The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever.  In an admirable and widely successful little book called ’The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,’ by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this lesson on almost every page. Act faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel.  “It is your purpose God looks at,” writes Mrs. Smith, “not your feelings about that purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend to....  Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases, and make no account of them either way....  They really have nothing to do with the matter.  They are not the indicators of your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of your present physical condition.”

But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on your attention.  From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to moment what our inner states shall be:  that is a fundamental law of psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.

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A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written about the Binnenleben, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.  No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient’s Binnenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house.  This inner personal tone is what we can’t communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality.  In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are not as they should be with him.  Half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary anaesthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to be in a human being at all.  In the healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and readiness for anything that may turn up.