One lifts the latch with rosy hand, Then turns, and dimpling, asks her mate ' What was the last thing that you saw ? ' 4 1 lay and watched the dawn begin, And suddenly, through the thatch of straw, A great, clear morning-star laughed in.' * And you ? ' 'A floating thistle-down Against June sky and cloud-wings white. 5 * And you ? ' 'A falling blow, a frown It frights me yet ; oh, clasp me tight ! ' * And you ? ' * A face through tears that smiled ' The trembling lips could speak no more, The blue eyes swam, the lonely child Was homesick, even at heaven's door." l With such a variety of aspects of love (and self-love is not represented) and each plainly a delight not only to the lover but J For permission to quote this poem we are indebted to the publishers of Mr. Sill's poems, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. 145 TIII: IM u i;\( i, or JOY in general also to the loved, the close re- lationship of joy to this one other founda- tion of our living scarce needs exposition. And yet there are some special consider- ations to be noted, even though love is known by all to be the very quintessence of joy. One of these things is that joy is also the very quintessence of love, in that it stands for satisfaction, is indeed satisfaction per- sonified. Just as body reduced to its ulti- mate material terms is motion, and mind reduced to its ultimate mental terms is experience, so joy, gladness, delight, hap- piness, rapture, pleasure, bliss thus reduced is satisfaction. This concept can be sim- plified no further save by the make-shift of saying that it is wished for by every one under normal conditions ; that all animals wish it in some or other of its as- pects. Love includes every phase of that desirable experience. It is to be especially noted, however, Jthat frequently pain and 146 THE LOVE-LIFE even agony give keen satisfaction, as for example to the mother, to the martyr, and to the hero, at times. But pain which is continuous for long breaks the courage inevitably through ner- vous depression which in turn has its basis in neuronal depletion. In hysteria, con- ditions less organic produce much less injury to the personality. But our proper topic in this chapter is more expediently the practical love-life of the everyday round, the love-life of sweethearts married or only betrothed, of parents and children, of brothers and sis- ters, of lifelong, intimate friends. Nothing in this great world is sadder than the occa- sional mortal who would have these but has them not. Children no longer, in civilized lands at least, have to lead years of loneliness and wretchedness, for the universal process of association soon gives them at least a vicarious love for those with whom society bids them live; but 147 Tin: I\TU i:\ri: OF JOY old people and folk who are growing old alone still suffer more than they should for lack of love and thereby of joy, haunted by the joys that have been and are for them no more. Next to the abused and neglected child, cold and hungry, the most joyless thing on earth is the lonely old woman or old man, whether rich or poor. On the other hand, as we look about, on the opposite side of the art gallery of life, the paintings and the sculpture are more joyous. The dominant picture is the nor- mal family, at first two, and then three, four, five, six, or more. Here's joy typified, at first partly selfish, although in the guise of loving the other, but gradually sub- limating itself or being sublimated and transferred, rejuvenated, into the next generation. And here are we at another of the deep secrets of the nature of joy : its continual close alliance sometimes with actual youths and always with youthfulness, whose very 148 THE LOVE-LIFE spirit joy is. The Preface essentially "says my say" in this particular, and it need not be repeated : the adult is not properly superior to the child any more than man is to woman, only different ; equivalent, though not equal. But "middle age" (and that usually indicates about two-thirds age) has no other task to do in the years to come more essential than Rejuvenation. The rejuvenation that is referred to is not the cosmetic process, external or at least no farther internal than the molar teeth; it is not the systematic endeavor of good dear Grandma to recall herself at the joyous age of twenty; "the man with the broken ear ", about which About tells us, was far more successfully restored ! The rejuvenation intended is that kind of living (not thinking) backwards which brings real joy, and not its pretense, into the heart and brain and muscles, lending them years additional of life. If, as is likely, we may accept Minot's 149 Till- INFU TACK OF JOY dictum that rejuvenation depends on the increase of the nuclei of body cells, pri- marily organs of reproduction, the pro- duction of offspring even in technical bio- logic terms is a process by which the parents tend to become young again. Psy- chologically the principle holds quite as well, and our children, our normal " nuclear increase ", lead us back, if we are wise and natural, to Halcyon, the telluric land of hap- piness. Without children, the love-life of the really normal man and woman is apt to be at first (after the novelty of the new association has inevitably worn away) only an empty but wistful shadow of content- ment which later sometimes withers into a specter, if not, as more of the years go by, into an ogre, a were- wolf, a lonely honor unpleasant to contemplate. This rejuve- tnitimi of one generation by int with the next is a matter of much practical importance too little cultivated. Not only as a means of joy, proper, but THE LOVE-LIFE as an incentive to far greater physical ac- tivity, is this particular phase of the love- life greatly of import in the practical life of parents. This need not be only a pleas- ing picture dear to the poets, the para- graphers, and writers of booklets on hap- piness, but it may be made a most useful and profitable element of the parents' life because it serves not only to make happier the years as they pass but also to make them more numerous, to lengthen life by postponing, under the influence of enthusiasm and effective happiness, the in- evitable sclerotic process. These are real things, not ghosts, a perfectly practicable procedure of a father or mother at thirty- five or at forty to do himself or herself good, morally, mentally, and physically, and meanwhile, under good conditions, to be giving the child an ideal start in life. Berle 1 has developed the theoretic possi- 1 A. A. Berle, "The School in the Home", New York, 1912; and "Teaching in the Home", New York, 1915. These are 151 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY hilities of this association of parents and children farther than most writers, but has naturally emphasized the education of the children more than the rejuvenation and the happiness of the parents. John Locke, Witte, Sidis, Wiener, Stoner, Bruce are other writers of well-known books aimed in the same significant direction. From whatever angle we may view rejuvenation, few, God be thanked ! can miss sympathy with the brief song of "a Harvard man 44 Dreams that the heart doth hold Shall the later years forget ? Days of the drifted gold, Shall you fade and wane and set ? Let the moon grow cold, let the stars grow old, But stay ye a little, yet outlines of a system extremely vital for education, especially if integrated with developed playground work and with basal principles of sense- train ing such as Seguin and Montessori have suggested. Along this pleasant highway surely lies the inevitable educational reform. 152 EPITOME The five preceding chapters have at- tempted to make fairly understood the scientific interdependence of emotion in- herently pleasant and of vigor in the basal physiologic functions, namely, nutrition, circulation, coordination, and reproduction. In doing this, be it noted, we have not catered unduly to the agreeable fashion of repeating interesting and numerous actual instances (many volumes of them are at hand), but for the most part have discussed principles, however superficially and fitfully. Without being explicit at any point, a real and firm ground in all this material, so far, of "words, words, words" (Shake- speare), is the fact that primitive gladness is properly a food to personality, rather than 153 TIIK 1NTMKNCE OF JOY a stimulant. This opposition and diiFer- ence is important in physiology, and both fundamental and far-reaching. In my longer lecture-course in the physiology of exercise, we are in the habit of considering and of discussing stimulants (as part of tin* important work in dietetics) in two classes: The natural stimulants are chiefly bodily exercise, joy, lean meat, cocoa, coffee, and tea, and the unnatural and more artificial stimulants alcohol (properly a depressant, and stimulating only because it poisons and so checks certain inhibi- tions), tobacco, and certain drugs, such as cocaine, strychnin, hashish, and opium. Inspection shows that two thirds of the more natural stimulants ace also foods; for tea and coffee feed the nerve cells, it is now likely, or at least, serve as < hromatin- sparers. Certainly joy and its close kindred physical exercise are the mo-t natural of all the stimulants, and Frc in 1901 demonstrated the largely sthenic in- 164 EPITOME fluence of bodily exercise on the organism's actual working power, so that we know that exercise at least is a true stimulant. Bodily activity, if thus shown to be both a natural and an efficient stimulant to life, certainly wins the same potency for gladness; for gladness, joy, pleasant en- thusiasm, are but the other aspects of normal organic alertness, vivacity, and efficient action. Both bodily activity and organic happi- ness are other, names for "holiday", pro- vided the action be of such a nature rela- tive to the agent that it is relaxation from the deadly strenuosity of our present rest- less mode of living which kills multitudes before their natural time. But as we have said, joy is food, not only a stimulant : it supports while it urges on. It is almost as if the old Roman farmer had used as an ox-goad ("stimulus") not a single sharpened piece of iron held in a handle, but an ever-renewed succulent 155 TIIK INFLUENCE OF JOY stalk of sugar cane which the patient animal was allowed forthwith to eat, tin helping to make him both strong and ac- tive, contented and comely. And cer- tainly it is true in the long life-run, and perhaps, who knows? also in the timeh lime to come thereafter, that the victory of life as well as the victory over death goes to the Happy, especially to the appreciatively happy, above all others. The best that is is theirs, be their every other condition whatsoever it may. 156 PART TWO THE NECESSITY OF JOY CHAPTER VI Work and Play WE have built our little bridge out of such materials as we had, and even if it be a bit shaky, or at least swaying to the breeze, we shall venture to pass over it, as we safely may, to live on the other side. Even as we land, we read of JOY is A REFLEX OF THE NORMAL LlFE-ACTIVITY, AND THEREFORE AN OBLIGATION. LEAVE INDO- LENCE BEHIND, ALL YE WHO WOULD ENTER HERE. BY AUTHORITY. 159 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY Above all else indeed (the present \a\ contends) is this "slogan" char- acteristic of the life of Joy land. Surely it is as old as written wisdom and as trite as advice, yet surely too, nothing in the whole long run of human living has a more timely, necessary force than it. In- dolence is in some respects the worst of crimes the normal adult can commit against himself. But how misleading is the etymology of the term itself! Trench, quoted in Webster's Dictionary, also notes this: "As there is a greal truth wrapped up in 'diligence', what a lie [sic] 9 on the other hand, lurks at the root of our pres- ent use of the word ' indolence'! This is from 'in* and 'doleo', not to grieve; and indolence is thus a state in which we have no grief or pain : so that the word as we now employ it seems to affirm that indulgence in sloth and ease is that which would constitute for us the absence of all pain." Certainly the word "lie" is most 160 WORK AND PLAY appropriate and exact, whoever in the past started its present connotation. It suggests early Italian or French aristoc- racy when at its falsest, a life-model as far from the wholesome ideal of active and really thoughtful modern men and women as pain is from pleasure. This change is a hopeful sign, even if only temporary, of recent years, the indolent dude and the idle millionaire are no longer respected by thinking men or women. And popular disrespect and scorn, if they be unanimous and lasting enough, are sure to make any- thing whatever unfashionable. The psychobiologic basis of this obli- gation to be continually active and thereby content if not joyous, already has been set forth, and so needs only brief summary here. Deepest at its roots lies the principle that it is use which, by "vasomotion", reg- ulates the blood supply to any active part, so that disuse, absolute or relative, means a proportionate degeneration of the mech- 161 THK INFU KNCE OF JOY concerned. Moreover, owing to the universal action of habituation, activity of any sort which is not somewhat enlarged or at least maintained continuously, tends to lose its conscious voluntary aspect and to degenerate into a mechanical and so less joyous process. Lastly, for our pn ent discussion, activity makes the nutri- tive draft move more rapidly, and in consequence the vital fires burn more enthusiastically. Elsewhere I have ex- pressed this 1 and explained it as a rai>inoli<- efficiency. Volun- tary or "personal" bodily action involves mental activity, just as the latter, for modern psychology, in a sense depends on bodily functioning, namely, on that of the neuro-musculo-glandular apparatus which by any one of eight or ten media might express the psychic intentions embraced. I G. V. N. Dearborn, "A Syllabus of the Physiology of Exercise" (about sixty thousand words), 3d ed., Cambridge, 1916. 162 WORK AND PLAY In the long run it is activity, one's effort and worth, that count and not often chance. An epigrammarian would tell us, as the re- sult of much actual experience, that " four- leaved clovers" do not hide, but are as easily seen when found as their trifoliate sisters. Fortuna's dice are not loaded, surely; but neither are Baalzebub's. Activity, then, "of both mind and body", adapted to the individual needs in quantity and, to a less degree, in quality, is a sub- stantial biologic need and, in the long run, a biologic necessity. In approximate terms, the more general the activity is and the freer, the less restrained, the more satisfaction or contentment or actual joy pervades it, for then the greater is the "rejuvenation." Such activity or vivac- ity is indeed a true biologic need and one that nothing whatever can possibly re- place. Indolence and idleness, however, are not only, so to speak, negatively un- 163 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY pleasant by the deprivation of the joy of activities, but positively unpleasant by inherent reasons of physiology and psy- chology. Indolence, in short, is actually fatiguing and therefore really unpleas- ant, especially to one who has experienced its opposite. This unpleasantness we of course term ennui, tedium, or boredom, or, very closely allied, disgust. Few states of mind and body have in them more real misery of the common sort, and there is no degree of wretchedness that drives so many, of their own free act, beyond the Great Divide. I believe it to be one of man- kind's worst enemies and all the worse because always wholly needless. Were not the large majority of us actually obliged to toil for livelihood, it would be of far greater importance still as an economic problem of humanism. As it is, ennui continuously fatigues and worries thou- sands, many of whom do not know what it is that keeps them unhappy, "with every- 164 WORK AND PLAY thing to make them happy" save them- selves, outcasts from the Kingdom of Happiness who have been condemned by a false understanding of the true values of the common life. Like most other things, sooner or later this form of misery reduces itself to the lowest terms of un- fitness of some kind, unintelligence or "abulia", either in the individual or in others on whom in some way he has been or is dependent. In other words, so often heard, "the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine." "Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the rev- enue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is re- sisted by an overcharge of energy in the 165 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY eiti/en, and the life glows with a fir flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigours or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of circumstance." [EMERSON : " Compensation."] The indolent person loses out of his one short succession of years the truest and most reliable kind of happiness, namely, that which is inherent in, and proportionately part of the life process itself. The idler misses the flower of his ever passing days. As we have striven to comprehend, the category Life is comprised of complex processes of reaction and of adaptation that are pleasant, and also of an immanent agreeableness which involves the activity of the entire personality. Thus is that which we have, for convenience, termed joy, an obligation, and when the activity in- volved is normal, it is also a necessity be- 160 WORK AND PLAY cause inseparable properly from the active life itself. Although by no means exhaustive, the terms work and play include perhaps most of the personal activities, although it is obvious that there are many occupations which are one of these as much as the other, and strictly, therefore, neither of them. This is as it should be on physi- ologic grounds, since the distinction be- tween work and play is wholly secondary, dependent on criteria extra-physiologic and for the most part psychological or still more arbitrary and personal. One recalls, of course, what is perhaps the most familiar fictional example of this easy transition, in the fence-whitewashing of Clemens's "Tom Sawyer", drudgery converted not only into work, but into frank and conscious play. We need not then attempt to separate work and play ; for our purpose, it is enough to think of both of them as forms of activity, of the contrary of indolence. As such, 167 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY with restrictions, each is a delight, and one to which normal living sets no limitations other than those which put an end to the normal life itself. Despite R. C. Cabot's assertion 1 that "there is an instinct too against the vivisection of this fragile element -joy- from out the tissue of working life", we must try, but very briefly, to analyze a little the factors concerned. But first we must enter a disclaimer against this con- cept of joy as a "fragile" thing in our lives, something too subtle to be safely handled. Quite on the contrary, the satisfactions of work stand the severe common handling of a world of rough and common folk, and removed for a time by toil, excessive or ill-fitted work, or by a period of indolence outlasting the need of rest, it recun and leads back the man or 1 K. C. Cabot, "What Men Live By ". Boston and New York, 1914. Readable essays on Work. Play, Love, and Worship 1>\ a wise physician to whom people have to listen, so human is the 168 WORK AND PLAY woman of average sense to the work in which there is satisfaction merging into joy which does not fail. This fact re- mains, despite the all too obvious cer- tainty that much of the world's work still is toil or drudgery. It shouts loudly and incessantly to the "lords and masters of the world" to use their science and their mastership to adapt the work or, when below the adaptable grade, to perform it as soon as may be with machinery. It were a shame to designate as work, which is the normal expenditure of personal energy, that drudgery or toil which Millet has drawn and Markham made horrific : " Down all the stretch of Hejl to its last gulf There is no shape more terrible than this More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed More filled with signs and portents for the soul More fraught with menace to the universe." Yet no one is blamable, "censure" is due to none, and the signs and portents and 169 TIIK INFLUENCE OF JOY menace will gradually lose themselves in the ever-progressive melioration of an evolving world. Let us join once more with President Bartlett's far- and loi famed Dartmouth "slogan", "O, hasten the day!" But let us remember mean- while the surprising paradox between our meager life-span (although all we have) and the time which the development of a planet inevitably takes. Then we will not be impatient, or get excited, or forget the basal optimism which underlies t normal activity of every mortal born. "Nature will not have us fret and fume. . . . When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance meeting, or the Tran- scendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, 'So hot? my little sir.' ' And this heat is the wholly unwarranted egotism of a soul outsoaring its mortality. For our purpose then, and properly everywhere, work and play mean the 170 WORK AND PLAY systematic expenditure of a not excessive amount of the energy of mind and body (empirical in several forms, but probably aspects of one Essence which perhaps does not appear) in ways suited more or less closely to the individual. Monographs of description of this expenditure and of this energy might almost be condensed into the little proposition : The energetic living of life in its human fullness, vegeta- tive as well as voluntary. This living gives joy above every other persistent procedure. Some for therapeutic purposes and others for dogmatic reasons have urged that this living must be as objective as possible with a minimum of self-consciousness. While emphasizing the entire necessity of this in therapeutic practice, where hysterical egotism or neurasthenic hypochondria are almost universal, still there should be a limit. One is happier, in greater enjoy- ment, when he realizes that he is so, and 171 THI; IMU I:\CK OF JOY thi> fact is of no small practical importance. Its explanation is psychologically as .simple as it is sound: the fundamental principle of contrast; the same water feels dis- tinctly warm or plainly cold to the same hand according to the latter's immedi- ately preceding temperature-experie nee. This physiologic influence, probably basal in the train's action, is reenforced by the powerful suggestion of enjoyment. It is this same means, suggestion, plus the additional or multiplied activity ob- tained, that makes continual association with young folk or even with children the important instrument of rejuvenation to people at middle life or beyond that which it obviously is. Here again the strange false "dignity" and false pride (which in reality is but vanity) of many grown people have come in to injure the reputation of a wholly estimable practice. \\ ho would be bold enough to say, how- ever, that the occupations of the child, his IT* WORK AND PLAY busy-ness or his play, are in general of less account than the occupations of an adult? And assuredly no means is at hand for more certainly "keeping young" than by systematic participation in the joyousness and in the physical activities of the youthful. To do this one by no means needs to make a fool of himself (in sooth is "no fool like an old fool") by pretending powers that are no longer present; but rather is it the mental attitude of sympathy and sugges- tion which counts most. "All things in proportion" certainly, but long and happy life demands inevitably, both mentally and physically, the juvenescence of general joyous activity. 173 CHAPTER VII Worry and the Glory of the World IN the slang sentiment of the day, - Some one's always taking the joy out of life ! At times it may be the ego! is- tic and thoughtless neighbor, but the world around and every day that "some one" is no less a personification than Worry the Fiend. He is the typical "antijoy"; from every point of view, this kill-joy, the Satan of our day as of no other, stands for both, the logical opposite and the practical, ptM -i- tent enemy and destroyer of happiness. If we would define in our minds the contrary of joy, it is expedient so to consider worry. From a recent booklet * it may not be 1 G. V. N. Dearborn. "Nerve- Waste", Health-Education League Booklet No. 37, Boston, 2d ed., 1914. This Series, written mostly by medical fptntKftt, has much popular appeal for the preservation of health. 174 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD amiss to repeat the present writer's general views about this important actual factor of our lives : Pre-eminently notorious among the common modes of nerve extravagance and waste is worry. This is the sheerest wastefulness in all our lives expendi- ture with nothing and worse than nothing in return. Worry is the very stock-gam- bling of extravagance in vital forces with- out possibility of a "bull market" or a "bear market" to recoup in, dice-throw- ing with the dice loaded always against you. In the terms of our discussion, every hour spent in worrying about some evil, whether real or imaginary, is a large and wholly needless check drawn on your bank bal- ance of bodily and mental strength. If one borrow trouble, the rate of interest that one has to pay is rank usury. We may define worry as the habit of wasting the soul and the body on evils that have not come. Many of its victims might 175 TIIK INFLUENCE OF .|nY properly define it in the same terms thai General Sherman used in regard to war, - hrief, but at once philosophic and expres- sive. James Russell Lowell never wrote anything more true than his statement that "the misfortunes hardest to bear are those that never come," for the human im- a.uination running riot is very apt to make things seem worse than kindly Nature often allows them actually to be. Worry is described by the physiolo- gists as essentially a form of more or chronic fear, fear that something evil is going to happen. Fear, of course, does not well become the strong man or woman ; although, as every one who is grown up knows too well, some worries cannot be avoided in this troubled life (fear of the illness and death of friends, for example). These must be met as is fitting to the brave. Since the valuable physiologic work of Austin and Sloan on the nerve cells of 176 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD rabbits, we know the actual effects which fear produces in the nervous systems of animals, and we know that the effect is very serious and widespread in the body. Worry must produce this same effect, and often to a greater degree even than a period of terror, which of necessity can last but a short time, so exhausting is it to the brain. Such facts (and they are really facts) ought to be more preventive of extrav- agance in worry .than any sort of mere logic would be. The ordinary anti-worry argument of course reads : If what you worry about can be prevented or cured, prevent or cure it rather than suffer so ; if it cannot be cured or prevented, why waste energy and time suffering because of it? Excellent logic, certainly, but woe- fully imcompetent, as most of us well know, to restore the wasting brain cells, or to abolish unaided this worst of bad habits. 177 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY The reason why so few worriers adopt the frequently expressed advice not to worry is that worry has the emotional basis just now suggested, that it is a, feeling, with a tremendous motive power behind and beneath it, hard to be controlled. We need not pause to describe in detail the physical and mental effects and conditions of fear and worry; suffice it to say that its depressing influence arises and is felt in well-nigh every portion of the body, bowels, stomach, heart, blood vessels, lungs, brain, muscles and nerves, and therefore unfits its victim for every free and useful ad. The motive power of much of our human activity is emotion or feeling, and those emotional states that depress the nerve centers tend to paralyze action, lessening at the same time our desire to do things, and our power of doing them well when we try. Here it is that happiness comes into the 178 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD matter. Multitudes of men and women learn sooner or later that not always, by any means, as we have often heard, is the race to the swift, or the battle to the strong; often, very often indeed, one inclines to think that both go to the happy, lords of the world. Saleeby puts it well, although perhaps too strongly, when he says: "There is no human end but happiness, high or low. Its one absolute negation is neither poverty nor ill health, nor material failure, nor yet starvation 'he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast/ The one abso- lute negation of happiness is worry or discontent. A prosperous society, con- sisting of strenuous worried business men, who have no time to play with their children, or listen to great music, or gaze upon the noble face of the sky, or com- mune with the soul . . . such a society may be as efficient as a beehive, as large as London, and as wealthy, but it stul- 179 Till-: INFI-I KNCE OF JOY tifies its own ends, and it would be better not at all." Not only work, but rest, likewise, is really efficient only when the soul is care- free ; this freedom from worry, as Saleeby has so importantly pointed out, is the very essence and the quintessence of every real holiday. There is, too, a fine philosophy that makes of the hard-worked life a holi- day, that refuses to be worried whatever come, trusting, with Tennyson, that "all is well/' But it is not only work and rest alone that are interfered with by the bad habit of worrying it disturbs also some of the most fundamental conditions of good health. No mental circumstance so de- cidedly harms digestion and assimilation, or causes so commonly the nervous dyspeptic habit. TliU in itself mean> a large group of harmful influences, little short of actual disease. Here we have one of the * vicious circles' the doctors 180 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD talk about, worry impairs digestion, which in turn leads to more worry through the injury to the delicate structures of the brain and nerves. This general condition more than any- thing else is the cause frequently of the premature loss of beauty in women and of youthfulness in men, for both men and women age rapidly and become wrinkled betimes when unhappiness and the dys- pepsia of hurry and worry are the demons of their passing days. Insomnia, also, accounts for some of this, and, as we have already pointed out, worry is one of in- somnia's most frequent causes. Worry is distinctly a matter of habit, and one which, like most bad habits, is far more easily acquired than abandoned. It is largely a matter of will-power whether it be allowed to take possession of the individual, body and soul, or not. The causes of our worry are often more purely physical than we suppose. 181 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY Mind and body are in the closest relation to each other, and, strangely enough, some- times conditions which seem to us to be purely mental, and perhaps even beyond our control, so that we worry about them, turn out, like our other depressed moods, to be based on simple physiological de- rangements, temporary, and easily cur- able. A brisk walk in the open air, a vi-il to a vigorous and jovial friend, even a cathartic, frequently sweeps the worri- some cobwebs out of a troubled mind. We cannot afford to forget this thor- oughgoing interdependence of our bodies and our minds, for it will often lead us into simple but substantial habits of good hygiene, wholly incompatible with the persistence of many of the trivial worries in our souls. If genius be, as has been said, in part "an infinite capacity for tak- ing pains ", let us all be geniuses (and so happier than most) in taking care that needless petty worries do not spoil any of 182 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD our rapidly passing days or hours ! No one can afford this habit, for it costs too much of our life. We are now assured by competent medical opinion that it is by no means unlikely that goiter may originate in excessive emotion, and especially from fear. H. Gushing seems to believe this and the recent work on the interrelations of the ductless glands and on their influence in dynamogeny makes it likely, for it is " a poor rule," even in lawless physiology, " that will not work both ways." Not less expedient and certainly no less effective than the consolations and wisdom of religion in the abolition from our lives of this the chief great kill-joy, is the Transcendentalism of a previous Ameri- can generation. It points out the glory of "the majestic world" and the transcendent essence which pervades our lives, and says to us, in substance: How absurd, then, to worry! The deep responsibility of things that are not as we would have 183 I UK INFLUENCE OF JOY them are not on our puny shoulders ; we have enough to do to live life well, whether it be in a palace or in a hovel. Life con- fronts us, the richest of all the categor Up and at him, and joy will take the place of fear ! We have recently had from H. G. Wells l a striking and, I believe, new characterisation of fear as "a social in- stinct, worst at the first onset, and far worse than any real experience." It dis- appears when one is not "alone"; it is worse at first than afterwards; and it is far worse than any real experience: each of these conditions is of large practical value in the displacement and replacement of the worst form of fear worry by happiness. One often hears it said that there is more religion in a smile to the living than in an eloquent eulogy to the dead; and ' H ( ; \YelU. "The Research MagniBoent ". New York, 1915. The story exemplifies the difference between joy and satisfuc t i< >n. with everybody content the hero with his stoical satisfactions, the others with their pleasures. 184 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD all can smile, but few can eulogize. The supposed "Cherry" in John Tre vena's recent "Moyle Church-Town" says to the 'Squire: "Sir, there never was a man or woman born who could not learn the simple task of knowing happiness. 'Tis true there may be many unwilling to learn, and many more who have not found a teacher. Sir, if one man in a crowd bursts into laughter, all the sour faces will laugh to see his mirth; he who laughs is the master. But if he should bid the sour faces to laugh, they would tell him to mind his business. God created happiness as an act of worship to Himself ; but when the Devil also attempted to create, it turned into sorrow. Sir, melancholy is the worship of the devil, and I'll have none of it." Worry and indolence and (abnormal) fatigue may lead one for a time to sym- pathize with Christina Rossetti in the sestet of one of her most beautiful sonnets : 185 THi; INFLUENCE OF JOY ' An-1 evermore men shall ^o fearfully, Bending beneath their weight of heaviness ; And ancient men shall lie down wearily, And strong men shall rise up in weariness ; Yea, even the young shall answer sighingly, Saying one to another : How vain it is ! " This certainly is a little masterpiece of affective beauty expressing an oft-recurring climax of melancholy emotion, but it lacks, as do most pessimistic attitudes, that iinc agreement with the best life philosophy, hot h practically and theoretically true, expressed by Duncan Campbell Scott, for example, in 'a stanza that seems to sing itself out of the supreme \\ i^lom of the world : " Let your soul grow a thing apart, Untroubled by the restless day, Sublimed by some unconscious art, Controlled by some divine deby. For life is greater than we think Who fret along its shallow bars." It is not a little surprising, even to ii psychologist, to whom many delicate iaa WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD causes producing tremendous effects are familiar, how subtle this worrisome state of mind may be. It would be hard for one to state with a feeling of certainty why a sense and behavior of hurry, for example, should so closely resemble worry in its bane- ful influence on the physiologic functions. Almost every one, however, in this "amer- icanitis "-infected Land of ours must have actually observed this ill effect at one time or other probably by an acute in- digestion within his very stomach ! Re- duced to its scientific value, obviously this hurry is in reality its rhyme-mate worry, a half -realized fear, in short, lest one be late for the something or other for which he is hurry- ing. One learns an important physiologic principle from this common injurious experi- ence, namely : Life properly is a deliberate and dignified process to which hurry, that is, undue haste, is wholly a stranger. Let us learn this lesson well, for all Nature sets us our example and serves us 187 I UK INFLUENCE OF JOY our sanction for taking time to live, thus in general living well. That silly remark, so often sententiously propounded, that it is better to wear out than to rust out, is quite beside the mark, for the instrument that does the best work is neither rattly from over-wear nor rusty from ill care, but full of keen life and active usefulness, running at its normal speed, eager to accomplish that which it is intended to perform and neither less nor more. It is only when we worship false gods and "pur- sue" happiness too mistakenly that " even tlu young shall answer sighingly, Saying one to another: How vain it is!* 1 No one thing better represents this vanity than real haste or hurry, an opposite inevitably of joy. And joy maketh no waste. The surest sign of the real wisdom of any age-period is an effective realization that character and well-living, like the Earth itself, were "not made in a minute." The truly wise youth takes full time to live. 188 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD A conspicuous aspect of this whole cas- uistic subject in the science and art of living well is the still neglected matter of relaxation the problem of literal bodily relaxation and that of the mental form being psycho- logically probably one. But a volume of physiology alone could adequately set this essential matter forth as perhaps one sometime may. It is enough here to formally call attention to the preeminent importance of frequent relaxation, thus re- lieving the fatiguing strain on heart and brain and soul ! The avidities of civilization have far outrun the powers of resistance in man's already over-developed nerves. Nothing in the human hygiene of the near future can excel this matter in significance, for underlying is not only a whole physiol- ogy and a whole psychology, but a whole philosophy of Life. Professor Patrick's re- cent contribution 1 to this literature is as novel as it is wise. 1 G. T. W. Patrick, "The Psychology of Relaxation," Boston and New York, 1916. 189 THi: INTLITACE OF JOY But other factors than worry and iN own dismal sister hurry partake of the family nature of the antijoys. Conspic- uous among these are envy, hate, and jealousy, enemies all and sundry of man- kind. The first of these and the last are near kin. Hate means usually a narrow mind quite unable to put itself in the view- point of the hated one. It is clear that in all of these the depressive and weakening attitude is closely allied to fear and means physiologically much the same thing - the exhausting of the immediate food material of the brain by a continuousness or by an intensity of action, or by both, which they never were intended ever to undergo. The notices we read on either end of some railroad crossings have more wisdom in them too than the mere information how to avoid being mangled by the lo- comotive: "Stop, look, and listen \ n Stop your rush and worry, urged on by that 190 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD reckless (but not wreckless) chauffeur, Thoughtlessness. Look at Nature all about you, never for long unhappy; look into the blue dome by day and out over the starlit sea by night ; and look up and down the track of your life for the unhappiness that might crush you. Listen to the music of the world and of the other spheres and, in the silence of your sleepless nights, to the rumble of a System which it is yours neither to stop nor to control save as you drive or refuse to drive across its track of. unhappiness. Worry is quite incompatible with the glory of the world; but joy is the living index thereof. Well indeed might we in part go back to the better freedom of the ancient world which was not afraid to play, as Fracastorius suggests: " In the meantime expel them from thy mind, Pale fears, sad cares, and griefs which do it grind, Revengeful anger, pain, and discontent, Let all thy soul be set on merriment." TIIK INTLl ENCE nr JOY Multitudes of men and women, old and young, are in this woeful condition of emotional and mental slump, so to say, without realizing it I A child born and brought up in squalor and indigence and neglect may not realize these all-pervading qualities of his life for many years, perhaps not until adolescence puts new ambitions into his or her conscious soul. A per-mi may become infected with a mild and slow strain of "la grippe" (most suitable name!) and in the course of a week become mi^er- able while scarcely realizing it and then stay so for a month, appreciating his woe- fulness only some bright morning when it has gone ; then indeed he realizes how un- happy and perhaps how "unfit" he has been for weeks. It is thus sometimes with the offensive unpleasantness of the anti- joy whose avoidance or escape this little book tries its best to urge. Herein lies one of the book's sanctions, in fact, in its V possible use to many as a reminder that 192 WORRY AND THE GLORY OF THE WORLD they are not as happy as they well might be. Examine, then, O prudent and canny reader, thy nerves, thy mind, thy soul itself, if indeed its brilliancy be perchance unwarrantably dimmed and, for the time, unworthy of its high privilege ! 193 CHAPTER VIII The Economics of Happiness THE scientific economics of joy and happiness remains to be developed, and our thesis insists that it is developable. In other terms, joy has a valuation (even if not yet in figures) in State Street on the bulletins of the Slock Exchange; in the concrete -and -glass factory office of Mr. Shoemaker; among the maids in your home ; in the coal mine ; aboard ship; in your own private ac- re >unU which you keep to satisfy I IK in- come-tax collector. Daily joy has money value as well as soul value even in the manual trades. And soon some man (or, more likely, perhaps, some ingenious woman economist) will begin to reduce it to grades, to "standardize" it, and to find its mean 194 THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS financial value to all sorts and conditions of workers. There is an inherent relationship as deep as is conceivable in our human per- sonality between the experience of a satis- faction which merges into plain enjoyment and the activity, fusing into the capability, of the body. This relationship is "imma- nent", as the metaphysicians used to say, in our self-reliance, in our pride of life, extending through the gamut from mere baseless vanity upward to the substantial manhood or womanhood which is certain of its worth and of its powers. The keen and great thinker Spinoza, nearly three centuries ago put this primal relationship into plain Latin in three successive prop- ositions of his "Ethics" (Part III, Prop- ositions LIII, LIV, and LV), translated by Elwes : "When the mind regards itself and its own power of activity, it feels pleasure: and that pleasure is greater in proportion 195 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY to the distinctness wherewith it conceives itself and its own power of activity. The mind endeavours to conceive only such things as assert its power of activity. When the mind contemplates its own weak- ness, it feels pain thereat/' This emphasizes one side: that we take delight in our capability and vice versa; the other side, that our powers increase with the agreeableness of the process, it has taken a busy scientific century to demonstrate. Let us turn now to its more practical meaning. If one compares the larger workshops of to-day with those of a few decades ago, our sees at a glance how much has been done in like direction, but with week-day good health and productive hygiene as the guid- ing star rather than happiness. It need not be suggested that the two are close relatives, daughters both of the same sound and handsome couple, the Busy Normali- ties. But happiness may be furthered for IM THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS her own sake, being quite worth while her- self as well as a complement to her hygienic sister. A glance backward over the first chapter of our essay suggests fully enough perhaps why work-a-day joy has economic status: it is, in short, because happiness is strongly dynamogenic, increasing the expenditure of energy in every kind of work. Joyous behavior is more vivacious; and a happy girl in a paper-box factory will probably make at least five per cent, more boxes in a day than the same girl unhappy can pile up. Moreover, the work done under the stimulus of joy is not only faster but better in every way, for it means an atten- tive interest in the adjustments, making them more exact. However considerable the efficiency increase in manual vocations, in those that are commonly termed mental (as if all such were not also neuromuscular as well!) the productive advantage is far 197 HIE INFLUENCE OF JOY urea tor >till. Here speed becomes usually of minor account, the quality bring of importance out of proportion to the time required. And happiness urges its own perfection on what it helps create. The practical result of this two-phased princi- ple of creative efficiency, and somewhat in ratio with the psychic freedom of the work, is that forms of art and philosophy and notably creative literature ordinarily are actually dependent more or less on it. The author, at a recent "Shop-talk" of the Boston Authors' Club, made a little more explicit some of this dependence un- der the title "The Author's Sthenenplmric Index." In part he said : In its details this close association between happiness, or contentment akin thereto, and the hi^h ative efficiency is a long and much involved story with complex plot within plot and incidents innumerable, whose scenario its Infinite Author is provokingly slow and hesitant 198 THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS to reveal (on this particular speck of the cosmos at least). My present years are in part employed in an attempt to under- stand this story whose practical meaning, however we view it, is so impressive. It is just one little phase of the master-knot of human mystery the relations of the body and the mind, which in its last analy- sis reduces to the structure and the mode of action of the human nervous system, by all means the magnus opus of Evolu- tion up to our era. The gist of the matter, the grist of this milling, appears to be that fatigue and pain and worry and impatience and real unpleasantness of every kind related to authorship and other creative work are abnormalities which actually diminish the speed and mar the quality of our entire creative efficiency. It is somewhat as if the course and the rate of a trolley car in our present wretched system were actually impaired by the wheels' squeak and the smell of the bad 199 Till; INFLUENCE OF .JOY air and the personal repulsion and the jolt and the whole general impiety of the interior atmosphere. And sometimes in very sooth these are so impaired as from quarrels with the conductor or by withdrawals because of the bad conditions within. Fatigue and unpleasantness of every sort may find their sanctions in the world's last reckoning, for philosophy as well as for religion and theology. But so far as the definite practical econom of a workaday world is concerned, there is little doubt that for the most part organic happiness makes for greatly iiiereased pro- ductiveness in quality and in quantity both. Be not misled by probable personal memories of "forcing yourself to do e\ cellent work when it was most unpleasant", etc., etc. Two ideas seem especially to belie this fallacy: (1) already suggested, the inexcusable waste of nerve strength necessary to force the association of ideas 200 THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS along the paths which for efficiency should always be, so to say, downhill ; (2) even more frequent, perhaps, a confusion of terms, the mistaking and misinterpreta- tion of feelings due to ennui, atony, lassi- tude, for a real dysphoria or emotional un- pleasantness underlying the action of the nervous system, in short, worry and true fatigue. In general, then, these last, the con- trary, in short, of our more or less symbolic "joy", seem to be of practical economic importance in freely creative work. To demonstrate this proposition, however, to set forth scientifically the details of this, the very heart of our matter, would take us into technicalities of physiology and psychology wholly out of place here. And you'll all be jolly well content, as our Eng- lish cousins say, to avoid the stress and strain, and so merely be assured that such wholly undomesticated and unauthorized creatures as the cortical nerve-cell cyto- 201 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY . internal secretions, blood pressure, and numerous like things underlie what we arc slowly learning about this general relationship of unhappiness and unpleas- antness to creative inefficiency or incapac- ity, objectively considered. On the other hand, your own interests it may be, as well as scientific theory, compel me to assure you that the practical fact seems to be substantially as I have said: It is better for your true 'efficiency' that you should not do creative work at all at any given time than that you should do it when it is distinctly an unpleasant task, that is, whenever the high quality be the aim. This is true of all highly-skilled work, as Professor W. F. Book has shown. Where quality and progressive efficiency count, it is pre-eminently true of (new) creative work. But nowhere else certainly than in literary work are materials and methods and results so wholly free, and therefore so wholly subject to the law. 202 THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS Mind and body are one, and language is an integral portion of the human mind, and of the human body which expresses and conditions it. It is not only a matter, however, of actual capability, but also of wasteless capability. If we would reach our highest and greatest efficiency, do the best for ourselves in the long run and struggle, we must here as elsewhere consider 'safety first.' To push too hard against fatigue, continued disinclination, or positive un- pleasantness, is to be wasteful of the best we have or can have as creators. And there's never any excuse for waste, anywhere, under any conditions, but, least of all, of a waste of our nerve force, of our vital energy, which goes apace but does not readily re- turn. The painter and sculptors and the musicians long have realized and prac- tised this principle as a necessary condi- tion of their best creative work. Let the 203 THK INFLUENCE OF JOY painters teach you, then, their easily- learned lesson ! those of you who have not already found this broad but (for once) straight road for yourselves. When the different phases of creative work shall have been studied along this general method, but with actual experi- mental data and mathematical result-, then at length the economics of happiness will have been, in part, written. Herbert Spencer, Alexander Bain, Grant Allen, II. R. Marshall, Max Meyer, and numer- ous others already have taken this matter a little way along its physiologic road, far beyond Jeremy Bentham and the Utilita- rianism of Mill. But in spite of these, which are as it were the steam engines and the electric motors of transportation, the true ultimate internal-combustion engine whieh will carry us along in contentment to the goal of hedonistic economics, al- though invented, is yet to be employed. Along this splendid roadway one speeds at 204 THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS will, and the ride, although a ride of joy, results for a certainty in no disaster. Personally, I have long firmly believed that the ideational side of mind and of human efficiency in general, the so-called pure "intelligence" (as if feeling also were not intelligent !) has been far over-rated in the world's estimation, in its philosophic esteem especially, but to a less extent in the popular valuation, although the latter be in large part derived from the former. Because of this disparity with the scientific facts, knowledge as distinct from sentiment has been greatly over-appraised. So keen a philosopher of practical affairs as Huxley does not fail to express in his surpassing definition of a liberal education this over- estimation of the logical efficiency of men (for the nonce leaving women out of the consideration) when he says that it in- volves an intellect which "is a clear, cold, logical engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order, 205 THE IM I II \( E OF JOY ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers, as well as forge the anchors, of the mind." Such a "logical engine", did it exist, were certainly not worth nearly as much to 4 the man on the street", that is to the traditional "average" man, as a well- developed appreciation of his own and the world's deeper values, those of the proper human relationships. Morton Prince in his latest essay l has a paragraph which values these things more equitably : "Our conscious thoughts are much more determined by subconscious processes, of which we are unaware, than we realize. One great popular delusion is that our minds are more exact logical instruments than they really are, and we stand in awe of the minds of great men, thinking that 1 Morton Prince, "The Psychology of the Kaiser". London, 1915. This little application of recent psychology has more meaning in its few thousand words than many billions of dollars ; millions of men have so far been able to express. 200 THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS because they are superior in certain direc- tions they are therefore superior in all other directions of their activities, where they claim superiority. Whereas, as a matter of fact, a man may be eminently superior in certain fields of mental activity and psychologically a perfect fool-thinker and fool-performer in other fields. Helm- holtz said of the eye that it was such an imperfect optical instrument that if an instrument-maker should send him an optical instrument so badly made, he would refuse to accept it, and return it forthwith. He might have said the same thing of the human mind. It is a very imperfect in- strument of thought. All we can say is that it is the best we can get. The deeper insight we get into the mechanism of the human mind, the poorer thing it appears as an instrument of precision." The old wisdom of the race has expressed this another way (through Madame Cor- nuel) by saying that no man is a hero to 207 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY his valet. In other words intimacy dis- covers mental defects which are hid from mere acquaintance by the claims of general superiority. This deficiency of all-round- ness in most of us, and the consequent relative superiority of the inherited feeling- aspect of human nature, lends both moral and practical support to our primal prop- ortion that we should allow or force our- selves to be influenced by the instinctive joy of life. Then would we realize that "Non est vivere sed valere vita." 208 CHAPTER IX Personality THE material which we have now pre- sented would be scarcely worth even the planning had it not as its vitaliz- ing germ and spirit something close to the always separate individual, an intimacy of meaning and mayhap of value for the striving, unique soul who appropriates it. However awful the present annihilation of the individual in a considerable part of the world may be, however vivid and flam- ing and altogether "unbelievable" the ap- parent apotheosis of centralized Right-in- Might, the Individual remains, in the long run world-wide, the final arbiter and object, as he is always the locus, of human life and human destiny. To abandon this at- titude, to forget, deep in one's brain, how- 209 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY ever sore one's heart, this Eternal Individ- ualism, is to crush by a single lapse of human reason the whole meaning as well as all the sweetness of our common life. And this general proposition of ours, this doctrine (in a purely secular sense) is not merely a theory, not merely a mass of psychobiologic science, but it has also, as has been hinted, practical applicability, common use for the common as well as for the uncommon man and woman. The educational problem is one of method in making it a continuous motive in the con- duct of life. The difficulty is largely one of futurity, so to say, and forbidding only because achievable so far ahead. It is the same problem that real education must meet in other respects, all parts of the indispensable wisdom of life or of living which the world is beginning at last to see is part in tiirn of the child's birthright itself. "Eugenics" and hygienic prophylaxis are two other 210 PERSONALITY obvious factors in this future wisdom a* In how to live, the practical psychology at the basis of "success." Certainly happiness is always a prominent necessary member of this momentous family. At present the school curriculum does not even show the child that it is his birthright, let alone ex- plain to him how it may be secured. Al- gebra and the elements of Greek philology are deemed more important to the future citizen and father and brother and hus- band than the deep wisdom inherent in the joy of living and in the means of happi- ness of fellow citizens, children, brothers and sisters, and wife. In other words, civilization is as yet far from being down to its bed-rock of human values. Sometimes it fails to see life because of its busy concern with some of life's excrescences (militarism is an example), and wholly misses the indi- viduals because of the crowd. The joy of life, then, is not, so far, in the public-school curriculum any more than THE INFLUENCE <>1 JOY is the nature of personality itself. But some of us here and there are wondering how long the psychologists and the moral philosophers are tacitly to pretend that what they know of Life-wisdom is beyond the understanding of the average school- child. This notion of course is absurd. In the hurry of educational discovery, it has been overlooked that advanced mathe- matics requires a special type of student- mind, but that ethics and psychology, on the other hand, do not. The writer is one psychologist who believes that if there is anything of practical value in psychology really not teachable by one who knows his business to an average girl or boy of ten years, that that part of the science is as yet not intelligible to itself ; and essen- tially the same attitude is true in regard to ethics. Is it the history of the long war between Latin and the vernacular repeating itself in a Twentieth Century guise? Is knowledge, the very wisdom itself of how PERSONALITY to live happily, too good for children? If it be only a matter of pretended abstruse- ness, certainly "knowledge" does not as yet know itself. Whatever be the educational system's apology for this state of defect and want, personality and how to attain it, happiness and how to secure and radiate it, rest to-day with the family influence and in- struction. They seem to me to rest properly there in such families as con- sciously realize that the active obligation exists. Our ancestors, when nomads and paleolithic cave-dwellers, did this at least for their children. We must welcome vigorously then that near-future com- bination of the Montessoriized outdoor playground and intensive home educa- tion that will properly prepare the girl and boy, ideally together, not only for rapid school-life at about ten years of age, but for Great Life at every age, and for the joy of living it. 213 THK INTMTACK OF JOY Among the important things that the education of a somewhat later day will surely teach to every child, and by which every present adult might amply profit now, is a deeply seated confidence in the destiny of man, at least "that all is well." Part of this in practice is the abolition from the mind of all fear of death as something evil to be kept out of consciousness. We know now that here as elsewhere often " familiarity breeds contempt", not familiarity with death, observe, but with the fear of death, save in a disordered mind prone to obses- MOII. Hell being a dead concept at last, the fear of death which came from it should be proscribed and banished too. And after all, death is Life's greatest ad- venture. Death properly is the climax of a lifetime of entertaining, venturesome, chivalrous, perhaps reckless, events; and from such a climax no worthy man or woman with red blood vitalizing the body and courage and good reason inspiriting 214 PERSONALITY the soul need shrink. Sorrow for affection lost and gone perhaps, and heartburn for the end of all these our only associations, but never a word other than of com- placency for the great adventure of all and the personal solution, at last, of God's great secret ! The truest personality, as we have tried to show, is an individual wholesomeness based on two mutually complementary processes, impulse and impulse's restraint. A personality without both of these op- posed phases, in some mode or other, is unthinkable, for without both, intelligent activity, its essence, could not be carried out. Of this activity, joy is the most natural index whenever the conditions are biologically normal. It is partly because of grades and qualities illimitable of ab- normality that the gladness of childhood does not continue into age oftener than it does. Each of these basic phases of personality, 215 THE INFLUENCE OF JOY actuation and inhibition* the one VCL tative, the other characteristically human, has its own type of joyousness, its own i -faction. Endless were the task of making these explicit, for it would have to include every shade of enjoyment from the baldest and crassest hedonism, seeking only pleasure, to the extremely complicated satisfactions of the purely ideal woman- hood and manhood, meeting even the requirements of Huxley's well-famed defi- nition of a liberal education. The im- portant thing for us is that both of these personal phases do have substantial and lasting founts of joy within their ac- tivities, and that each is essential, yes, indispensable, to the well-rounded life. Thus by a law of selfsatisfaction-seek- ing, more certain and more lasting than the orbits of the stars, the human individual, no matter how far he may soar into the empyrean of the super-human, is kept a mortal with mortal interests and joys and 216 PERSONALITY sympathies. Without the inhibitory joys, the man or woman is etymologically a brute, but without the vegetative, some- thing that is worse, because factitious and inherently selfish, a secular ascetic. Bliss Carman, in a book l of essays about which too little has been heard, states the matter keenly: "The direct pursuit of pleasure, or to demand happiness, may indeed be futile; but the instinctive pur- suit of our activities is not futile, unless it be ill-advised; and from such pursuit, when it is wisely ordered, some essence of happiness is inevitably derived. Happi- ness comes to us not as a reward of merit, but as a proof of worth. It is not a rec- ompense for abnegation, but a natural satisfaction in normal life, an incalculable result of real deserving." The ideal satisfaction or joy in the life- process would seem to be the incense glow ascending from a really human altruism 1 Bliss Carman. "The Making of Personality". Boston, 1908. 217 Till: INFLUENCE OF .!<>Y based on a natural egoism, both of these being ample, vigorous, and free. We may cordially agree with sundry the- orists that gladness as an effective agent in our behavior is eminently easy of cultiva- tion. Were it not so, this book were of no use beyond its narrow and problematic scientific interest. As a matter of fortu- nate fact, the Master Law of Habituation rules in this as in all besides. Gladness of effective permanence and degree is not a mere theory of the optimistic morning sun- shine, but a thoroughly practical and prac- t i cable human attitude. The persistent will t<> be glad is at first a joy, to be sure, but soon Nature makes of it a wholesome re- ligion, almost a worship of humanity and thus a form of love to God; and " Love that hath no beginning hath no end/' INDEX ABEYANCE OF RESTRAINT, 47. Action-system, 83. Activity, 161 /. Actuation, 14. Adrenal, adrenin, 44, 124, 129 /. Adventure, Life's greatest, 214. Affective balance, 115, MO-/. Affective tone, 23, 27, 111 /. Alcohol, 154. Angor animi, see WORRY. Anticipation, 77. Anxiety, see WORRY. Apoplexy, 103, 105. Arteries, 97. Artistry, 203. Asceticism, 60, 217. .Associations in nervous system, 76, 140. -Attention, 121. Automobiling, 128. Autonomic nervous system, 13, 15 /. . Autonomic rhythm of the blood-pressure, 100, 103. Auto suggestion, 134. BALANCE, AFFECTIVE, 23, 27, 111 /. Banquet, 42. " Basis ", bodily, of feeling, 23. Beauty, 107, 149, 181. Blood, 82. Blood-pressure, 99 Jf . ; vol- untary control of, 102. Blood-sugar, 11. Bodily aspect of an emo- tion, 9. Breath-holding, 102. CENESTHESIA, 125. Children, xiv, 148, 150. Chromatin, 126, 154. Circulation, 82. Coffee, 154. Collapse, 95, 97. Compensation, 165 /. Components of emotion, 8. Conditioned reflexes, 76, 140. Congestion, 98 /. Constipation, 74. Continuous expenditures, 67 /. Control, personal, see IN- HIBITION. INDIA Conventional repressions, 119Jf. Corpus striatum, 124, Cortex (f. 1 1;>. Energy, 36. 122, 126. Knmii, 163 /. Enthusiasm, 123 Jf., 142. Envy, 190. K pit helium, 12, 132 /. Epitome, 153. Eugenics, 210 /. Euphoria, 79. Excitement of an emotion, 8. Exercise, 46, 110, 128, 1,M; as a stimulant, 46 ; phys- iology of, 162. Exhaustion, 128. "Expression" of an emo- tion, 9. lUC OF NERVE IM- PULSES, 26, in. Factors of gladness, 37 Jf . Fad of blood-pressure, 100. Farm, back to the, 110, 128. Fatigue. 126 Jf., 130. Fear, 174 Jf.. 184. Feeling, analysis of. 7 /. ; components of , 8 jf . ; c 1 inance of, 35 /. ; nature of, 5, 26. Feelings, list of, 115. "Fletcherism", 46. Freedom from care, 43. Freud, 139. M, 1?. i->. 132 /. Goiter. 183. Good humor, xiii /., 32, 127, 130. Goose-Oesh, 87. HABIT, 89, 134. Happiness, 5, 156, 159. INDEX Happiness-mechanism, 89. Hate, 190. Heart, 82, 85 /. Holiday, 42, 48. Home-education, inten- sive, 151. Hormones, 10 /. Humanness, 49. Hurry, 66, 187 /. Hypochondria, 88. IDEAS, NEUROLOGY OF, 92. Imprecision of the mind, 207. Impulse, 14. Indigestion, 63/., 69, 73. Individuality, 61, 137, 209 /. Indolence, 159 /., 163 /. Inhibition, 21, 33, 49, 51, 53/., 60, 63, 119. Innervations, 120. Insomnia, 181. Instinct, 26. Integration, 83 ; of the ali- mentary canal, 78 Jf. Intellectualism, 35, 205. Internal secretions, 10 /. JAMES-LANGE-SERGI theory of emotion, 11, 29. Jealousy, 190. Joy-factors, 37 jf. Joy, necessity of, 157; power of, 1. KAISER, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE, 206. Kinesthesia, 18, 20, 54, 125, 132. King of the senses, kines- thesia, 19. Kiss, imaginary, 101. Knowledge of self, 84. Koliones, 10 /. LlST OF FEELINGS AND EMO- TIONS, 115. Life, 94. Liver, 40. Living backwards, 149. Love-life, 143. Lucretia Davidson, 96. MECHANISM OF EFFI- CIENCY, 84. Medical psychology, 35. Meeting-place of gladness and activity, 126. Melancholy, 70 jf., 186. Melioration, 61. Mental aspect of an emo- tion, 8. Metabolic planes of effi- ciency, 162. Mind, general meaning of, 4. Mirth, xiv, 106. Motion, essence of body- life, 19. Motives, motivity, 36. Movement-sense, 18, 54, 132. Muscle, fatigue of, 127; vegetative or smooth, 12. INDEX Music, 131 /. Myth. Wundtian, 122. NECESSITY OF JOT, 157. Nerve-waste, 174, 203. Nervous system, 111, KM*. Neurasthenia, 73 /. Nutrition, 41. OBJECT OF AN EMOTIO Obligation to activity, 159, 161. Ol<;. Organic happiness, see JOT. Original nature of man, 17. PAIN, 111. U6/. Paris, siege of, 108. Passivity, 129. IWvislmrss. 81. Persistence, 141. Personal control, 14. Personality, 50 /., 61, 137, 209 /.; see also SOUL. Physiology, a birthright, 84; of exercise, 162. Planes of efficiency, 162. Play, 159. Pleasantness and unpleas- antness. Ill /. Pleasure and pain. 111. Pneumogastric nerve, 86. Posture, 30 /. Pressure of the blood, 99 /. Pseudo-mii- 1-1. Psychasthenia, 72. Psychology, 2 12 /., medical, 8$. Pulse-rate, 92. REALIZATION OF HAPPINESS, 171 /. Reflexes, conditioned, 76. Rejuvenation, 48, 1 H , 148 /., 172 /. Relaxation, 102, 155, 189. Repression, see INHIBI- TION. Rest, 130, 180. Restraint, see INHIBITION. Revolution, the, and apo- plexy, 103. Rhythm, joy in, 131. SAFETT-VALVE ACTION OF THE NERYE-CELLS, 127. Satisfaction, 27, 146. Secretions, 133. 7. Seep, 128 /. Soul, 4, 22, 48. Stheneuphorir index, 107, IHi. 198 /. Stimulants, 128, 154. "Stop, look, and list. -n." 190 /. "Strains", 10. Stream of mind. \2\ f. Subconsciousness, 134, IK). Sugar, 11, 44 /. Suggestion, 90/., 134 /.; a theory of, 139. INDEX TEA, 154. Thalamus, optic, 124 ff. Tone of an emotion, 8, 23 Jf. Tonus, muscular, 83, 86. UNCERTAINTY OF BLOOD- PRESSURE MEASURE- MENTS, 100. Universality of movement, 28. Unpleasantness, 58 ff., 74. Use-congestion, 98. VAGUS NERVE, 86. Vasomotion, 98 /. Vegetarianism, 129/. Vegetative mechanism, H, 50. Vicious circle, 75, 180. Villi's movements, 79. Vives, 106. Voluntary action, 57. WAR, 103 ff . Waste of nerve-energy, 68, 174, 203. Will to be glad, 218. Wisdom of life, 210 /. Work and play, 159, 165. 170. Worry, 102, 105, 174 ff. "Wundtian myth", 122. 223 OF 25 CES WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 5O CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO fl.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. PCD 15 1933 , -**M935 8 1937 IMr, 52DP 100m-8,'34 704 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY