It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you.  Indeed, you are the very man I am aiming at.

Throw away the suggestion, and you throw away the most precious suggestion that was ever offered to you.  It is not my suggestion.  It is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed men who have walked the earth.  I only give it you at second-hand.  Try it.  Get your mind in hand.  And see how the process cures half the evils of life—­especially worry, that miserable, avoidable, shameful disease—­worry!

VIII

THE REFLECTIVE MOOD

The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an hour a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the piano.  Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one’s complex organism, one has naturally to put it to the yoke.  Useless to possess an obedient mind unless one profits to the furthest possible degree by its obedience.  A prolonged primary course of study is indicated.

Now as to what this course of study should be there cannot be any question; there never has been any question.  All the sensible people of all ages are agreed upon it.  And it is not literature, nor is it any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science.  It is the study of one’s self.  Man, know thyself.  These words are so hackneyed that verily I blush to write them.  Yet they must be written, for they need to be written. (I take back my blush, being ashamed of it.) Man, know thyself.  I say it out loud.  The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges the value, and which only the most sagacious put into practice.  I don’t know why.  I am entirely convinced that what is more than anything else lacking in the life of the average well-intentioned man of to-day is the reflective mood.

We do not reflect.  I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our principles and our conduct.

And yet you are in search of happiness, are you not?  Have you discovered it?

The chances are that you have not.  The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable.  But men have attained it.  And they have attained it by realising that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

I suppose that you will not have the audacity to deny this.  And if you admit it, and still devote no part of your day to the deliberate consideration of your reason, principles, and conduct, you admit also that while striving for a certain thing you are regularly leaving undone the one act which is necessary to the attainment of that thing.