ows on any given day that there are
energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not
call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of
us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our
highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or
firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only
half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are
making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical
resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their
rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable
neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions with life grown into one
tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far
within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he
habitually fails to use. He energizes below his _maximum_, and he
behaves below his _optimum_. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination,
in power of _inhibition_ and control, in every conceivable way, his
life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject--but
with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest
of us it is only an inveterate _habit_--the habit of inferiority to our
full self--that is bad.

Admit so much, then, and admit also that the charge of being inferior
to their full self is far truer of some men than of others; then the
practical question ensues: _to what do the better men owe their escape?
and, in the fluctuations which all men feel in their own degree of
energizing, to what are the improvements due, when they occur_?

In general terms the answer is plain:

Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional excitement, or
some unusual idea of necessity induces them to make an extra effort of
will. _Excitements, ideas, and efforts_, in a word, are what carry us
over the dam.

In those "hyperesthetic" conditions which chronic invalidism so often
brings in its train, the dam has changed its normal place. The
slightest functional exercise gives a distress which the patient yields
to and stops. In such cases of "habit-neurosis" a new range of power
often comes in consequence of the "bullying-treatment," of efforts
which the doctor obliges the patient, much against his will, to make.
First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected
relief.