ature is worth knowing and worth loving, and it can never be
known or loved without open sympathy.

Why, we ourselves are human nature!

Many of us would be glad to give sympathy to others, especially in
little ways, but we do not know how to go to work about it; we seem
always to be doing the wrong thing, when our desire is to do the
right. This comes, of course, from the same inability to take the
other's point of view; and the ability is gained as we are quiet and
watch for it.

Practice, here as in everything else, is what helps. And the object
is well worth working for.

IX.

OTHERS.

HOW to live at peace with others is a problem which, if practically
solved, would relieve the nervous system of a great weight, and give
to living a lightness and ease that might for a time seem weirdly
unnatural. It would certainly decrease the income of the
nerve-specialists to the extent of depriving those gentlemen of many
luxuries they now enjoy.

Peace does not mean an outside civility with an inside dislike or
annoyance. In that case, the repressed antagonism not only increases
the brain-impression and wears upon the nervous system, but it is
sure to manifest itself some time, in one form or another; and the
longer it is repressed, the worse will be the effect. It may be a
volcanic eruption that is produced after long repression, which
simmers down to a chronic interior grumble; or it may be that the
repression has caused such steadily increasing contraction that an
eruption is impossible. In this case, life grows heavier and
heavier, burdened with the shackles of one's own dislikes.

If we can only recognize two truths in our relations with others,
and let these truths become to us a matter of course, the worst
difficulties are removed. Indeed, with these two simple bits of
rationality well in hand, we may safely expect to walk amicably side
by side with our dearest foe.

The first is, that dislike, nine times out often, is simply a
"cutaneous disorder." That is, it is merely an irritation excited by
the friction of one nervous system upon another. The tiny tempests
in the tiny teapots which are caused by this nervous friction, the
great weight attached to the most trivial matters of dispute, would
touch one's sense of humor keenly if it were not that in so many
cases these tiny tempests develop into real hurricanes. Take, for
example, two dear and intimate friends who have lived happily
together for years. N