he stress of a world
they only feel and have never attempted to comprehend. The irresponsibly
happy ones are too often crushed and broken when life proves to bring
loss and failure and disappointment; the morbid probably will cease some
day to enjoy their melancholic moods, and be unable to find their way
out of them. If both had learned to control attention, they might have
been saved. The happy, care-free child of the light is at desperate loss
when the sun he loves is obscured, if he has not learned to look upon
the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the
rays temporarily shut from him. Because clouds were not interesting to
him he never attended to them--and now he cannot. If the pessimistic,
morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in
the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to
find all the good there was in life. Willed attention, rather than
spineless feeling distractibility, might have saved him.

When thinking can be forced to follow where trained reason directs, and
can be kept in that direction, the greatest problem of physical and
nervous well being is solved. To the nurse there is no other principle
of psychology so important. But no child ever had his attention
diverted by reasoning alone. The object at which you wish him to look
must be made more impelling than the one he already sees, or he must
want much to please you, else he only with his eyes will follow your
command while his mind returns to his real interest; and the second you
cease to command that eye service, he looks back to the thing that was
holding him before. The beginning of all education is in arousing a
_want to know_; in turning desire in the direction of knowledge.

I am an undisciplined child and I want only candy for my lunch. It is
not good for me. Milk is what I should have. I don't want it. You may
deprive me of the candy and force me to drink the milk, and I can do
nothing but submit. But I rebel within, and I am only more convinced
that I "hate" it and want candy, and that you are my natural enemy
because you force the one upon me and deprive me of the other. If I were
insane and so, of course, could not be reasoned with, this might be
inevitable. But it would be unfortunate. In that case, if possible, do
not let me see the candy; let only the food it is best for me to have be
put before me, and perhaps eventually I shall come to want the more
wh