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 pre-occupation 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 plan of campaign, 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 reel themselves 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?  To what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too