in England, said
last year to the British Medical Association that the best
sleep-producing agent which his practice had revealed to him, was
_prayer_. I say this, he added (I am sorry here that I must quote from
memory), purely as a medical man. The exercise of prayer, in those who
habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most
adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the
nerves.

But in few of us are functions not tied up by the exercise of other
functions. Relatively few medical men and scientific men, I fancy, can
pray. Few can carry on any living commerce with "God." Yet many of us
are well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be, were
such important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical
atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in every one
potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use.
Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labor can thus be easily
explained. One part of our mind dams up--even _damns_ up!--the other
parts.

Conscience makes cowards of us all. Social conventions prevent us from
telling the truth after the fashion of the heroes and heroines of
Bernard Shaw. We all know persons who are models of excellence, but
who belong to the extreme philistine type of mind. So deadly is their
intellectual respectability that we can't converse about certain
subjects at all, can't let our minds play over them, can't even mention
them in their presence. I have numbered among my dearest friends
persons thus inhibited intellectually, with whom I would gladly have
been able to talk freely about certain interests of mine, certain
authors, say, as Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G.
Wells, but it would n't do, it made them too uncomfortable, they would
n't play, I had to be silent. An intellect thus tied down by
literality and decorum makes on one the same sort of an impression that
an able-bodied man would who should habituate himself to do his work
with only one of his fingers, locking up the rest of his organism and
leaving it unused.

I trust that by this time I have said enough to convince the reader
both of the truth and of the importance of my thesis. The two
questions, first, that of the possible extent of our powers; and,
second, that of the various avenues of approach to them, the various
keys for unlocking them in diverse individuals, dominate the whole
problem of individu