And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close.  If one’s example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed. Become the imitable thing, and you may then discharge your minds of all responsibility for the imitation.  The laws of social nature will take care of that result.  Now the psychological principle on which this precept reposes 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 insanity you may 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 estate.  And 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 irresponsive and one-idea’d as a melancholiac.  And, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought.  Ask young people returning from a party or a spectacle, 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.  Probably every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune. “Good!  GOOD!  GOOD!” is all we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very 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.