The word emotion means outgoing motion, discharging force.  This force is like live steam.  An emotion is the driving part of an instinct.  It is the dynamic force, the electric current which supplies the power for every thought and every action of a human life.

Man is not a passive creature.  The words that describe him are not passive words.  Indeed, it is almost impossible to think about man at all except in terms of desire, impulse, purpose, action, energy.  There are three things that may be done with energy:  First, it may be frittered away, allowed to leak, to escape.  Secondly, it may be locked up; this results usually in an explosion, a finding of destructive outlets.  Finally, it may be harnessed, controlled, used in beneficent ways.  Health and happiness depend upon which one of the three courses is taken.

CHARACTER AND HEALTH

Evidently, it is highly important to have a working knowledge of these emotions and instincts; important to know enough about them and their purpose to handle them rightly if they do not spontaneously work together for our best character and health.  The problems of character and the problems of health so overlap that it is impossible to write a book about nervous disorders which does not at the same time deal with the principles of character-formation.  The laws and mechanisms which govern the everyday life of the normal person are the same laws and mechanisms which make the nervous person ill.  As Boris Sidis puts it, “The pathological is the normal out of place.”  The person who is master of himself, working together as a harmonious whole, is stronger in every way than the person whose forces are divided.  Given a little self-knowledge, the nervous invalid often becomes one of the most successful members of society,—­to use the word successful in the best sense.

=It Pays to Know.= To be educated is to have the right idea and the right emotion in the right place.  To be sure, some people have so well learned the secret of poise that they do not have to study the why nor the how.  Intuition often far outruns knowledge.  It would be foolish indeed to suggest that only the person versed in psychological lore is skilled in the art of living.  Psychology is not life; it can make no claim to furnish the motive nor the power for successful living, for it is not faith, nor hope, nor love; but it tries to point the way and to help us fulfil conditions.  There is no more reason why the average man should be unaware of the instincts or the subconscious mind, than that he should be ignorant of germs or of the need of fresh air.

If it be argued that character and health are both inherently by-products of self-forgetful service, rather than of painstaking thought, we answer that this is true, but that there can be no self-forgetting when things have gone too far wrong.  At such times it pays to look in, if we can do it intelligently, in order that we may the sooner get our eyes off ourselves and look out.  The pursuit of self-knowledge is not a pleasurable pastime but simply a valuable means to an end.