Part 3

There are two distinct kinds of _ego_--self: The _ego_ that is physically and intellectually born only, and whose tendencies are egotistically selfish, and therefore, _animalesque_: And the _ego_ that enjoys Appreciation, realizes God, loves spontaneously, understands the Higher Law of Harmony and serves with enthusiasm in the execution of the Law by the exercise of Divine Selection, and thereby attains True Happiness.

The mental equipment of the unthinking is dulled by a confusion of these two _egos_, and hence they cultivate egotism, believing it to be _Egociation_; as they cultivate _fearthought_, believing it to be forethought; and as they tolerate license, believing it to be an attribute of liberty.

The desirability of separating the lower, or animal, self from the Higher Self, warrants the coining of a term, sufficiently new to attract attention and sufficiently allied to well-known words to explain itself. With this object in view I have empirically selected a combination of _ego_ and _appreciation_, and in so doing, have coined the euphonious term _Egociation_ as an antithesis of "egotism," especially useful in inculcating a general understanding of the Higher Law of Harmony and in securing recognition of the place of the Higher Self within the Law.

In the cultivation of Egociation, man recognizes and asserts an _individuality_, or _responsibility_, as a part of the whole, the result of appreciation, opposed to _personality_ or _separateness_, which is an attribute of egotism.

* * * * *

Words that carry good suggestion with them are less liable to do harm by being variously understood than those that convey bad suggestion. These latter should be defined in such a manner as to clearly suggest their badness; in fact, war should be waged upon them by every possible means.

* * * * *

EGOTISM.

"Egotism" is _separation from God_. The fruit of egotism is selfishness.

SELFISHNESS.

In the list of the deterrents, selfishness holds bottom place. Self-forethought, self-carefulness, self-culture, and self-respect, are in no way related to selfishness, but are provision of strength towards useful purposes. Selfishness is the mark of animal origin. We will therefore define it as _relic of animalism remaining in man_.

Selfishness is the opposite of altruism. While a suggestion of altruism is found in some animals, especially in dogs, it is not an animal characteristic. Selfishness is the predominant animal trait and therefore excuses the otherwise unkindly comparison.

FEAR.

Fear is also a relic of animalism, and a child of selfishness--a deformed child of an ill-formed parent. It is not a physical condition, but simply an expression of fearthought. We will therefore define "fear" as _an expression of fearthought_.

FEARTHOUGHT.

"Fearthought" is _the self-imposed or self-permitted suggestion of inferiority_. It is both a _cause_ and an _effect_ of selfishness. It is the "tap-root of evil."

"Fearthought" was coined by the author in order, if possible by suggestion, to separate from divinely ordained forethought any element of apprehension or weakness that might be masquerading under the name of forethought in the minds of the unthinking.

WORRY.

"Worry" is _fearthought in contradistinction to forethought_.

ANGER.

"Anger" is _the brutal and self-inflicting expression of disapproval_--brutal, because it is ungodly, unchristian and unaltruistic; _self-inflicting_, because the ill-effect of it reacts upon the person enangered.

There can be no "righteous anger." Disapproval there must be, because man has been endowed with the faculty of _Divine Selection_, and thereby shows a divinity denied to all other living things whose preferences are called in Science "natural selection." Disapproval in the interest of harmony--_Divine Selection_--and disapproval in the creation of discord--anger--are, the one holy, and the other unholy, uses of the faculty of selection.

There may be, then, _righteous disapproval_, but there never can be "righteous anger."

ENVY.

"Envy" is _anger of non-possession_.

"Envy" is sometimes wrongly used to express appreciation, as, "I envy you your good fortune," but we will give it the one meaning of "anger of non-possession."

JEALOUSY.

"Jealousy" is "the homage that inferiority pays to merit";[3] or, _recognition or confession of inferiority_; or, _fearthought_.

TAP-ROOT.

"Tap-root" is "the chief root." It is the main support of the tree, of nearly the size of the trunk, and without which the tree must fall and die. The tap-root strikes deep into the soil, while the surface-roots reach out along the surface. For example; egotism is the tree of evil, either selfishness or fearthought is the tap-root, and anger and worry in all their phases are the surface roots of the tree. The tree is known by its fruits, which are, separation, paralysis, disease, unhappiness and death.

TROUBLE.

Trouble does not really exist. Fearthought of trouble is as near as one ever gets to the condition, for the reason that whatever has come has already ceased to exist, except in the memory. The reason for so fine a distinction is made clear under the caption of "The Impotence of Pain," and is emphasized in order to place merited responsibility on fearthought. What is called "trouble," however, can be defined as _unwelcome conditions_, but, if analyzed, the chief elements of the "conditions" will be found to be _fearthought of still more unwelcome conditions_. The tap-root, then, of trouble is fearthought.

PESSIMISM.

Pessimism is _fearthought_. Pessimism is the devil.

NERVOUSNESS.

Nervousness is generally an _effect_ and not a _cause_. It is the immediate or reflex result of fearthought.

TEMPERAMENT.

Like "nervousness," so-called, "temperament"--habit-of-feeling--is generally an effect and not a cause; and is frequently used as an excuse for self-indulged weaknesses.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Menticulture_ is the title of a book by the present author, whose mission is to declare a theory of the possible and very profitable eradication of the germs of all evil, and consequent unhappiness, which are commonly assembled under the class names of "anger" and "worry",--"anger" representing the aggressive, and "worry" representing the cowardly passions.

[2] Note: The motto of Optimism is, as elsewhere stated, "_All can be_, and therefore _shall be_, well."

[3] NOTE--I take this apt definition of "jealousy" from that excellent periodical--the organ of the League of American Wheelmen--"The Bulletin and Good Roads." Many good suggestions in menticulture accompany the excellent suggestions relative to good roads in this paper. Good thoughts are good roads to good action.

THE VALUE OF SIMILE.

Christ taught almost entirely by parable.

Apropos of the value of simile is an experiment about which I have recently heard.

An experimenter wished to measure in some way the strength of certain vibrations and their effect upon vibratory things. A large steel comb, such as is used in music-boxes to produce sounds, was constructed. Each tooth was made as nearly as possible just like every other tooth. They not only seemed to measure alike, but when set in motion the vibrations seemed to be alike to the sense of hearing.

There was also constructed a huge tuning-fork, large enough to be struck with a bar of iron, and whose vibrations, when it was struck, came forth in big undulating waves like the pealing of a temple bell.

The object of the experiment was to observe, through the effect of powerful vibrations on the teeth of the resonant comb, a possible difference, too slight to be measured by calipers or by striking the teeth separately. The sound-waves, coming alike to all, would affect all alike unless there should be a difference in the receptivity of the teeth owing to differing density of metal, size, or some other condition not measurable by other means. By listening attentively near to the comb, the effect of the vibrations on the separate teeth could be heard.

The tuning-fork was placed about forty feet away from the steel comb, and was struck a heavy blow with the iron bar. Only three of the twelve teeth vibrated in response. The others were not in sympathy. _They did not hear the sound._

I did not see the experiment, but it will serve to illustrate the value of simile.

All knowledge is measured by comparison. The most effective teaching is done through parable or simile. A so-called magnetic orator or writer reaches his hearers or readers by aid of apt simile. In this the orator has the advantage. If one simile does not convey the point he wishes to make, he tries another and yet another until he has detected sympathetic signs of approval in the majority of his audience. If there are present a hundred listeners, it may require ten stories or ten similes to reach the entire hundred, as there may be ten kinds of interest or sympathy present to be reached. Farmers and gardeners may not be familiar with the terms that describe the experience of the mariner; mechanics may not understand the language of the counting room or of the various exchanges; and men may not appreciate the special accomplishments, sympathies, weaknesses or foibles of women. Each individual is a separate tooth or string in the instrument called society. Heredity and environment have tempered and shaped each individual differently from his fellows. Truth is always the same, but the vibrations that carry it must be regulated to suit the conditions and understandings of each person, or group of persons, to be harmonized by it.

In an attack upon offensive and evil things, offensive similes are best employed. It is an application of the principle that a thief can best catch a thief. The object of this little book is to wage war upon fearthought and its brood of evil children. This is the excuse for writing under such offensive captions as "Don't Be a Sewer," and "Thou Shalt Not Strike a Woman," and also such ungrammatical caption as "I Can't _Not_ Do It."

It is the opinion of the author that we are in the habit of taking evil too seriously. Evil is usually ridiculous, and while it thrives under the stimulation of serious consideration, it cannot stand ridicule. Shrewd politicians know this, and hence depend more upon the political cartoon to kill the political enemy, than upon all the reading matter possible to be printed.

What the terms "God," "Appreciation," "Mother," "Love," "Altruism," "Egociation," "Forethought," "Happiness," etc., stand for, should be reverenced and glorified; while the devil, egotism, selfishness, fearthought, anger and worry, and all of their various expressions, should be ridiculed out of respectability.

There is no intent to make vulgar excuses for the method of presentation of the simple and aged truths which are the subject of the present book. For the same reason that I have asked my readers to agree with me as to the meaning of terms in connection with the discussion, I ask them to allow me to state my reasons for the method of the presentation, if it should seem unusual and, perhaps, undignified.

ANALYSIS OF FEAR.

Professor Angelo Mosso, the eminent physiologist of Turin, Italy, who has experimented with the condition and results of fear to a greater extent than any one else that I know of, has published a volume entitled "Fear."[4]

Professor Mosso writes of much regarding fear that we can all corroborate from personal experience as to the uncomfortableness of the emotion, and also informs us of much that is instructive as to the baleful effects of the mischief it produces upon the tissues of the body. He states that, unconsciously or consciously, the effect of fear is found to be disarrangement, which allows or causes inflammation, fever and other unhealthy conditions that are favorable to the nesting of the microbes of special diseases, such as are sometimes found in the air or in the water that we take in, and which are ever waiting for a chance to nest and breed.

An eminent English physician has also communicated to a leading English magazine a belief that fear directly attacks the individual molecules of the body and causes a disarrangement, a relaxing, a letting-go condition of the molecules in their relation to adjoining molecules, and that the relaxed condition is that in which disease originates. He states that there are means of communication within the body that are as direct and distinct as are the wires that convey the electric fluid from point to point, and that they connect the brain or nervous centers with each pair of molecules. By these means the sense of fear travels, weak or strong, in response to every pulse of its activity.

Within our visible experience, we know how completely the emotion of fear, or any of its various expressions can upset the stomach, suspend the appetite and even cause instant death. So evident are the bad effects of fear, that it is necessary only to refer to them before suggesting a remedy; but there are some powerful illustrations that are interesting, and which will be found under the caption of "Baleful Effects of Fear."

In this connection, what we are most interested in is, how to rid ourselves of the habit of fear. Fear is not a physical thing. It is the result of fearthought, and, being fearthought, has no more substance than other thought.

In animals it is an attribute of instinct, and is a wise provision of protection. In the human young, it is not so. In the helplessness of human foetal existence and infancy, we find a perfectly clean, but wonderfully impressionable, thought-matrix, into which are to be impressed the suggestions whose sum constitutes the intelligence in men which takes the place of instinct in animals.

Fear is no constituent part of the composition of this thought-matrix. Susceptibility to fearthought, as it is susceptible to any and all suggestions, is the nearest approach to inherent infliction of fear that the unfolding soul is burdened with. If the race-habit-of-thought were indelibly pock-marked by fear, and stamped its roughness on the thought-matrix of all mankind, there would be no one free from it; but, as many are born into, and live, a life of great strength and courage, free from any taint of fearthought, this assumption is disproved, and is as absurd as would be the assumption that man must always do whatever, and only what, his ancestors did.

All of the fear-impressions received are the result of either pre-natal or post-natal suggestion. It is within the power of parents and nurses to keep the delicate susceptibility of their charges free from the curse of fearthought; or to cause or allow it to be scared and bruised by the claws of the demon.

President G. Stanley Hall, of Clarke University, Editor in Chief of the _American Journal of Psychology_, and Dr. Colin A. Scott, Professor of Psychology and Child Study at the Cook County Normal School, Chicago, Ill., U. S. A., have rendered greatest service to humanity by searching out and analyzing fears in children, exposing the absurdity of them, showing the sources from which foolish fears are derived, and thereby dragging from ambush the worst enemy of mankind, whose strength is developed by means of secret toleration, but can easily be overcome if uncovered.

The method of securing information was by means of the _questionaire_, the answers to which, although unsigned and unidentifiable, and savoring of exaggeration or romance, furnish splendid texts in a crusade against the toleration of the habit-of-fear in a civilized community. One can scarcely imagine, before reading the answers to the fear _questionaire_, the unreasonable and absurd fears that warp the lives and ruin the health of many of the people among whom we move, and by whom, in some measure, we and our children are unconsciously influenced.

If it were the community-habit-of-thought that fear was an unnecessary thing and an evil thing, and not respectable and not Christian, many of these fears would not exist, owing to the proneness of all persons to imitation and their acceptance of community-of-habit-thought as law and gospel. Fear is a very insidious thing. It will enter the smallest opening, and ferment, and increase, and permeate whatever it attacks, if it be permitted foothold in the least degree.

We have too little time in life personally to investigate all of the causes of things that are pertinent to our living and working, or to learn the reason for their leading to observed results. We are indebted to Professor Mosso, Dr. Hall, Dr. Scott and other painstaking scientists, for observing the habits of our enemies, and for giving the results of their observations in such agreeable forms as are the intimate and frank analyses of fear given in Professor Mosso's book and other treatises on the subject; but what we are most interested in is, how to kill or how to escape fearthought within ourselves and, ultimately, how to protect our children against the evil.

To digress somewhat, and as an excuse for using the terms of parable and homely experience instead of the terms of science: It is said that the use of alum for the settling of impurities out of water was an old housewife's remedy for a very long time before any scientist studied the chemical change that effected the result.

The old housewives knew by experience, as well as did the doctors, that alum _would_ "settle" water, but it was left to the latter to say _why_ it did so. We are, therefore, mainly indebted to a chance discovery, and to the preservation of the formula by housewives, for our ability to purify water by means of alum.

In the same manner we have discovered, perhaps by accident, that certain suggestions will purify our minds, by eliminating special fears by which we have been dominated. We also have learned by experiment that all fear is eliminable by use of sufficiently powerful suggestion made to fit the particular fear experimented against. I _know that the deterrent passions can be eradicated_; and, _easier than not_. Others _know_ this also, and are living lives of beautiful strength, freedom and happiness, who once were slaves to fearthought; and many such there already are, and their number is increasing very rapidly under the influence of the observation of unfailing, profitable results in consequence.

If we _know_ that anything _can be done_, it is not vitally essential that we should know _why_ it is possible.

Experience, in conveying the suggestion, has taught that there is _some_ way to reach, and to dispel, any special fear.

Science will some time, undoubtedly, be able to tell us just how to treat each form of fear in a scientific manner, but in the meantime we _know_ that it is possible to cure all of the separate forms of fear by rooting out the basic fear--the fear of death--and by conveying the all-powerful suggestion that all fear is needless and unprofitable.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] Messrs. E. Lough and F. Kiesow, pupils of Professor Mosso, translated the fifth Italian edition of "Fear" into English, and Longmans, Green and Company published it in 1896.

BALEFUL EFFECTS OF FEAR.

In the last chapter I stated that the bad effects of fear were so well known to every one that it was not necessary to dwell upon them, but second thought suggests stating a few special cases that have been told me by physician friends who are interested in the lay experiments I am making.

In the Southern States of the United States of America, where the black race comes into closest touch with Caucasian civilization under conditions of free expression, is probably the best place to study fear and its opposite, chivalrous courage.

Dr. William E. Parker, of the Charity Hospital of New Orleans, was once called to attend a big negro who had been brought in by the ambulance, and whom the students in charge of the ambulance had frightened nearly to death by telling that he was badly wounded in the stomach, and would probably die.

The negro was big and burly and black, and yet, livid with fear. Both pulse and temperature indicated serious trouble within, and the convulsive tremors that shook him from time to time revealed a state of collapse that might end in death at any time. There was no outward flow of blood, but the probable inward flow seemed more dangerous in consequence.

The account of the case, as related by the students, told of a shooting affray, in which the negro had been hit in the abdomen, as evidenced by a bullet-hole in his clothing.

Dr. Parker began an examination by ordering the clothing of the patient removed, and during which a bullet, much flattened, fell upon the floor. This bullet had done no serious injury, of course, but there might have been two shots and two bullets, one of which had penetrated the body, and hence the bullet that fell upon the floor caused no special attention, till search had been made in vain for a hole in the skin. Complete examination revealed the fact that the negro had been hit, but that the bullet had struck a button, causing a bruised place behind the button, but had lodged in the clothing, in harmless inertia.

As the doctor held up the bullet, and told the patient of the slight extent of his injury and the wonder of his escape, good, warm blood returned to the livid countenance, the pulse and the temperature assumed their normal condition, a grateful sparkle lit up the almost glassy eyeballs, and the broadest possible grin spread over the face of the erstwhile dying man.

The negro got down from the operating-table, arranged his clothing, and, after apologizing for the trouble he had caused, and after thanking the doctor and the students for their attentions, went out into the street as well as ever. He had been, half an hour before, at death's door.

Dr. Henry A. Veazie, one of the student-heroes of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878, who had splendid opportunity to witness the effects of fear during an epidemic, asserts that fear is a certain cause of attack of yellow fever.

I will say, parenthetically, in the way of right information relative to the South, that there has been no epidemic since 1878--twenty years; that it has been proven that yellow fever does not originate in any part of the United States, and that it is very effectively barred out at quarantine, or, if accidentally admitted, that it is easily killed by present means of treatment, and that an epidemic is no longer mentioned as a possibility--only as quite a remote memory--in New Orleans, or elsewhere in the South.

Doctor Veazie's story is corroborated by an able brochure on "The Influence of Fear in Disease," by the much-beloved, the late Dr. William H. Holcomb, of New Orleans; and, so helpful are the suggestions contained in it, that I have secured the privilege from the Purdy Publishing Company, of Chicago, of reprinting largely from it, and have added the matter copied as "Appendix A," to this volume.[5]

Doctor Veazie also called my attention to the unusual fatality attending what are called "frog-accidents." Train-handlers and yardmen employed on railroads are very liable to these "frog-accidents." The frog is that part of a switch where the rails come together, forming a "V." In running about recklessly, as a train-man generally does, he sometimes catches the sole of a boot in the "V," and wedges it in so tightly that the foot cannot be withdrawn. If a locomotive, or a car, happen to be coming towards him, and cannot be stopped in time, cutting off of the foot or the leg by the wheels upon the rails is a certain result.