The Nervous Life (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER THE WIDBB VIEW We are now in a position to see more clearly, and in a broader way, the whole problem of the nervous life: the philosophy, so to speak, of its causes and its control. We have seen at every turn that the relation of the individual to his world tends to change as society becomes complex, and that the means of control of the harmful results of this normal development are not yet fully worked out for society or for the individual. The individual, in our present condition of education and social life, is likely to grow up in abnormal isolation from his fellows and from nature. The world seems alien to him, to be of a nature different from his own, and perhaps unfriendly to him. At the worst, individuality may become the cause of the greatest pain and tragedy. The over-burdening sense of loneliness of it may drive the sufferer on to pessimism and despair, as it did Schopenhauer, yet all the time he may be more and more fearful of losing that individuality. All the way along we have seen that whatever tends to break down the sharp confines of the individuality, to rest it, or lose it even for a moment, to merge it in the whole; anything which teaches one to see those most individual parts of the self, the emotions, its pleasure and its pains, as common in meaning and possession, the sharing of mental states, all these are hygienic and therapeutic resources in the actual control of the nervous life, and the cure of its diseases. The problem of nervous health is one, not merely of physical welfare--of digestion, exercise, or any or all of the physical functions, or even of the mental faculties--but it is a problem of the adjustment of the individual as a whole to his world. All those systems which are successful in treating the nervously wea...