nervous fatigue as an excuse.
Many people have inherited emotional magnifying glasses, and carry them
through the world, getting and giving unnecessary pain, and losing more
than half of the delight of life in failing to get an unprejudiced view
of it. If the tired man or woman would have the good sense to stop for
one minute and use the power which is given us all of understanding and
appreciating our own perverted states and so move on to better, how
easy it would be to recognize that a feeling is exaggerated because of
fatigue, and wait until we have gained the power to drop our emotional
microscopes and save all the evil results of allowing nervous
excitement to control us. We are even permitted to see clearly an
inherited tendency to magnify emotions and to overcome it to such an
extent that life seems new to us. This must be done by the individual
himself, through a personal appreciation of his own mistakes and active
steps to free himself from them. No amount of talking, persuading, or
teaching will be of the slightest service until that personal
recognition comes. This has been painfully proved too often by those
who see a friend suffering unnecessarily, and in the short-sighted
attempt to wrench the emotional microscope from his hand, simply cause
the hold to tighten and the magnifying power to increase. A careful,
steady training of the physique opens the way for a better practice of
the wholesome philosophy, and the microscope drops with the relaxation
of the external tension which has helped to hold it.

Emotions are often not even exaggerated but are from the beginning
imaginary; and there are no more industrious imps of evil than these
sham feelings. The imps have no better field for their destructive work
than in various forms of morbid, personal attachment, and in what is
commonly called religion,--but which has no more to do with genuine
religion than the abnormal personal likings have to do with love.

It is a fact worthy of notice that the two powers most helpful, most
strengthening, when sincerely felt and realized, are the ones oftenest
perverted and shammed, through morbid states and abnormal nervous
excitement. The sham is often so perfect an image of the reality that
even the shammer is deceived.

To tell one of these pseudo-religious women that the whole attitude of
her externally sanctified life is a sham emotion, would rouse anything
but a saintly spirit, and surprise her beyond measure. Yet