And yet, so curiously perverted is human nature that we often hear a revolting story told with the preface, “Oh, I can’t bear to think of it!  “And the whole story is given, with a careful attention to detail which is quite unnecessary, even if there were any reason for telling the story at all, and generally concluded with a repetition of the prefatory exclamation.  How many pathetic sights are told of, to no end but the repetition of an unpleasant brain-impression.  How many past experiences, past illnesses, are gone over and over, which serve the same worse than useless purpose,—­that of repeating and emphasizing the brain-impression.

A little pain is made a big one by persistent dwelling upon it; what might have been a short pain is sometimes lengthened for a lifetime.  Similarly, an old pain is brought back by recalling a brain-impression.

The law of association is well known.  We all know how familiar places and happenings will recall old feelings; we can realize this at any time by mentally reviving the association.  By dwelling on the pain we had yesterday we are encouraging it to return to-morrow.  By emphasizing the impression of an annoyance of to-day we are making it possible to suffer beyond expression from annoyances to come; and the annoyances, the pains, the disagreeable feelings will find their old brain-grooves with remarkable rapidity when given the ghost of a chance.

I have known more than one case where a woman kept herself ill by the constant repetition, to others and to herself, of a nervous shock.  A woman who had once been frightened by burglars refused to sleep for fear of being awakened by more burglars, thus increasing her impression of fear; and of course, if she slept at all, she was liable at any time to wake with a nervous start.  The process of working herself into nervous prostration through this constant, useless repetition was not slow.

The fixed impressions of preconceived ideas in any direction are strangely in the way of real freedom.  It is difficult to catch new harmonies with old ones ringing in our ears; still more difficult when we persist in listening at the same time to discords.

The experience of arguing with another whose preconceived idea is so firmly fixed that the argument is nothing but a series of circles, might be funny if it were not sad; and it often is funny, in spite of the sadness.

Suppose we should insist upon retaining an unpleasant brain-impression, only when and so long as it seemed necessary in order to bring a remedy.  That accomplished, suppose we dropped it on the instant.  Suppose, further, that we should continue this process, and never allow ourselves to repeat a disagreeable brain-impression aloud or mentally.  Imagine the result.  Nature abhors a vacuum; something must come in place of the unpleasantness; therefore way is made for feelings more comfortable to one’s self and to others.

Bad feelings cause contraction, good ones expansion.  Relax the muscular contraction; take a long, free breath of fresh air, and expansion follows as a matter of course.  Drop the brain-contraction, take a good inhalation of whatever pleasant feeling is nearest, and the expansion is a necessary consequence.