the more likely one is to
succeed. _Become the imitable thing_, and you may then discharge your
minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature
will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which
this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in
the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans
most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that
_strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of
one's objective ideas and motor processes_. We get the extreme example
of this in the mental disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely
painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is
doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a
cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on
insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has
ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are
inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one
monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's
desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere
fact that his emotion is _painful_. Joyous emotions about the self also
stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless
and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as
far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden
pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning
from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Oh,
it was _fine_! it was _fine_! it was _fine_!" is all the information you
are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably
every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some
great success or piece of good fortune. "_Good_! GOOD! GOOD!" is all we
can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very
foolishness.

Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If,
namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and
varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the
inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation
about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed.
Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and