This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have fixed upon us, for better or worse.  Now no type can be wholly disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good.  Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of strength:  they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination.  The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run.  Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he never goes backward or breaks down.  Your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be when you most need his help,—­he may be having one of his ‘bad days.’  We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard.  I suspect that this is an immense mistake.  I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the same work would nine times out of ten be free.  These perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the American camel’s back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and tear and fatigue.

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired and plaintive sound.  Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent habits of vocalization and expression.  And if talking high and tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to do more by the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different.  There would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so.  But the exact reverse is the case.  It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success.  My colleague, Professor Muensterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently, has written some