Mental growth and control

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Prefatory Note

Certain books of counsel, teaching young men and women how best to shape their ideals and their lives, played an honorable part in the literature of the nineteenth century, particularly in America, where aspiring youth is eager to learn the secret of noble success. These books, so gratefully remembered by older men, have long since become powerless to aid a younger generation, and their place has not yet been worthily filled. It is our intention to issue a short series of small volumes that shall fulfil the mission of the best of these obsolescent manuals. No one mind, no single experience, would suffice for such a task. Each special field, each special group of personal problems, must be treated separately. There is the problem of the body — how shall its mechanism be perfected and kept in repair; the problem of the mind — how shall its latent powers be wisely developed ; the problem of the spiritual nature — how shall it be best nurtured. Each is

\'iii Prefatory Note

to be treated by one who has given long-continued thought and effort to that particular subject. These are fundamental problems, which all young men and young women must consider. There are others that appeal to great classes of the community : the securing of an education when college is out of the question, the management of life at college, the choice of a profession — to mention no more — and each of these is also to be treated by men of special knowledge and experience.

THE PUBLISHERS.

December 1, 1901.

MENTAL GEOWTH AND CONTEOL

CHAPTER I The Growth of Chakactee

The growth of a human being from childhood to manhood is one of the most stimulating things that we know of; it is, as one of our ablest educators has said, " a splendid and impressive sight." The human being begins as a speck of vitalized protoplasm that develops in dark and in secret. He comes into the world helpless, complaining. He straightway begins to struggle with the world and all its chances of benefit and harm. His body may be well nourished or held back by sickness and bad care, but it is a tangible thing, whose good or bad state may easily be seen. Just as surely his mind grows, but less plainly, and the growth is less easily seen. The effects are there ; the mental man as being formed just as surely as the physical. The body keeps on developing for a certain length of time till maturity arrives, the time of active work, then growth ceases ; an even level of strength is now kept up, until middle age comes on, when the physical resources begin to decline. Slowly weakness creeps on, and each year finds the man less able to withstand wear and tear than the last one. And thus old age arrives, when once more we are apt to be weak and complaining.

The mind during all this time does not keep an absolutely even pace in its progression. It has a varying work to do, and its preparation for the work is commonly not well understood. It differs from the body in being more influenced by en-' vironment than by heredity. ' It starts out as a fluid, whose final, crystallized form is the product of the forces that have been working upon it. Good and bad, wise and unwise, are influencing it every day, every hour. There is the same struggle between these influences that there is between animals in a primeval land or trees in a forest. Those that are naturally strong and have the most favorable environment grow briskly; those that are less fortunately placed die out. And all this time the man knows nothing of what is going on. He is totally unconscious of being

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a battlefield where one sort of victory or another must be decided. He simply seems to liye his little life, to have his ups and downs, to accomplish big or small things, to be happy or miserable. He is the last one, until the matter has passed beyond the chance of interference, to realize that he could have done much to decide the growth and conflict.

There can be no doubt that growth involves conflict, for our natural development brings out all sorts of impulses that need shaping to fit them in their place in the world. The mere fact that society is made up of a great number of persons means that some sort of artificial regulation must be made to keep them from rubbing too hard against each other. This set of regulations we call our laws and civilization. One man fits into them well, and is called useful and law-abiding. Another fits badly, and we call him useless and disorderly. It is not merely a question of right and wrong, for the standard of right and wrong changes with the change of time and place. Even such fundamental things as honesty, modesty, and filial duty are to a large extent the products of individual civilization. It is extremely hard to find such a thing as natural right, and about equally hard to find the natural wrong. When a community finds that a certain course of behavior, in the logical action of ethical evolution, is good, then we straightway have a definite decision that that behavior is right. And after a similar fashion wrong grows into being. The distinction between these two things is a relative one ; and the sooner we recognize this relation, the easier and more certain will be our tendency in the favorable direction.

No human being, with the natural frailties of humanity, has or can have so perfect a reaction to our environment that he is all good. " No man can absolutely characterize his neighbor. No man can absolutely characterize himself. Every man is good. Every man is bad," said Bishop Brooks, the large-minded and large-hearted preacher. He who, consciously or unconsciously, learns easily the lessons of the conditions of ordinary life is easily and rapidly successful in various ways. But if these lessons come hard, if he has failed to understand them and the principles for which they stand, then for all his daj^s he will fight against the world as little boys kick against

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the door of the dark room in which they have been confined. His fight will of course be futile, and he will certainly fall into a final state of subjection. The pitiable thing is that his life has been wasted, the lives of those who are dependent upon him have been clogged and fettered, and nobody is a whit the better for all these unnecessary pains. When such a man dies the world says of him, "He died as the fool dieth." He has encumbered the earth, his place should be taken by a better man.

Every one of us has to learn how the fight is conducted, and that means that we have got to learn how to live. According to the wisdom and resources of our parents we get as good a preparation as they can give us. But commonly one great factor has been forgotten, and that is the youth's knowledge of himself. When a young man goes into a business or a profession, every means is employed to make him familiar with its conditions and requirements, its tools and its rules of competition. If he is ignorant of them, his failure is counted as foregone. For an occupation means struggle, the fight to do better than one's competitors. There is certainly as much reason for him to have an equally thorough training for the vocation of living, because life is as much of a battle as anything we know of. It is a battle with outside foes, as well as those that are within us. The preparation is learning what one's self is, how the human mind works, what life means, what there is to be extracted from it, and by what methods we may obtain the good and escape the evil.

Usually this knowledge is learned in a very practical way, from hard experience. A boy grows into youth and manhood, he comes into the heritage of his faculties, and he knows almost nothing of his mental possessions, his intellectual and moral assets. He wants to understand the world ; but he knows nothing of the faculty of attention, of observation. He finds himself assailed by countless impulses of ambition, envy, jealousy, love ; but he knows nothing of the force of instinct, nor how it sways him. He finds himself acting in certain predetermined ways, doing the same things always in the same manner, being influenced time and again by impressions that he does not and cannot define ; for he is ignorant of the great power of habit and association. Sooner

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or later he may obtain a glimpse into the lovely world of imagination and emotion, and he will not know how to widen his breadth of vision ; or he may be to all intents and purposes blind to it, and then he will wonder what other people are thinking of when they claim to get pleasure and profit from a cultured taste in music, in painting, in art, in literature. He may join a church or be a sceptic, but in either case he will be unable to make clear to himself the grounds for his choice, or recognize rightly the tremendous strength for good or bad that religion possesses. In short, the great impulses of his life will remain mysteries, he will be tossed to one side or another from lack of guidance, he must surmount numberless obstacles before he has a fair chance of happiness or success.

The time for you to get an inkling of all this is in your youth, while your mind and character are not finally formed, while the great conflict between your natural impulses is going on. That is when you must learn what growth means : the constant watchfulness of yourself, the discouraging of unfavorable traits, and encouraging of helpful ones. That is when you must realize that your future career has not been settled beyond hope of change, and that you may make it great or small. There is nothing more dwarfing in its effect than fatalism, the idea that events are going to turn out in a certain way no matter what efforts are directed to influence them. You must come to realize that, after all, the decision in regard to your acts and your fate belongs to you, and that you have within you forces which may lead to the noblest achievements. They are there ; you have but to dig deeply enough for them, and they will be yours. You must recognize that you are the keeper of great responsibilities, that your possibilities must be administered as a sacred trust, that through all the years you must guard your actual and potential powers as you would guard precious things. You ought to know that any stagnant, lifeless condition of mind is a crime against yourself and against all who come in contact with you ; that you have a master whose name is Duty, whose task is the work of neverending usefulness. This is what the idea of growth is to teach you.

To know all this means a knowledge of the

The Q-roivth of Character 9

growth and control of your mind ; and the following chapters are designed to make you acquainted with the important facts which are involved and their practical application. Before you attempt to acquire this knowledge, you must free yourself from certain beliefs that have been handed on from one generation to another, up to the present time. You must absolutely rid yourself of the idea that the mental condition is an entirely fixed one, which is beyond all expectation of moulding and adjusting. Your ancestors and mine continued to believe in that fallacy for centuries ; and the belief did as much as anything could do to limit their intellectual and moral growth, to make real improvement no more than a blind chance of blind experience, of unreasoning uncertainty. It was hard for them to conceive of a man's controlling the impulses and workings of his body — such power they attributed to various sorts of mysterious and supernatural forces. But to control the impulses and workings of the mind never seemed in any practical fashion even remotely possible. The mental functions seemed quite distinct from the bodily, they touched on matters not easily understood, they were put aside as if they belonged to the province of holy things.

We know well enough nowadays that such beliefs are unreasoning and superstitious ; and you need no proof to convince you that the functions of the brain are as much subjects of inquiry as those of the heart or the stomach or the bones. The more you understand about any organ, the better must you know how to use it ; and this applies as surely to one part of the body as another. Most of the really valuable work that you may do in life will be done by your brain. And if you understand what that organ is, what its functions are, what you may and what you may not expect from it, how to get the best results from it while avoiding the numberless avenues of waste and vicious action — if you know all this, your opportunities of success will be indefinitely increased. In proportion to your knowledge, your methods of life will change from haphazard to clearly defined and reasonable rules of action.

This rational conduct means freedom from intellectual slavery ; it means the ability as well as the disposition to think over matters that

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require decision, and to form a conclusion on sufficient grounds. If you cannot do thus, you can scarcely be said to have principles, outside of l^indergarten rules. Your beliefs are not the outgrowth of your own vital convictions, they have no moving force to them, and they accomplish no work in the world. Your religious creed has no saving grace in it, your political creed is that of the timid middleman and timeserver, your moral and ethical creed dissolves at the first gusty wind of temptation. Such a man accomplishes nothing; he creeps along at a slow and uneventful gait, and he may call himself fortunate if his weakness results in no positive injury to others. He is separated, as opposite poles are placed, from the man who possesses the habit of deliberation, of thoughtfulness, of enlightened reason. These are not the only things that the development of your character is to straighten out. You must by all means acquire the nice poise of bearing and demeanor that is a sign of a well-balanced mind. Your manners must be even, easy, showing faith in and respect for yourself. No cringing to your worldly superior or bullying your worldly inferior may be tolerated for an instant. The cringing would show you to be a coward, the bullying would mean both cowardice and

viciousness. You must learn how to be direct, simple, frank; you must know how to look your fellow-man straight in the eye, how to be courteous and deferential to women, how to be affectionate and patient with children. Your demeanor must not be assumed as a garment to hide opposite traits or to prepossess the world for any purpose of expediency. That course would be far worse than uncultured crudeness, for to the unfinished quality there would be added the vice of deceit. But it must be the light of a genuine feeling which shines through your ordinary words and acts, it must be the sentiment of real intention which means well by yourself and all others. All these qualities are not necessarily born with you ; in addition, they are not necessarily a part of j'our educational training. Without regard to such conditions you can make these strong characteristics your own, if you once obtain the power of undivided attention and clear analysis, of understanding the true relations between your

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mental workings and their outward expression in conduct.

Do not for a moment believe that these considerations are merely theoretical, without a strong, practical bearing on the plain, everyday facts of life. On the contrary, such things are the very foundation material of successful endeavor. It makes absolutely no difference whether you are to live the life of a business man, a professional man, or a man of leisure ; the same general rules of conduct hold good in all circles. Commonly the business man is supposed to be farthest removed from theories, and to be best fitted for his career if he represents practical action to the greatest possible extent. But no action can be of a high degree that lacks the backing of ordered and conscious intelligence. And the core of such intelligence is a knowledge of what the mind does, and how it does it. The fine factor in this thought is that every part of a man's life must be favorably influenced by such enlightenment; for it applies as well to his moral and spiritual as it does to his purely intellectual parts. For this reason you can easily see that a merchant may be honest, conscientious, fair-dealing, high in his ideals, courteous, and chivalrous, without being any the less successful. He may have fully as keen an eye for opportunities, as sharp a business sense for the wants of his public, as clear-cut a way of buying and selling, as his less-instructed neighbor. But in addition he has certain great advantages ; the business community trusts and respects him, it holds him up as a standard of worth and solidity, and when occasion calls for responsible men, he is the first to be chosen. Everybody prefers to deal with a high rather than a low type of man, everybody feels safer in the hands of the one than of the other ; and deep down in everybody's heart is the admiration for truth, loyalty, and uprightness. All this applies to every sort of calling. You need not worry about the character of your work. There is as much honesty and as much honor in making good boxes as good books, there may be as fine a mission in supplying food for the body as for the mind. Only let the work be done fairly and squarely enough, faithfully enough. It is a common experience that a man will become surfeited with refinements and conventionalities.

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cloyed with the sickly sweet taste of the artificialities which he meets when he lengthens too much the distance between his work and healthy simplicity. And then we see such strange sights as a statesman chopping down trees, a king turning watchmaker, a financier becoming a breeder of livestock. Thus do the elemental characteristics of men assert themselves, thus do the forces of nature triumph over every tendency that is nonnatural. There is a sign of health in this, the health that eats and sleeps heartily, that performs simple duties unquestioningly and faithfully, that struggles with plain forces in the open until they have been overcome. There are manliness and vigor in such a life, enjoyment of body and repose of mind. And with it there may be in undiminished possibility an elevation of character that beyond doubt is priceless. Hans Sachs, while cobbling shoes, made the songs of a nation and helped to shape the emotional growth of the civilized world. Spinoza worked out an immortal system of philosophy while grinding lenses. They had a noble simplicity that saw no shame in soiled, coarse hands, that dignified their labor with a touch of consecration.

Now take these few thoughts to yourself, and get what good you can out of them. They contain more of the whole truth of life than many a high-flown system of abstract thought. And above and beyond all things resolve to accomplish something, to get things done. The hell that mere intentions lead to cannot be better typified than in the whole life of the petty, fearsome man. It makes very little difference what you do, so long as you do it with intensity and enthusiasm. You must work hard, think hard, love hard. You must from time to time make an inventory of yourself, find out what good and bad parts there are to you ; and then, after trying to make the good better, and the bad less bad, you must gird yourself up as for a battle, and prepare to struggle for the noblest things. Make up your mind that your whole life will be a struggle — a struggle against weakness and temptation, against sickness and misery, against shams and falseness of all sorts. There will be a struggle with the world, with open enemies, with yourself. And every time you allow yourself to be beaten, every time you fail to accomplish the thing you set out to do, another step has been taken toward

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that bourn where the incompetent wither and shrivel up. All life, as far as we know, means strife, and progress is assured by the defeat of the weaklings. There is no growth that is not fed by the decay of the conquered, who ought to ask no better fate than to make a fertile ground in which their superiors may flourish.

The question, in the last analysis, comes back to the fact of individual effort. Ancestry counts for something, but not much ; social position is good enough to amuse one's self with in times of relaxation ; wealth has advantages which in fortunate cases may be great enough to offset its disadvantages. But the man who sees in life the opportunity to express himself in the largest terms, who after ascertaining what faculties he has determines to develop them to the highest possible efficiency, who is capable of seeing the sweetness and joy that lie all about him, who being proud dares not allow his body or mind to be defiled, he is the one who obtains the big rewards, the big successes. There is no mere theory in this counsel. It is the hardest kind of hard sense, the sort that sinks into a man's soul after suiScient experience, as a stain sinks into clear, dead wood.

" Health, happiness, and good repute, nay, even, in the long run, prosperity and wealth, are promised to, are given to, the man who lives uprightly and keeps his garments clean and his hands busy."

Chapter II

You are about to learn something concerning the mind ; and, before you begin, it is surely desirable to know some of the elementary facts about the structure of the brain and spinal cord. Such information is really a very necessary thing, not only for the sake of helping you to get the most out of what follows, but also for the general reason of making you know yourself and how you are constructed. If you were starting to learn a trade or a business, you would want to know as much as possible about the mechanical principles of it. And similarly you ought to have a reasonable acquaintance with the machine that does your mental work. The information is not hard to get, especially if you are the sort of person who is not frightened by a few unfamiliar or longsounding names. These names must be used to designate certain parts, for they are the only names that we have. You must try to keep in mind that they came to be used because it could not well be helped. The worst ones are of Latin origin, for Latin was the common tongue of medicine in past times. All persons who made medical investigations understood and employed it ; and only by its use could they make foreign people understand them. A few names of special parts are called after the men who first described them or best described them. But by all means remember that each name of Latin origin describes the location or form of the part in question, and that its employment is strictly a matter of usefulness and convenience.

In the very beginning you must rid yourself of the common belief that all mental action begins and ends in the brain alone. On the contrary, a very important part belongs to the spinal cord. Indeed, you ought to make no sharp distinction between these two parts, for their formation is practically continuous, and their functions are so bound up together that they remind one of the working of an intricate but smoothly running machine. One might claim that the brain contains the higher and the spinal cord the lower centres. But even this cautious statement should be made understandingly, for not all of the brain centres are high, and also many of its high centres are brought into connection with the rest of the body by means of the cord. Speaking in a practical way, they are parts of one great nervestructure, they have about the same formation in most of their parts, and they are pierced by a continuous aperture through which a common fluid — called cerebro-spinal — runs.

The brain, as every one knows, lies in the hard, bony skull which acts as its protector. There is need for this, for the structure of the organ is very delicate and easily injured. The spinal cord has a similar safeguard, but, because it lies in the back, its case must be jointed, as we know is the fact with the beautifully fitted vertebral bones. Surrounding the brain there are three membranes : the outer is comparatively thick and tough, and is called the dura mater; the inner is fine an^ thin, and has the name pia mater; the middle one is called, on account of its delicacy, arachnoid, or weblike. The object of the dura mater is largely protective ; that of the pia mater is more by way of holding and supporting a large supply of blood-vessels. The arachnoid seems to partake of the nature of both. In these envelopes the brain is surrounded by a clear lymph, which further protects it after the manner of a water cushion, and reduces the harmful effects of shock to a minimum. Thus the brain practically floats, and easily adapts itself to all changes of position. At the same time, provision is made for any increase or decrease in size, such, for instance, as might be caused by anaemia or engorgement. The blood-vessels which supply and serve it are likewise safely poised, somewhat as enmeshed fish are gently but securely set in a net. These vessels are so well protected that under ordinary circumstances they could not easily be harmed excepting by extreme violence or organic disease. The brain, or cerebrum, is a double organ, and its right and left hemispheres are bound together by a bridge, or commissure, of nervestructure thaf is made up of many strands. Below the cerebrum, or main brain, and connected with it by a bridgelike structure, called the pons, is the cerebellum, or little brain. This part is likewise double, and its composition is the same as that of the cerebrum. Between the brain above and the spinal cord below lies the medulla oblongata, a wedge-shaped body that is small in size but great in the variety and complexity of its functional centres. Last of all, there is the spinal cord, which extends down through almost the whole length of the back, lying in the central cavity of the verlsebral bones, through which it sends off its anterior and posterior nerves to the body at large. These nerves divide and subdivide to a remarkable extent, running to all the muscles of the limbs and surface. One set carries all impulses or messages from the outside world to the brain ; the other carries back the resulting command of the brain to the body, and directs its action. This whole complex set of parts is wonderfully adapted to recognize what is going on around it, to register the changing conditions of the environment, and then to enable the body to act in the most advantageous way to meet the requirements.

The surface of the brain, as we shall later on see, is one of its most important parts. And therefore the more of it there is, the more possibilities of service does the organ present. For this reason the surface, or cortex, is not smoothlyplain, but tucked in, as if the brain were really a long, thin body that was bent and coiled and twisted upon itself. This appearance is not so very far removed from the truth, at any rate as far as the division into convolutions is concerned. This surface layer, for a depth of about one-quarter of an inch, is the often-mentioned gray matter, and is composed of nerve-cells. The substance under it is called the white matter, and is made up of nerve-fibres., Both cells and fibres lie embedded in a soft, springy material, called neuroglia, which in addition holds a large quantity of lymph that makes its way there from the cerebral blood-vessels. Here again we have the same protecting principle of the water cushion, to take up all jar and shock and provide against injury. If you could examine the structure through a microscope, you would recognize what a beautiful piece of work it is, and how remarkably it serves its purpose.

These cells are exceedingly interesting, for in them or in their projections the characteristic exhibition of nervous energy takes place. They are very small, irregularly shaped bodies, from one extremity of which a projection, called the axon, extends ; while from another a variable number of small branches, csClled dendrons, push their way into the surrounding tissue. The function of the axon is to carry away from the cell its particular form of energy; that of the dendrons is to bring to the cell the energy arising from outside stimulation which serves to start it to work. The growth and development of these structures in function, as well as in size, are slow and gradual. The development of the child is marked by the budding out of these processes, which do .not reach their permanent state until after full maturity has been reached. For this reason the child's youthful peculiarities of both body and mind depend less upon insufficient experience, as you can easily understand, than upon the simple fact of an immature condition. The cells themselves constitute ten per cent or less by weight of the whole central nervous system, while the remainder is composed of the axons, dendrons, and the neurons from •which the dendrons develop. The cells of the new-born child ' are practically without these projections ; and even when they do begin to grow, they are not immediately in a fit state for profitable use. The original structures must become meduUated,- must receive their proportion of chromatin granules, must, in short, go through the slow process of evolutionary development before they attain the ripe condition of adult activity.