According to the Lange-James theory, our emotions arise because of the organic stirrings that are aroused in our bodies through the stimulation of an exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear or surprise, for example, is not a direct effect of the object’s presence on the mind, but an effect of the still earlier bodily commotion that the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion suppressed, we would not feel fear or call the situation fearful; we would not feel surprised, but would calmly recognize that the object was astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid it is because we run away, and not conversely.

Now, whatever exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example, or to the outward expression of an angry fit, will result in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one’s personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we don’t strike the blow or lash out with a complaining or insulting word, our feelings themselves will presently become calmer and better on their own account with no particular guidance from us. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling arise together; and by regulating the action, which is under more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a fit of courage will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person who has wronged us, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling is reduced tenfold and silently steals away.

A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written about what he calls the buried life of human beings. No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations with an anxious patient until he gets some sense of the unuttered inner atmosphere in which the patient's consciousness dwells. This inner personal tone is something we can’t communicate or describe articulately to others; but the ghost of it, so to speak, is often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shame, and aspirations obstructed by timidness, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts that breed a general self-mistrust and sense that things are not as they should be. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary anesthetic to all these morbid feelings that never ought to be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or shames to discover; and the physical sensations that pour in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and readiness for anything that may turn up.

Many years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, who visited this country said something that has remained in my memory ever since. “You Americans wear too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the British population reflects a better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon if any occasion should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,” continued Dr. Clouston, “as the great safeguard of our British people. What I see in you Americans gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you relate too intensely to the trivial moments of life.”

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the countenance, and his observation means a great deal to me. And all Americans who stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses itself there, which is so unexcitable compared with ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native shores. They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots’ faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or too intense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: “What intelligence it shows! How different from the wooden cheeks, the inexpressive eyes, and the slow, inanimate demeanor we see in the British Isles!” Intensity, swiftness, vigor of appearance, are indeed nationally accepted ideals to us. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the heroine’s personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that all who looked upon her were left with the impression of ‘bottled lightning.’

Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even in a young girl’s character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some people unpatriotic, to criticize in public the physical peculiarities of one’s own people, of one’s own family, so to speak. Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of unemotional temperaments here; and that the bodily tension about which I am making such a fuss is a very small item in the sum total of a nation’s life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be talked about. Well, in one sense the bodily tension held in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its place and function.

One of the most powerful philosophical remarks I ever heard was made by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house many years ago. “There is very little difference between one man and another when you look to the bottom of it. But what little there is, is very important.” And the remark certainly applies to this case. The general over-contraction may be small, but its importance is immense on account of its effects on the person’s spiritual life. This follows as a necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour in from the over-tense body and over-tense and excited habit of mind is sustained; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg and body muscles half contracted ready to get up; if you breathe eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite exhale fully,—what mental mood can you be in but one of inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries not be foremost on your mind? On the other hand, how can negative thoughts and feelings gain admission to your mind if your brow is unruffled, your respiration calm and complete, and your muscles all relaxed?

Now what is the cause of this absence of relaxation, this bottled-lightning quality in us Americans? To explain them, we must go not to geography, but to psychology and sociology. Recent discoveries in sociology and in psychology reveal the power of the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form the entirety of a human’s social life. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social phenomena. They are bad habits, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about? Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last everyone in the locality used them. Just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own characteristic national type.

This type, which we have thus reached through the power of imitation, we now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be wholly disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and bad coordination. Your unhurried worker covers a great deal of ground, because he never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he is when you need him most because he may be having one of his ‘bad days’. We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and drive for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease that our work is so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who does the same work would nine times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the American camel’s back.

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this over-tension — and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main facts — where does the remedy lie? It lies, of course, in the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed. And, though it is no small thing to inoculate millions of people with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.

So, we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is only one way to improve ourselves: some of us must set an example which others pick up and imitate until the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some are more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn’t have a still poorer Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn’t work contagiously in some particular way for someone. If you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person a wave of imitation will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even one already perceives its machinations in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is. And, better than that is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little volume called ‘Power through Repose,’ a book that ought to be in the hands of every teacher and student in America. You don’t need to be an absolute pioneer. You only need to follow the path that has already been opened up by others. But of one thing you can be certain: others will follow you.

And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. The psychological principle I want to introduce is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that strong feeling about one’s self tends to arrest the free association of one’s objective ideas and motor processes. We get the extreme example of this in the mental disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on the subject you will read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man’s desperate state. This inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is painful; joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and unresponsive as a melancholiac. And, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning from a party and all excited about it, what it was. “Oh, it was fine! It was fine! it was fine!” is all the information you are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. And probably every one us has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune. “Good! GOOD! GOOD!” is all we can say to ourselves until we smile at our own foolishness.

Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of action, and keep them out of the details.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get rattled in the recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are most indifferent. Their ideas flow out of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? This is due to the overactive conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one’s interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions? On the other hand, conversation does flourish and is neither dull nor exhausting wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful. But the advice I would give to most teachers would be to prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one’s carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running of one’s mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive days of examination impending. If you really want to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, “I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t care an iota whether I succeed or not.” Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss Call in her book, ‘As a Matter of Course,’ which preaches the gospel of moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not ‘caring’. Not only our preachers, but our friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping on this string. And with the doctors, the various mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a good start might be made in the direction of changing our American mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.

The need to feel responsible all the livelong day has been preached long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any rate. What we need nowadays is not the exacerbation of the negative tensions, but rather the toning-down of them. Even now I fear that some of my fair listeners may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed at any cost for the remainder of their lives. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on that way indefinitely.

And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my readers is my most earnest wish.