So we go back to the psychology of imitation again.  There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west.  Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions.  Some are much 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.  The very idiots at our public institutions imitate each other’s peculiarities.  And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person, you may depend upon it that 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 now in New York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is.  And, better still than that, because more radical and general, 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 of either sex.  You need only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others.  But of one thing be confident:  others still 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.  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 widespread 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.