THE BOOK OF LIFE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY" 
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd; 
TORONTO The 
Book of Life 
Mind and Body 
By 
UPTON SINCLAIR 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 Copyright, 1921 
BY 
UPTON SINCLAIR 
Set up and electrotyped. Published Sept., 1921. 
All rights reserved, including rights of translation 
in all countries, including the Scandinavian. 
Printed in the United States of America. To 
Rate Crane (gart? 
in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a 
better world, and her fidelity to those 
who struggle to achieve it. INTRODUCTORY 
The writer of this book has been in this world some forty- 
two years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long 
enough to have made many painful mistakes, and to have 
learned much from them. Looking about him, he sees others 
making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that same 
knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the 
case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the 
blunders and the pain. 
There come to the writer literally thousands of letters 
every year, asking him questions, some of them of the 
strangest. A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can 
be cured by a fast? A man is unable to make his wife happy, 
and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A man 
has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him 
what to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has 
only a little time for self-improvement, and will I tell him 
what books he ought to read? Many such questions every 
day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry 
for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The, things they, 
most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in 
the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of 
these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the second 
is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to date. 
Nor is there anywhere a book in which the effort has been 
made to give to everyday human beings the everyday informa- 
tion they need for the successful living of their lives. 
For the present book the following claims may be made. 
First, it is a modern book; its writer watches hour by hour 
the new achievements of the human mind, he reaches out for 
information about them, he seeks to adjust his own thoughts 
to them and to test them in his own living. Second, it is, or 
tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among those 
too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that 
because many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore 
everything that is old is to be spurned with contempt, and 
everything that proclaims itself new is to be taken at its own 
valuation. Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not 
VII VIII 
Introductory 
pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it is neces- 
sary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind 
book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his 
enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you 
in the brief span of your life. It will attempt to tell you how 
to live, how to find health arid happiness and success, how to 
work and how to play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to 
love and to marry and to care for your children, how to deal 
with your fellow men in business and politics and social life, 
how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what 
art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys 
phrase it! 
There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might 
begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might 
begin with love, because that precedes the child; it might begin 
with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health 
is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it 
might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing 
its origin and fundamental nature. 
The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of 
people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; 
they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, 
and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you 
a startled look and get out of your way. And then there is 
another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who say, 
"Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of 
thing." You offer them something that looks like a sermon, 
and they turn to the baseball page. 
Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among 
others, the great American tired business man. He wrestles 
with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to 
read in the evening, he says: "Make it short and snappy." 
There is the wife of the tired business man, the American 
perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; 
but she has never got down to anything fundamental in her 
life, and mostly she likes to read about exciting love affairs, 
which she distinguishes from the unexciting kind she knows 
by the word "romance." Then there is the still more tired 
American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all day 
under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt 
to fall asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there 
is the workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, Introductory 
IX 
and has a chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her hus- 
band before he falls asleep. She would like to have somebody 
tell her what to do for croup, but she is not sure that she has 
time to discuss the question whether life is worth living. 
Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired 
people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had 
some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his 
mind like a knife: "What a strange thing this life is! What 
am I anyhow? Where do I come from, and what is going to 
become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" 
I have sat chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, 
cooking themselves a mulligan in an old can, and heard one 
of them say: "By God, it's a queer thing, ain't it, mate?" 
I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out over the midnight 
ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use almost the 
identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the 
schools that the minds of men are grappling with the funda- 
mental problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the 
new religions and the great moral impulses of humanity took 
their origin. It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hill- 
sides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from car- 
penters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches. 
Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a 
difference what you believe about life, how it comes to be, 
where it is going, and what is your place in it. Is there a 
heaven with a God, who watches you day and night, and knows 
every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal 
bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that, you will 
try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively 
little concerned about the success or failure of your business. 
Perhaps, on the other hand, you have knocked about in the 
world and lost your "faith"; you have been cheated and ex- 
ploited, and have set out to "get yours," as the phrase is; to 
"feather your own nest." But some gust of passion seizes you, 
and you waste your substance, you wreck your life; then you 
wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature 
of blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my 
own control entirely ? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about 
in a storm and smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can 
I in any part control it ?" 
No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you 
may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know X 
Introductory 
a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about 
them, and more especially what science with its new tools of 
knowledge may have discovered. 
The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in 
colleges and universities; also he was brought up in a church. 
So he knows the orthodox teachings, he can say that he has 
given to the recognized wise men of the world every oppor- 
tunity to tell him what they know. Then, being dissatisfied, 
he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the 
"cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought for him- 
self ; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. 
As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or 
final truth; but he has what he might describe as a rough 
working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes. 
He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to 
give you the hardest part first; that is, to begin with the great 
fundamental questions. What is life, and how does it come 
to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it? 
Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and 
what do we owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have 
to stand its hardness? And can we really know about all 
these matters, or will we be only guessing? Can we trust our- 
selves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we believe 
what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, 
and how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we 
think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble? 
Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the 
simplest language possible. I would avoid long words alto- 
gether, if I could; but some of these long words mean certain 
definite things, and there are no other words to serve the 
purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the automobile busi- 
ness because the carburetor and the differential are words of 
four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself 
straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to 
go to the dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" 
means something else than a little boy who can play the piano 
or do long division in his head. CONTENTS 
PART ONE: THE BOOK OF THE MIND 
PAGE 
Chapter I. The Nature of Life 3 
Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the 
bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and 
self-deception. 
Chapter II. The Nature of Faith 8 
Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and 
what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process 
of thinking, and without which no thought could be. 
Chapter III. The Use of Reason 12 
Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies 
we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it. 
Chapter IV. The Origin of Morality 17 
Compares the ways of Nature with human morality, and 
tries to show how the latter came to be. 
Chapter V. Nature and Man 21 
Attempts to show how man has taken control of Nature, 
and is carrying on her processes and improving upon them. 
Chapter VI. Man the Rebel 27 
Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, 
in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to 
a securer condition. 
Chapter VII. Making Our Morals 31 
Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit 
human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human 
reason. 
Chapter VIII. The Virtue of Moderation 37 
Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of 
means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a 
particular set of circumstances. 
XI XII 
Contents 
PAGE 
Chapter IX. The Choosing of Life 42 
Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is 
best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it. 
Chapter X. Myself and My Neighbor 50 
Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the 
relative importance of our various duties. 
Chapter XI. The Mind and the Body 53 
Discusses the interaction between physical and mental 
things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed 
causes. 
Chapter XII. The Mind of the Body 61 
Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does 
to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use 
of by the intelligence. 
Chapter XIII. Exploring the Subconscious 67 
Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and 
other methods by which a new universe of life has been 
brought to human knowledge. 
Chapter XIV. The Problem of Immortality 74 
Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point 
of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling 
us to live forever? 
Chapter XV. The Evidence for Survival 81 
Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of 
spiritism thus put before us. 
Chapter XVI. The Powers of the Mind 91 
Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and igno- 
rance is slavery, and what science means to the people. 
Chapter XVII. The Conduct of the Mind 98 
Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to 
preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our 
lives and the lives of all men. Contents 
XIII 
PART TWO: THE BOOK OF THE BODY 
PAGE 
Chapter XVIII. The Unity of the Body 105 
Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is 
not a matter of many different organs and functions, but 
is one problem of one organism. 
Chapter XIX. Experiments in Diet 115 
Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and 
his conclusions as to what to eat. 
Chapter XX. Errors in Diet 123 
Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they 
play in the making of health and disease. 
Chapter XXL Diet Standards 134 
Discusses various foods and their food values, the quan- 
tities we need, and their money cost. 
Chapter XXII. Foods and Poisons 145 
Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon 
the system of stimulants and narcotics. 
Chapter XXIII. More About Health 156 
Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, cloth- 
ing, bathing and sleep. 
Chapter XXIV. Work and Play 163 
Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and 
the overworked. 
Chapter XXV. The Fasting Cure 169 
Deals with Nature's own remedy for disease, and how to 
make use of it. 
Chapter XXVI. Breaking the Fast 177 
Discusses various methods of building up the body after 
a fast, especially the milk diet. 
Chapter XXVII. Diseases and Cures 182 
Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and 
what is known about their cause and cure. PART ONE 
THE BOOK OF THE MIND CHAPTER I 
THE NATURE OF LIFE 
(Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds 
of real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.) 
If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what 
Life is. But unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The 
only consolation I can find is in the fact that nobody else 
knows either. 
We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female 
created He them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and 
they would have been happy had not Satan tempted them. 
But then you ask, who made Satan, and the explanation grows 
vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan 
was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself ? 
So this explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further 
than the Hindoo picture of the world resting on the back of 
a tortoise, and the tortoise on the head of a snake-and noth- 
ing said as to what the snake rests on. 
Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, 
perhaps the greatest in the world, and his eager face rises 
before me, and I hear his quick, impetuous voice declaring 
that he knows what Life is; he has told it in several big 
volumes, and all I have to do is to read them. Life is a 
tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of 
chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the 
thing in his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought 
called Monism, which finds the ultimate source of being in 
forms of energy manifesting themselves as matter; he shows 
how all living things arise from that and sink back into it. 
But question this scientist more closely. What is this 
"matter" that you are so sure of ? How do you know it ? 
Obviously, through sensations. You never know matter itself, 
you only know its effects upon you, and you assume that the 
matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other words, 
"matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a 
permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were 
to be sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon 
3 4 
Mind and Body 
who liked to make fun of eminent physiologists-then there 
might be the appearance of matter and nothing else; in other 
words, there might be mind, and various states of mind. So 
we discover that the materialist, in the philosophic sense, is 
making just as large an act of faith, is pronouncing just as 
bold a dogma as any priest of any religion. 
This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother 
Eddy there was Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there 
was Plato, and they and the materialists disputed until their 
hearers cried in despair, "What is Mind? No matter! What 
is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago in a 
town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of 
philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his 
eyes on a church steeple outside the window, and for years 
on end devoted himself to examining the tools of thought with 
which the human mind is provided, and deciding just what 
work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So came the 
proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing 
with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only 
phenomena-that is to say, appearances-and their relations 
one with another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this 
once for all time, setting forth four propositions about ulti- 
mate reality, and proving them by exact and irrefutable logic, 
and then proving by equally exact and irrefutable logic thejr 
precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who has read and 
comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant* 
knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and 
that all the complicated theories which the philosophers from 
Heraclitus to Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of 
their inner consciousness, have no more relation to reality 
than the intricacies of the game of chess. 
The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he 
spent a lot of time reading these philosophers and acquainting 
himself with their subtle theories. He learned a whole lan- 
guage of long words, and even the special meanings which 
each philosopher or school of philosophers give to them. When 
he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics is 
concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of 
clearing out of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. 
It was not even good intellectual training; the metaphysical 
method of thought is a trap. The person who thinks in abso- 
* See Paulsen: "Life of Kant." The Book of the Mind 
5 
lutes and ultimates is led to believe that he has come to con- 
clusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he has merely 
proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe 
the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well-as his 
opponents will at once demonstrate. 
If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result repre- 
sents a plain surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you 
multiply two feet by two feet by two feet, you have a solid, 
or figure of three dimensions-such as the world in which 
we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply two 
feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that 
represent? For ages the minds of mathematicians and 
philosophers have been tempted by this fascinating prob- 
lem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked out by 
analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into 
this "fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, 
and come back to our present world in that condition, and 
no one of your three-dimension friends would be able to 
imagine how you had managed it, or to put you back again 
the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have the 
perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth 
dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound 
thinking as a physical "fourth dimension" would play with- 
say, the prison system. A man who takes up an absolute- 
God, immortality, the origin of being, a first cause, free will, 
absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space, final truth, 
original substance, the "thing in itself"-that man disappears 
into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or 
upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits 
himself in triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another 
disappearance, and another change, and is back on earth an 
ordinary human being. 
The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and 
metaphysicians and professors of academic philosophy, tran- 
scendentalists and theosophists and Christian Scientists, who 
perform such mental monkey-shines continuously before our 
eyes. They prove what they please, and the fact that no two 
of them prove the same thing makes clear to us in the end 
that none of them has proved anything. The Christian Scien- 
tist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain 
is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in 
this faith until he runs into an automobile and sustains a com- 6 
Mind and Body 
pound fracture of the femur-whereupon he does exactly what 
any of the rest of us do, goes to a competent surgeon and 
has the bone set. On the other hand, some devoted young 
Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and Dietzgen, 
and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and 
that all things have grown out of it and return to it; they 
have seen that the brain decays after death, they declare that 
the soul is a function of the brain-and because of such 
theories they deliberately reject the most powerful modes 
of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in human 
solidarity. 
The best books I know for the sweeping out of meta- 
physical cobwebs are "The Philosophy of Common Sense" and 
"The Creed of a Layman," by Frederic Harrison, leader of 
the English Positivists, a school of thought established by 
Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these booksj I 
recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it ap- 
pears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. 
Mr. Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the 
mental tools for dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs 
prove that mankind never will and never can have these tools. 
I look back upon the long process of evolution and ask myself, 
What would an oyster think about Positivism? What would 
be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on the subject 
of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the 
difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great 
as will be the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super- 
race which some day takes possession of the earth and of all 
the universe. It does not seem to me good science or good 
sense to dogmatize about what this race will know, or what 
will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good 
science and good sense is to take the tools which we now 
possess and use them to their utmost capacity. 
What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly 
endless stream of sensations which manifest themselves in 
certain ways, and seem to inhere in what we call things and 
beings. We observe incessant change in all these phenomena, 
and we examine these changes and discover their wrays. The 
ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for practical 
purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our 
calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, 
we could not live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowl- The Book of the Mind 
7 
edge is the further tracing out of such "laws"-that is to say, 
the ways of behaving of existence-and the extending of our 
belief in their invariability to wider and wider fields. 
Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth 
where it listeth." But now we are quite certain that there 
are causes for the blowing of the wind, and when our re- 
searches have been carried far enough, we shall be able to 
account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once 
we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; 
but now we are beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain 
what they come from and what they mean. Perhaps we still 
find human nature a bewildering and Unaccountable thing; 
but some day we shall know enough of man's body and his 
mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human 
nature and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce 
certain reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that 
the fnost cautious financier will invest tens of millions of 
dollars in a process, and never once reflect that he is putting 
too much trust in the permanence of nature. 
In many departments of thought great specialists are now 
working, experimenting and observing by the methods of 
science. If in the course of this book we speak of "certainty," 
we mean, of course, not the "absolute" certainty of any meta- 
physical dogma, but the practical certainty of everyday com- 
mon sense; the certainty we feel that eating food will satisfy 
our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two will 
continue to make four. CHAPTER II 
THE NATURE OF FAITH 
(Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and 
what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process of think- 
ing, and without which no thought could be.) 
The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Her- 
bert Spencer has defined this growth, or evolution, in a string 
of long words which may be summed up to mean: the process 
whereby a number of things which are simple and like one 
another become different parts of one thing which is complex. 
If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of 
it in others, we discover that when it is proceeding success- 
fully, it is accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which 
we call happiness or pleasure; also that when it is thwarted 
or repressed, it is accompanied by a different sensation which 
we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both inside the churches 
and out, have set themselves to the task of proving that there 
must be some other object of life than the continuance of these 
sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. 
They have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will 
collapse and human progress come to an end unless we can 
find some other motive, something more permanent and more 
stimulating, something "higher," as they phrase it. All I can 
say is that I gave reverent attention to the arguments of these 
moralists and theologians, and that for many years I believed 
their doctrines; but I believe them no longer. 
I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfold- 
ment of its powers, its growth into higher forms-that is to 
say, forms more complex and subtly contrived, capable of 
more intense and enduring kinds of that satisfaction which is 
nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up this state- 
ment and argue about it, please wait until you have read the 
chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between 
instinctive life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" 
does not mean any growth, all growth, blind and indiscriminate 
growth. It does not mean growth for the tubercle bacillus, 
nor growth for the anopheles mosquito, nor growth for the 
8 The Book of the Mind 
9 
house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we mean 
that the purpose of man's own life is any pleasure, all 
pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of 
alcohol, the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern 
form of cannibalism which we call "making money." We 
have survived in the struggle for existence by the cooperative 
and social use of our powers of judgment; and our judgment 
is that which selects among forms of growth, which gives 
preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to self-control 
and honesty over treachery and greed. 
So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we 
do not mean to turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean 
that our duty as thinkers is to watch life, to test it, to pick 
and choose among the many forms it offers, and to say: This 
kind of growth is more permanent and full of promise, it is 
more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we choose 
this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other 
kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put 
in jail anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to 
invite to our home people who are lewd, and some day we shall 
not permit our children to attend moving picture shows in 
which the modern form of cannibalism is glorified. 
The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between 
"science" and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that 
everything is to be determined by human reason? You reject 
all faith?" I answer, No; I am not rejecting faith; I am 
merely refusing to apply it to objects with which it has nothing 
to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that a package 
of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find 
out-in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But 
all the creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronounce- 
ments which are no more matters of faith than the question 
of the weighing of sugar. Is pork a wholesome article of 
food or is it not? All Christians will readily acknowledge 
that this is a matter to be determined by the microscope and 
other devices of experimental science; but then some Jew 
rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing in- 
jurious to the character? And immediately all members of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church vote to close the discussion. 
What is faith? Faith is the instinct which underlies all 
being, assuring us that life is worth while and honest, a thing 
to be trusted; in other words, it is the certainty that successful 10 
Mind and Body 
growth always is and always will be accompanied by pleasure. 
The most skeptical scientist in the world, even my friend the 
physiologist who proves that life is nothing but a tropism, 
and can be produced by mixing chemicals in test-tubes-this 
eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He 
is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, 
and also that it is possible of attainment. With what bound- 
less scorn would he receive any suggestion to the contrary- 
for example, the idea that life might be a series of sensations 
which some sportive demon is producing for the torment of 
man! More than that, this friend is burning up with the cer- 
tainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men will 
receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when 
they do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense 
of the materialist philosophy? 
And that same faith which animates the great monist ani- 
mates likewise every child who toddles off to school, and every 
chicken which emerges from an egg, and every blade of grass 
which thrusts its head above the ground. Not every chicken 
survives, of course, and all the blades of grass wither in the 
fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread, and chickens 
make food for philosophers, and the great process of life con- 
tinues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process pro- 
duces man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and 
judges it, and makes it over to suit himself. 
You will note from this that I am what is called an opti- 
mist ; whereas some of the great philosophers of the world 
have called themselves pessimists. But I notice with a smile 
that these are often the men who work hardest of all to spread 
their ideas, and thus testify to the worthwhileness of truth 
and the perfectibility of mankind. There has come to be a 
saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are 
familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are 
no bad babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and 
well babies. In the same way, I would say there are no pessi- 
mists and optimists, there are only mentally sick people and 
mentally well people. Everywhere throughout life, both ani- 
mal and vegetable, health means happiness, and gives abundant 
evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory to itself; 
when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this is 
yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using 
it is pleasant. When I was in college the professor would The Book of the Mind 
11 
propound the old question: "Would you rather be a happy 
pig or an unhappy philosopher?" My answer always was: 
"I would rather be a happy philosopher." The professor re- 
plied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will 
prove that it is!" CHAPTER HI 
THE USE OF REASON 
(Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies 
we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.) 
The great majority of people are brought up to believe that 
some particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that 
there are penalties more or less severe for the application of 
reason to these dogmas. What particular set it happens to 
be is a matter of geography; in a crowded modern city like 
New York, it is a matter of the particular block on which the 
child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be taught 
that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter 
from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be 
taught that it is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. 
A child born on Madison Avenue will be taught that it is a 
question of the precise metaphysical process by which bread is 
changed into human body and wine into human blood. Each 
of these children will be assured that his human reason is 
fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this 
"sacred" subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept 
the authority of some ancient tradition, or some institution, or 
some official, or some book for which a special sanction is 
claimed. 
Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside 
of or above human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? 
In order to test this possibility, select for yourself the most 
convincing way by which a special revelation could be handed 
down to mankind. Take any of the ancient orthodox ways, 
the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top, or a voice 
speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before 
a great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. 
Suppose that were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale- 
Harvard football game; suppose the news were to be flashed 
to the ends of the earth that God had thus presented to man- 
kind an entirely new religion. What would be the process by 
which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon 
that revelation? First, they would have to consider the ques- 
12 The Book of the Mind 
13 
tion whether it was an American newspaper fake-by no 
means an easy question. Second, they would have to consider 
the chances of its being an optical delusion. Then, assuming 
they accepted the sworn testimony of ten thousand mature 
and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the pos- 
sibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible 
aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really 
a supernatural being, they would next have to decide the 
chances of its being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth 
dimension of space, or from the devil. In considering all this, 
they would necessarily have to examine the alleged revelation. 
What was the literary quality of it? What was the moral 
quality of it? What would be the effect upon mankind if the 
alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied ? 
Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, 
the human judgment; there is no other method of determining 
them, there would be nothing for any individual person, or for 
men as a whole to do, except to apply their best powers, and, 
as the phrase is, "make up their minds" about the matter. 
Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation would be 
the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real 
inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and 
allow no one from now on to question it. But inevitably there 
would be some who would say, "Tommyrot!" There would 
be others who would say, "This new revelation isn't working, 
it is repressing progress, it is stifling the mind." These people 
would stand up for their conviction, they would become 
martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And 
who would decide between them and the great mass of men? 
Reason, the judge, would decide. 
It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. In- 
fallibility is an absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a 
reality. Life has not given us infallibility, any more than it 
has given us omniscience, or omnipotence, or any other of 
those attributes which we call divine. Life has given us 
powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all capable 
of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby 
mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal 
kingdom, and is gradually taking control of the forces of 
nature. It is the best tool we have, and because it is the best, 
we are driven irresistibly to use it. And how strange that 
some of us can find no better use for it than to destroy its 14 
Mind and Body 
own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek 
to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and 
must abdicate to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have 
persuaded me. I admit the fallibility of my mortal powers; 
and I begin by applying my doubts of them to the arguments 
by which you have just convinced me. I was convinced, but 
of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by fallible 
reason. Therefore I am just where I was before-except that 
I am no longer in position to be certain of anything." 
You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, 
closing the door of the good father's study behind you. But 
stop a moment, why do you close the door? You close the 
door because your reason tells you that otherwise the cold air 
outside will blow in and make the good father uncomfortable. 
You put your hat on, because your reason has not yet been 
applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out 
onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step 
back onto the curbstone, because your reason tells you that 
an automobile is coming, and that on the sidewalk you are 
safe from it. So you go on, using your reason in a million 
acts of your life whereby your life is preserved and developed. 
And if anybody suggested that the fallibility of your reason 
should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you would 
apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide 
that he was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in 
everyday judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in 
philosophy, metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of 
all this kind of insanity being the notion that it is the duty 
of anybody to believe anything which cannot completely justify 
itself as reasonable. 
Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma 
are hard put to it, and you will find their minds a muddle of 
two points of view. The Jewish rabbi will strive desperately 
to think of some hygienic objection to the presence of meat 
and butter on the same plate; the Catholic priest will tell you 
that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and that any- 
how we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and 
the Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day 
in seven their health would break down. Thus they justify 
faith by reason, and reconcile the conflict between science and 
theology. Accepting this method, I experiment and learn that 
it improves my digestion and adds to my working power iP I The Book of the Mind 
15 
play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably rational 
form of conduct-and find myself in conflict with the "faith" 
of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a 
term in its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly 
desecrated its day of holiness! 
If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of 
Freedom of Thought," you will discover that there has been 
a long conflict over the right of men to use their minds- 
and the victory is not yet. The term "free thinker," which 
ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is still almost 
everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In 
the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism 
Act, which provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for 
any person who shall write or publish or speak any words 
expressive of the idea that the United States government 
should be overthrown in the same way that it was established- 
that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of this 
book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the pain- 
ful, almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked 
about by an inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined 
him as to every detail of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts 
from his published writings, in the effort to make it appear 
that he held some belief which might possibly prejudice the 
jury against him. The defendant in this case, a returned 
soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the trenches, 
and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, 
not merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but 
also of having printed uncomplimentary references to priests 
and religious institutions. 
Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken pos- 
session of the powers of government, and which presumes 
to censor the thinking of mankind in its own interest. But 
whether it be priestcraft or whether it be capitalism which 
seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same thing, 
and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of 
errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there 
is no way for men to advance save by using the best powers 
of thinking they possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to 
others. Speaking theologically for the moment, God has given 
us our reasoning powers, and also the impulse to use them, 
and it is inconceivable that He should seek to restrict their 
use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid their use. 16 
Mind and Body 
It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. 
In so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we re- 
fuse to be troubled by the idea that for this service He will 
reward us by an eternity of sulphur and brimstone. 
Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed 
that the reader accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that 
he is willing for purposes of experiment to give it a trial 
and see where it leads him. We shall proceed to consider the 
problems of human life in the light of reason, to determine 
how they come to be, and how they can be solved. CHAPTER IV 
THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY 
(Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries 
to show how the latter came to be.) 
Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, 
"The Origin of Species," in which he defied the theological 
dogma of his time by the shocking idea that life had evolved 
by many stages of progress from the diatom to man. This 
of course did not conform to the story of the Garden of Eden, 
and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, 
and in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian 
colleges where the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed 
whispers. Only the other day I read in my newspaper the 
triumphant proclamation of some clergyman that "Darwinism" 
had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got mixed 
up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the 
method by which the evolution of species had been brought 
about. Do species change by the gradual elimination of the 
unfit, or do they change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory 
of de Vries? Are acquired powers transmitted to posterity, 
or is the germ plasm unaffected by its environment? Concern- 
ing such questions the scientists debate. But the fact that life 
has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to the 
higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in 
infancy the history of this long process-these facts are now 
the basis of all modern thinking, and as generally accepted 
as the rotation of the earth. 
You may study this process of evolution from the outside, 
in the multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their 
reactions one to another; or you may study it from the inside 
in your own soul, the emotions which accompany it, the im- 
pulse or craving which impels it, the elan vital, as it is called 
by the French philosopher Bergson. The Christians call it 
love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called it "the 
will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite 
of love. 
You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one en~ 
17 18 
Mind and Body 
titled "Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the com- 
plete unmorality of nature, and declares that there is no way 
by which what mankind knows as morality can have originated 
in the process of nature or can be reconciled to natural law. 
This statement, coming from a leading agnostic, was welcome 
to the theologians. But when I first read the essay, as a student 
of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw a stand- 
point from which the contradiction disappeared. The differ- 
ence between the morality of Christ and the morality of 
nature is merely the difference between a lower and a higher 
stage of mental development. The animal loves and seeks by 
instinct to preserve the life which it knows-that is to say, 
its own life and the life of its young. The wolf knows noth- 
ing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state 
develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are 
others like himself, the members of his own tribe, and he 
makes for himself taboos which forbid him to kill and eat 
the members of that tribe. At the present time humanity has 
developed its reason and imaginative sympathy to include in 
the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to those 
outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf. 
How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so 
far astray on the question of the evolution of morality? The 
answer is that this was the factory age in England, and the 
great scientist, a rebel in theological matters, was in economics 
a child of his time. We find him using the formulas of 
bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for 
the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," 
ran the nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the 
god of nineteenth century biology. Tennyson summed it up 
in the phrase: "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin;" 
and this was found convenient by Manchester manufacturers 
who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a 
day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the 
coal mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges 
and the holy men of their churches that this was "the survival 
of the fittest," it was nature's way of securing the advance- 
ment of the race. 
But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and 
it occurs to our men of science to go back to nature and find 
out what really are her ways. If you will read Kropotkin's 
"Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," you will find a com- The Book of the Mind 
19 
plete refutation of the old bourgeois biology, and a view of 
nature which reveals in it the germs of human morality. 
Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it 
is the social and not the solitary animals which are most 
numerous and most successful. There are many millions of 
ants and bees for every hawk or eagle, and certainly in the 
state of nature there were thousands of deer for every lion 
or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social creatures 
have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the 
imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral 
codes of mankind. The different animals prey upon one an- 
other, but they do not prey upon their own species, except in 
a few rare cases. The only beast that makes a regular prac- 
tice of exploiting his own kind is man. 
By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows 
that mutual aid and mutual self-protection are the means 
whereby the higher forms of being have been evolved. In- 
sects and birds and fish, nearly all the herbivorous mammals, 
and even a great many of the carnivores, help one another 
and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the tree- 
tops drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because 
there were so many of them, and when they saw him they 
all set up a shriek and clamor which deafened and confused 
him. And when by and by these monkeys developed an 
opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club, 
and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and 
fell upon the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they 
did it because they had learned solidarity-even as the workers 
of the world are today learning solidarity in the face of the 
beast of capitalism. 
Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, 
and that is true. But first among the products of that cunning 
brain has been the knowledge that by himself he is the most 
helpless and pitiful of creatures, while standing together and 
forming societies and developing moralities, he is master of 
the world. He has not yet learned that lesson entirely; he 
has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he takes 
the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain, 
and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present 
hour he is painfully realizing that his poison formulas all 
become known to the tribes whom he calls his enemies, and 
so it is his own destruction he is engaged in contriving. In 
3 20 
Mind and Body 
other words, man has come to a time when his mechanical skill, 
his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed more 
rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. 
His ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than 
his desire to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of 
nature as an insane creature, wrecking not merely everything 
that he himself has built up, but everything that nature has 
built in the ages before him. He is striving now with infinite 
agony to make this fact real to himself, and to mend his 
evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out from 
his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed 
he has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find 
real happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this 
earth, by the method of inflicting misery and torment upon 
his fellow men. CHAPTER V 
NATURE AND MAN 
(Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and 
is carrying on her processes and improving upon them.) 
If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human 
morality is not a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like 
everything else in the world, a product of natural evolution. 
We can trace the history of it, just as we trace the story of 
the rocks. It is not a mysterious or supernatural thing, it is 
simply the reaction of man to his environment, and more 
especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same 
inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith 
which appears to be the soul of all being. 
Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many 
fundamental respects his ways are still nature's ways and his 
laws still nature's laws. But there are other and even more 
significant ways in which man has separated himself from 
nature and made himself something quite different. In order 
to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction between nature 
and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear in 
mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We 
distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at 
one stage the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We 
distinguish the animal from the vegetable kingdom, despite 
the fact that in their lower forms they cannot be distinguished. 
What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? 
The difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind 
in her processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give 
life to one salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon 
to be devoured by other fish apparently no better than salmon. 
Poets may take up the doctrine of evolution and dress it out in 
theological garments, talking about the "one far off divine event 
towards which the whole creation moves/' but for all we can 
see, nature, apart from man, is just as well satisfied to move 
in circles, and to come back exactly where she started. Nature 
made a whole world of complicated creatures in the steamy, 
luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if decid- 
21 22 
Mind and Body 
ing that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not 
a success, she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, 
and we have nothing but the bones to tell us about them. 
No one understands anything about evolution until he has 
realized that the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not 
mean the survival of the best from any human point of view. 
It merely means the survival of those capable of surviving 
in some particular environment. We consider our present 
civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should cause 
another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" de- 
pended upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something 
we could grow by artificial light in the bowels of the earth. 
So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now- 
whether we say with the theologians that it was divine provi- 
dence, or with the materialist philosophers that it was an 
accidental mixing of atoms-at any rate it has come about that 
nature has recently produced creatures who are conscious of 
her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to take 
up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or 
for worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been 
on parts of our planet such a combination of climate and soil 
as has brought into being a new product of nature, a heightened 
form of life which we call "intelligence." Creation opens its 
eyes, and beholds the work of the creator, and decides that 
it is good-yet not so good as it might be! Creation takes 
up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many respects 
annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether 
a sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a 
question it would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should 
be clear-nature has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature 
never produced a sonnet, nor anything resembling it. 
Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. 
This fact may shock us, or it may inspire us; to the meta- 
physically minded it offers a great variety of fascinating prob- 
lems. Can it be that God is in process of becoming, that there 
is no God until he has become, in us and through us? H. G. 
Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the 
bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce 
Mr. Wells as an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They 
have been worshiping their God for some three or four thou- 
sand years, and know that He has been from eternity; He 
created the world at His will, and how shall impious man The Book of the Mind 
23 
presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine 
that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly 
little toys, his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony 
concerts and such pale imitations of celestial harmonies! 
Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has 
created a bishop of his own, and no doubt would maintain 
the thesis that he is a far better bishop than any created by 
the God of the Anglican churches. We will leave Mr. Wells' 
bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops, and will 
merely remind the reader of our warning about these meta- 
physical matters. You can prove anything and everything, 
whichever and however, all or both; and discussions of the 
subject are merely your enunciation of the fact that you have 
your private truth as you want it. It may be that there is 
an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the whole process of 
creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and blunders 
of nature can be explained from some point of view at present 
beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may 
be that consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the 
first time. It may be that it is an accident, a fleeting product 
like the morning mist on the mountain top. On the other 
hand, it may be that it is destined to grow and expand and 
take control of the entire universe, as a farmer takes control 
of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as our 
individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge 
into a family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall 
some day grope our way toward the consciousness of other 
planets, or of other states of being subsisting on this planet 
unknown to us, or perhaps even toward the cosmic soul, the 
universal consciousness which we call God. 
But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: 
man, the created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up 
the world purpose, he is imposing upon it new purposes of his 
own, he is attempting to impose upon it a moral code, to test 
it and discipline it by a new standard which he calls economy. 
To the present writer this seems the most significant fact 
about life, the most fascinating point of view from which life 
can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into 
greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray 
Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening 
essay, with its fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son." 
In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of 24 
Mind and Body 
man revised and even supplanted the processes of nature? 
The ways are so many that it would be easier to mention 
those in which he has not done so. A modern civilized man 
is hardly content with anything that nature does, nor willing 
to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's 
fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into 
being. He is not content with the skin that nature has given 
him; he has made himself an infinite variety of complicated 
coverings. He objects to nature's habit of pouring cold 
water upon him, and so he has built himself houses in which 
he makes his own climate; he has recently taken to creat- 
ing for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which 
fly through the air, or which swim under the surface of 
the sea; so he carries his private climate with him to all 
these places. It was nature's custom to remove her blunders 
and her experiments quickly from her sight. But man has 
decided that he loves life so well that he will preserve 
even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a 
state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, 
he blundered into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But 
civilized man despises such a method of maintaining the 
standard of human eyes; he creates for himself a transparent 
product, ground to such a curve that it corrects the focus of 
his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten 
thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against 
the harshness of his ancient mother, and has freed himself 
from her control. 
But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way 
to act first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes 
about that very few, even of the most highly educated men, 
are aware how completely the ancient ways of nature have 
been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It is a good deal 
as in the various trades and professions which have developed 
with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper 
man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to 
make shoes, the optician knows about grinding glasses, but 
none of these knows very much about the others' specialties, 
and has no realization of how far the other has gone. So it 
comes about that in our colleges we are still teaching ancient 
and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual practice 
of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. 
In all colleges, except a few which have been tainted by The Book of the Mind 
25 
Socialist thought, the students are solemnly learning the so- 
called "Malthusian law," that population presses continually 
upon the limits of subsistence, there are always a few more 
people in every part of the world than that part of the world 
is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's pro- 
ductive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so 
there can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, 
war and famine are simply nature's eternal methods of adjust- 
ing man to his environment. 
Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine 
out of ten of the students come from homes where the parents 
have discovered the modern practice of birth control; all the 
students are themselves finding out about it in one way or 
another, and will proceed when they marry to restrict them- 
selves to two or three children. In vain will the ghost of 
their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be 
traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the 
dreadful crime of "race suicide"-that is to say, their pre- 
suming to use their reason to put an end to the ghastly situa- 
tion revealed by the Malthusian law, over-population eternally 
recurring and checked by abortion, war and famine 1 In vain 
will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist, Anthony 
Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people 
in jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich 
woman knows, and for attempting to change the entirely man- 
made state of affairs whereby an intelligent and self-governing 
Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or three generations turned 
over to a slum population of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, 
Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese! 
Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught 
what his professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing 
returns of agriculture." That is to say, additional labor ex- 
pended upon a plot of land does not result in an equal increase 
of produce, and the increase grows less, until finally you come 
to a time when no matter how much labor you expend, you 
can get no more produce from that plot of land. All pro- 
fessors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and 
since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political 
science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs 
of the city where the college is located, market gardeners are 
practicing on an enormous scale a new system of intensive 
agriculture which makes the "law of diminishing returns" a 
foolish joke. 26 
Mind and Body 
As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and 
Workshops," the modern intensive gardener, by use of glass 
and the chemical test-tube, has developed an entirely new 
science of plant raising. He is independent of climate, he 
makes his own climate; he is independent of the defects of 
the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and make 
his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital 
investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten 
times as much. If his methods were applied to the British 
Isles, he could raise sufficient produce on this small surface 
to feed the population of the entire globe. 
So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices 
man is in position to restrict or to increase population as he 
sees fit. Also he is in position to raise food and produce the 
necessities of life for a hundred or thousand times as many 
people as are now on the earth. But superstition ordains in- 
voluntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that land shall 
be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for 
rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"-that old 
nature of the "tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that 
they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who 
can"; that ancient nature which has been so entirely suppressed 
and supplanted by civilized man, and which survives only as 
a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the tomb, for the 
purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory 
financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the 
cold, or when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation 
of his blood, you do not find him troubling himself about the 
laws of "nature"; never will he mention this old scarecrow, 
except when he is trying to persuade the workers of the world 
to go on paying him tribute for the use of the natural resources 
of the earth! CHAPTER VI 
MAN THE REBEL 
(Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in 
which man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer 
condition.) 
In the state of nature you find every creature living a 
precarious existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the 
creature survives only so long as it keeps itself at the top of 
its form. The result is the maintenance of the type in its 
full perfection, and, under the competitive pressure, a gradual 
increase of its powers. Excepting when sudden eruptions of 
natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly provided with 
a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in harmonious rela- 
tionship to its environment, it knows how to do what it has 
to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection. 
But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, 
abolishes the competitive struggle, and changes at his own 
insolent will both his environment and his reaction thereto. 
Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; 
they are for his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the 
inconveniences of nature and the stresses of the competitive 
struggle. In a state of nature there are no fat animals, but in 
civilization there are not merely fat animals, but fat men to 
eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no animal loafs very 
long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But man, by 
his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, 
and also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth 
for himself; not merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he 
wants, but he builds a whole elaborate set of laws and moral 
customs and religious codes about this power, he invents man- 
ners and customs and literatures and arts, expressive of his 
superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of his ability 
to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his imperious 
self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained 
over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thou- 
sand monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. 
And each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new 
27 28 
Mind and Body 
life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, 
and perhaps an art; it becomes the means of life, the environ- 
ment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps mil- 
lions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the colossal 
structure which we call civilization-in part still healthy and 
progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer. 
What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must 
be diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the 
causes of it determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his 
mother nature, and has lost and for the most part forgotten 
the instincts with which she provided him. He has destroyed 
the environment which, however harsh to the individual, was 
beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of it a 
gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving 
pictures and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' 
furnishing establishments." 
Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, 
that he shall no longer make asylums for the insane and 
homes for the defective, eye-glasses for the astigmatic and 
malted milk for the dyspeptic? There are some who preach 
that. Among the multitude of strange books and pamphlets 
which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from 
England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker 
Read, a learned and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein 
with all the paraphernalia of learning it is gravely maintained 
that the solution for the ills of civilization is a return to the 
ancient Greek practice of infanticide. Every child at birth is 
to be examined by a committee of physicians, and if it is 
found to possess any defect, or if the census has established 
that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this 
baby shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You 
might think that this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's 
proposal for eating the children of famine-stricken Ireland. 
I have spent some time examining this book before I risk 
committing myself to the statement that it is the work of a 
sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun. 
If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first 
point we have to understand is that nature has nothing to do 
with it. We cannot appeal to nature, because we are many 
thousands of years beyond her sway. We left her when the 
first ape came down from the treetop and fastened a sharp 
stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable good-bye The Book of the Mind 
29 
to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and 
altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argu- 
ment to say that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." 
Our choice will lie among a thousand different courses, but 
the one thing we may be sure of is that none of them will be 
"natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war cartoons, portrays 
a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the trenches 
and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the 
mud and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses 
us vastly; but we should be even more amused if any kind of 
reformer, physician, moralist, clergyman or legislator should 
suggest to us any remedy for our ills that was really "accord- 
ing to nature." 
Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no 
love for nature except as an object for the play of his fancy 
and his wit. He means to live his own life, he means to 
hold himself above nature with all his powers. Yet, obviously, 
he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot give his life- 
blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper tissues 
starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, 
his social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the 
healthy growth. To abandon the metaphor, man will deter- 
mine by the use of his reason what he wishes life to be; he 
will choose the highest forms of it to which he can attain. 
He will then, by the deliberate act of his own will, devote 
his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new 
laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, 
calculated to bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. 
So only can man justify himself as a creator, so can he realize 
the benefit and escape the penalties of his revolt from his 
ancient mother. 
And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we 
have come back to nature, only in a new form. Nature, 
harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind as we call her, yet had her 
deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she protected and 
preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has in- 
vented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "in- 
dividualism." He lives and works for himself; he chooses 
to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin 
ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now what he must do with 
his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degenera- 
tion, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old 30 
Mind and Body 
mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, 
as an act of high daring: I will protect the species, I will 
preserve the type! I will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic 
intoxication, because it damages the health of my offspring; 
I will deny myself the amusement of sexual promiscuity for 
the same reason. I will devise imitations of the chase and 
of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the 
best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized 
life is based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and 
spread it among my fellow men. Because I perceive that 
civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sym- 
pathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow 
men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my ener- 
gies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all 
forms of exploitation of man by his fellows. 
Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay 
entitled "A Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the 
idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has 
called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully 
aware of the powers of their being. He asks, May it not be 
possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love 
of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to 
invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the 
destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon 
cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the 
mind? That this can be done by men, I have never doubted. 
That it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain 
by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all think- 
ing people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been 
such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization 
more damage than it is able to endure. CHAPTER VII 
MAKING OUR MORALS 
(Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit 
human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.) 
Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be 
accepted, it appears that human life is in part at least a 
product of human will, guided by human intelligence. Man 
finds himself in the position of the crew of a ship in the 
middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how the ship 
was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but 
he has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship 
is steered, and the meaning of the compass. So now he takes 
charge of the ship, and keeps it afloat amid many perils; and 
meantime, on the bridge of the vessel, there goes on a furious 
argument over the question what port the ship shall be steered 
to and what chart shall be used. 
It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile 
is useful because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable 
are the conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent 
the problems with which he finds himself confronted. The 
moral and legal codes of mankind may be compared to the 
steering orders which are given to the helmsman of the vessel. 
Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a heavy 
wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard, 
then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direc- 
tion. If he does not do so, he may find that his vessel has 
swung around and is going to some other part of the world. 
Next morning the passengers may wake up and find the ship 
on the rocks-because the helmsman persisted in following 
certain steering directions which were laid down in an ancient 
Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago! 
If life is a continually changing product, then the laws 
which govern conduct must also be continually changing, and 
morality is a problem of continuous adjustment to new cir- 
cumstances and new needs. If man is free to work upon this 
changing environment, he must be free to make new tools and 
devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose 
31 32 
Mind and Body 
among many possible courses and many possible varieties of 
life, then clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every 
detail of his laws and customs and moral codes. 
This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of 
all religions. So far as I know there is no religion which 
does not teach that the conduct of man in certain matters has 
been eternally fixed by some higher power, and that it is 
man's duty to conform to these rules. It is considered to be 
wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact, to do so is 
the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than 
any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be. 
Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, 
for a test, the Ten Commandments. These commandments 
were graven upon stone tablets some four thousand years ago, 
and are supposed to have been valid ever since. "Thou shalt 
not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no murder"; 
and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of 
controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former ver- 
sion, while if you are a member of the military general staff 
of your country you accept the latter. You maintain the right 
to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing 
have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their 
distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. You main- 
tain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, 
when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining 
the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of 
the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which 
destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city 
full at a time. 
And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided 
the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a 
man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, 
and perhaps a powdered wig. You consider that by the simple 
device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered 
wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the 
divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to 
human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so 
subjected, you call him by the dread name "pacifist," and 
if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for 
ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you 
kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular 
infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of The Book of the Mind 
33 
killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you 
bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water 
cure" in your dungeons. 
Or take the commandment that we shall not commit 
adultery. Surely this is a law about which we can agree! 
But presently we discover that unhappily married couples 
desire to part, and that if we do not allow them to part, we 
actually cause the commission of a great deal more adultery 
than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and 
revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if 
a man takes another wife, provided he has received from a 
judge an engraved piece of paper permitting him to do so. 
But some of the followers of religion refuse to admit this 
right of mere mortal man. The Catholic Church attempts to 
enforce its own laws, and declares that people who divorce 
and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mor- 
tal sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as 
that; it allows the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. 
Other churches are content to accept the state law as it stands. 
Is it not manifest that all these groups are applying human 
reason, and nothing but human reason, to the interpreting 
and revising of their divine commandments? 
Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can 
all agree upon that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets 
us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to 
decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to seize upon land, 
and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for your own, 
and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course, 
that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your 
statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number 
of years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by 
law, and held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against 
the fact that it is not stealing, if it is done by the State, by 
men who have been dressed up in the costume of killers before 
they commit the act. 
Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, 
while other men are starving and dying for lack of land to 
labor upon? Some of us call this stealing, but we are im- 
politely referred to as "radicals," and if we venture to suggest 
that anyone should resist this kind of stealing, we are sen- 
tenced to slow death from malnutrition and tubercular infec- 
tion. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system of land 34 
Mind and Body 
monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of 
his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and 
sends the man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of 
mankind protests, and I have heard a great many respectable 
Americans venture so far in "radicalism" as to say that they 
themselves would steal under such circumstances. 
One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is 
enough to make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to 
attempt to talk about "divine" rules for human conduct. Re- 
gardless of any ideas you may hold, or any wishes, you are 
forced at every hour of your life to apply your reason to the 
problems of your life, and you have no escape from the task 
of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right 
or to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery 
upon yourself and upon all who come into contact with you. 
How much more sensible, therefore, to recognize the fact of 
moral and intellectual responsibility; to investigate the data of 
life with which you have to deal, the environment by which 
you are surrounded, and to train your judgment so that you 
will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness and certainty! 
"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves man- 
kind without any guide or authority. How can human beings 
act, how can they deal with one another, if there are no laws, 
no permanent moral codes?" 
The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of 
morality does not mean at all that there will be no permanent 
laws and working principles. Many of the facts of life are 
fixed for all practical purposes-the purposes not merely of 
your life and my life, but the life of many generations. We 
are not likely to see in our time the end of the ancient Hebrew 
announcement that "the sins of the father are visited upon the 
children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a course 
of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down 
to his children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. 
The Catholic Church has had for a thousand years or more 
the "mortal, sin" of gluttony upon its list; and today comes 
experimental science with its new weapons of research, and 
discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the arteries, 
and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will 
ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has 
added to gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of 
alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes; we have done this in The Book of the Mind 
35 
spite of the manifest fact that the drinking of wine was not 
merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New Testament reli- 
gious rite. 
To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries 
and new powers make necessary new laws and moral customs, 
is to say something so obvious that it might seem a waste of 
paper and ink. Man has invented the automobile and has 
crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt a rigid set of 
traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never occurred 
to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation 
for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" 
at Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five 
o'clock in the afternoon. But modern science has created 
new economic facts, just as unprecedented as the automobile; 
it has created new possibilities of spending and new possibilities 
of starving for mankind; it has made new cravings and new 
satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the great 
mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in 
their readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which 
have no more relationship to these facts than they have to the 
affairs of Mars! 
I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest 
and most devoted souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems 
of her life, and of her large family of children and grand- 
children, according to sentences which she picks out, more 
or less at random, from certain more or less random chapters 
of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some words 
which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her 
devout eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing 
on the matter, which say exactly the opposite. She will place 
the strangest and most unimaginable interpretations upon the 
words, and yet will be absolutely certain that her interpretation 
is the voice of God speaking directly to her. If you try to 
tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye have 
always with you"; which means that it is interfering with 
Divine Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large 
scale. This lady is ready instantly to relieve any single case 
of want; she regards it as her duty to do this; in fact, she 
considers that the purpose of some people's poverty is to 
provide her with a chance to do the noble action of relieving 
it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence, "Spare 
the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one 
4 36 
Mind and Body 
could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean 
that God forbade the physical chastisement of children, and 
preferred them "spoiled." She held this idea for half a life- 
time-until it was pointed out to her that the sentence was 
not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an old English poem! CHAPTER VIII 
THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION 
(Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means 
to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set 
of circumstances.) 
Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propa- 
gandist who found my way of arguing intensely irritating, 
because, as he phrased it, I had "no principles." We would 
be discussing, for example, a protective tariff, and I would 
wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my bewilderment 
that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing" 
on the part of the government. The government had a right 
to tax land, because that was the gift of nature, but it had 
no right to tax the products of human labor, and when it took 
a portion of the goods which anyone brought into a country, 
the government was playing the part of a robber. Of course 
such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the early 
stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good 
thing for the country to make itself independent and self- 
sufficient by encouraging the development of its manufactures; 
that, on the other hand, when these manufactures had grown 
to such a size that they controlled the government, it might be 
an excellent thing for the country to subject them to the 
pressure of foreign competition, in order to lower their value 
as a preliminary to socializing them. 
The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and 
fast rules of life will be disappointed. It would be convenient 
if someone could lay down for us a moral code, and lift from 
our shoulders the inconvenient responsibility of deciding about 
our own lives. There may be persons so weak that they have 
to have the conditions of their lives thus determined for them; 
but I am not writing for such persons. * I am writing for 
adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that 
every individual is a separate problem, with separate needs 
and separate duties. There are, of course, a good many rules 
that apply to everybody in almost all emergencies, but I cannot 
think of a single rule that I would be willing to say I would 
37 38 
Mind and Body 
apply in my life without a single exception. "Thou shalt not 
kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far without exception; 
but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can think of 
many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember 
discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out- 
and-out religious non-resident. I pointed out to him that 
people sometimes went insane, and in that condition they 
sometimes seized hatchets and killed anyone in sight. What 
would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac attacking his 
children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that he 
would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he 
had finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a ques- 
tion of the life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would 
kill. And this is not mere verbal quibbling, because such 
things do happen in the world, and people are confronted with 
such emergencies, and they have to decide, and no rule is a 
general rule if it has a single exception. There is a saying 
that "the exception proves the rule," but this is very silly; it 
is a mistranslation of the Latin word "probat," which means, 
not proves, but tests. No exception can prove a rule. What 
the exception does is to test the rule by showing that the 
result does not follow in the exceptional case. 
The only kind of rule which can be laid down for human 
conduct is a rule in such general terms that it escapes excep- 
tions by leaving the matter open for every man's difference 
of opinion. Any kind of rule which is specific will sooner or 
later pass out of date. Take, by way of illustration, the 
ancient and well-established virtue of frugality. Obviously, 
under a state of nature, or of economic competition, it is 
necessary for every man to lay by a store "for a rainy day." 
But suppose we could set up a condition of economic security, 
under which society guaranteed to every man the full product 
of his labor, and the old and the sick were fully taken care 
of-then how foolish a man would seem who troubled to 
acquire a surplus of goods 1 It would be as if we saw him 
riding on horseback through the main street of our town in a 
full suit of armor! 
I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed 
and unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest 
burdens that mankind carries upon its back. The record of 
human history is sickening, not so much because of blood and 
slaughter, but because of fanaticism; because wherever the The Book of the Mind 
39 
mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape from the blind 
rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and proceeds 
to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole 
of life. Consider, for example, the rule of the Puritans in 
England. The Puritans glorified conscience, and it is per- 
fectly proper to glorify conscience, but not to the entire sup- 
pression of the beauty-making faculties in man. Macaulay 
summed up the Puritan point of view in the sentence that 
they objected to bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the 
bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. As a 
result of applying that principle, and lacing mankind in a 
straight-jacket by legislation, England swung back into a re- 
action under the Cavaliers, in which debauchery held more 
complete sway than ever before or since in English life. 
This is a hard lesson, but it must be learned: there is no 
virtue that does not become a vice if it is carried to extremes; 
there is no virtue that does not become a vice if it is applied 
at the wrong time, or under the wrong circumstances, or at 
the wrong stage of human development. In fact, we may 
say that most vices are virtues misapplied. The so-called 
natural vices are simply natural impulses carried to excess, 
while the unnatural vices result from the suppression and 
distortion of natural impulses. The Greeks had as their 
supreme virtue what they called "sophrosune." It is a beau- 
tiful word, worth remembering; it means a beautiful quality 
called moderation. We shall find, as we come to investigate, 
that life is a series of compromises among many different 
needs, many different desires, many different duties; and 
reason sits as a wise and patient judge, and appoints to each 
its proper portion, and denies to it an excess which would 
starve the others. Such is true morality, and it is incompatible 
with the existence of any fixed code, whether of human origin 
or divine. 
The fixed morality is a survival of a far-off past, of the 
days of instinct and servitude. Human reason has developed 
but slowly, and perhaps only a few people are as yet entirely 
capable of taking control of their own destiny; perhaps it is 
really dangerous to think for oneself! But if we investigate 
carefully, we may decide that the danger is not so much to 
ourselves as it is to others. The most evil of all the habits 
that man has inherited from his far-off past is the habit of 
exploiting his fellows, and in order to exploit them more 40 
Mind and Body 
safely the ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and 
property owners have taken possession of the moralities of 
the world and shaped them for their own convenience. They 
have taught the slave virtues of credulity and submission; 
they have surrounded their teachings with all the terrors of 
the supernatural; they have placed upon rebellion the penalties, 
not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the 
dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone. 
I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral 
codes now taught in the world are made wholly in this evil 
way. As a matter of fact they are a queer jumble of the two 
elements, the slave terrors of the past and the common sense 
of the present. There is not one moral code in the world 
today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an 
entirely different one for the poor, and the rich have had a 
great deal more to do with shaping the code of the poor than 
the poor have had to do with shaping the code of the rich. 
There is one code for governments, and an entirely different 
one for the victims of governments. There is one code for 
business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and 
decent one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for 
Sunday and another code for the other six days of the week. 
Most of our idealisms and our sentimental fine phrases we 
reserve for our Sunday code, while for our every-day code 
we go back to the rule of the jungle: "Dog eat dog," or "Do 
unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When 
you attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day 
moral authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code 
they bring out for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are 
impressed by their arguments-until Monday morning, when 
you attempt to apply this code at the office, and they stare at 
you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing in your face. 
What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will 
not be a matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will 
apply to all men, rich as well as poor, and to all seven days 
of the week. I am not so much suggesting a code, as pointing 
out to you how you can work out your own code for yourself. 
I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not because I tell 
you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested it, 
precisely as you would test any other of the practical affairs 
of your life-potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular 
sack of potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is The Book of the Mind 
41 
not yet possible for you to be as sure about everything in 
your life as you can be about a sack of potatoes; human 
knowledge has not got that far; but at least you can know 
what is to be known, and if anything is a matter of uncer- 
tainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most 
important of all-just as the driver of an automobile wants 
to know if a bridge is not to be depended on. 
So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this 
life, look with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all 
hard and fast rules, all formulas and dogmas and "general 
principles." Bear in mind that there are many factors in every 
case, there are many complications in every human being, 
there are many sides to every question. Try to keep an open 
mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning 
something new every day, and in trying some new experi- 
ment. This is the scientific attitude toward life; this is the 
way of growth and of true success. It is inconvenient, be- 
cause it involves working your brains, and most people have 
not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest kind of 
work there is. But how much better it is to think for your- 
self, and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to 
some group of people whose only interest may be to exploit 
you for their advantage! CHAPTER IX 
THE CHOOSING OF LIFE 
(Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best 
in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.) 
We have made the point about evolution, that it may go 
forward or it may go backward. There is no guarantee in 
nature that because a thing changes, it must necessarily be- 
come better than it was. On the contrary, degeneration is as 
definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of the utmost 
importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and 
how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, 
and continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and para- 
sites and failures and abortions. And all these blunders of 
our great mother struggle just as hard, desire life just as 
ardently as normal creatures, and suffer just as cruelly when 
they fail. Blind optimism about life is just as fatuous and 
just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we propose to 
take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that we 
have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is. 
"Chopse well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says 
Carlyle. You are driven in your choice by two facts-first, 
that you have to choose, regardless of whether you want to 
or not; and second, that upon your choice depend infinite 
possibilities of happiness or of misery. The interdependence 
of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the present, 
but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity forever, 
and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew 
Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but 
I, for my part, have never been able to see where he got his 
figures. It seems to me that conduct is practically everything 
in life that really counts. Conduct is not merely marriage and 
birth and premature death; it is not merely eating and drink- 
ing and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it is religion and 
science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the light- 
ning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is 
coming to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may 
be even the comet and the rising of the sun. 
42 The Book of the Mind 
43 
We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous 
problem of human conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the 
question: What kind of life do we want? What kind of life 
are we going to make? What are the standards by which we 
may know excellence in life, and distinguish it from failure 
and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done 
this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have 
to say is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable 
things into being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken 
them. 
We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this ques- 
tion for us. This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall 
find, as usual, that we can pick up precious hints from her; 
we shall be wise to study her ways, and learn from her suc- 
cesses and her failures. We are proud of her latest product, 
ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the stages 
on the way to man? 
First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. 
We call it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, 
of course, that it consists of infinite numbers of molecules 
vibrating with speed which we can measure even though we 
cannot imagine it. This "matter" is enormously fascinating, 
and a wise man will hesitate to speak patronizingly about it. 
Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the mind which 
studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of being. 
We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of 
clay. We award more respect to things like mountains and 
tempest-tossed oceans, because they are big; in the early days 
of our race we used to worship these things, but now we think 
of them merely as the raw material of life, and we should 
not be in the least interested in becoming a mountain or an 
ocean. 
Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we 
call "life" is a higher and more important achievement of 
nature. And if we wish to grade this life, we do so accord- 
ing to its sentience-that is to say, the amount and intensity 
of the consciousness which grows in it. We are interested in 
the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout 
nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they 
nourish and beget themselves; we suspect that they have a 
germ of consciousness in them; but we are surer of the 
meaning and importance of the consciousness we detect in 44 
Mind and Body 
some complex organism like a fish or bird. We learn to know 
the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence, and we 
esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount 
of it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and 
mere strength. Joyce Kilmer may write: 
"Poems are made by men like me, 
But only God can make a tree"- 
And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the com- 
mon sense of the thing is voiced to us much better in the 
lines of old Ben Jonson: 
"It is not growing like a tree 
In bulk doth make man better be." 
If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and 
the elephant, we shall be far more interested in the elephant, 
because of the intelligence and what we call "character" which 
he displays. There are good elephants and bad elephants, 
kind ones and treacherous ones. We love the dog because we 
can make a companion of him; that is, because we can teach 
him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are fasci- 
nated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and 
displays the keenest intelligence. 
Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, 
and that we have no way of really being sure that the life of 
elephants and hippopotami is not more interesting and sig- 
nificant than the life of men. Never having been either of 
these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know that 
I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen 
them in cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, 
or even to understand what is happening to them. So I am 
irresistibly driven to conclude that intelligence is more safe 
and more worth while than unintelligence; in short, that intelli- 
gence is nature's highest product up to date, and that to 
foster and develop it is the best guess I can make as to the 
path of wisdom-that is, of intelligence! 
When we come to deal with human values, we find that 
we can trace much the same kind of evolution. Back in the 
days of the cave man, it was physical strength which dominated 
the horde; but nowadays, except in the imagination of the 
small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a figure. The Book of the Mind 
45 
We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and 
break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere 
strength had to yield in the struggle for life to quickness of 
eye and hand, to energy which for lack of a better name we 
may call "nervous." The pugilist who has nothing but muscle 
goes down before his lighter antagonist who can keep out of 
his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can duck 
and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thou- 
sand illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down 
the heavily armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels 
of Britain overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as 
society develops and becomes more complex, the fighting man 
becomes less and less a man of muscle, and more and more 
a man of "nerve." Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon would 
have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many of 
their followers. They led, because they were men of energy 
and cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige. 
Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who 
are the great men of our time, the men whose lightest words 
are heeded, whose doings are spread upon the front pages of 
our newspapers? Obviously, they are the men of money. 
We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really stand in 
awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let 
us say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a 
man of money, and will tell you that he had to be a man of 
money in order to be free to conduct his experiments. As for 
our politicians and statesmen, they either serve the men of 
money, or the men of money suppress them, as they did 
Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much 
talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with 
being obeyed, and the shaping of our society is in their hands. 
And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher 
faculties in man than the ability to manipulate the stock 
market. We consider that the great inventor, the great poet, 
the great moralist, contributes more to human happiness than 
the man who, by cunning and persistence, succeeds in monopo- 
lizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets," says 
Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." 
If this strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely 
of importance that we should decide what are the higher 
powers in men, and how they may be recognized, and how 
fostered and developed. 46 
Mind and Body 
What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the 
lower to the higher forms of mental life? It is a process of 
expanding consciousness; the developing of ability to appre- 
hend a wider and wider circle of existence, to share it, to 
struggle for it as we do for the life we call our "own," The 
test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of univer- 
sality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner 
words, it is a test of enlightened unselfishness. 
Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct 
of self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of im- 
portance ; but the test of his development is his ability to 
realize that, important though he may be, he is but a small 
part of the universe, and his highest interests are not in him- 
self alone, his highest duties are not owed to himself alone. 
And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact be- 
comes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. 
Men who monopolize the material things of the world and 
their control are necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm 
of the higher faculties this element, in the very nature of the 
case, is forced into the background. It is evident that truth 
is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor for J. P. 
Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the 
United States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one 
who sincerely labors for the truth does so for the universal 
benefit. 
There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the 
activities of poets and inventors. They may be seeking for 
fame; they may be hoping to make money out of their dis- 
coveries ; but the greatest men we know have been dominated 
by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read 
their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or 
jealousy or greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches 
us most deeply is some mark of self-consecration and humility; 
as, for example, when Newton tells us that after all his life's 
labors he felt himself as a little child gathering sea-shells on 
the shore of the great ocean of truth; or when Alfred Russel 
Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working longer 
than himself over the theory of the origin of species, gen- 
erously withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world 
in Darwin's name. 
There are three faculties in man, usually described as in- 
tellect, feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty The Book of the Mind 
47 
predominates, we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a 
great moralist. We might choose a representative of each 
type-let us say Newton, Shakespeare and Jesus-and spend 
much time in controversy as to which of the three types is 
the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human 
happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three 
faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have 
all three, and a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop 
all three. Jesus was considerable of a poet, and we should pay 
far less heed to Shakespeare if he had not been a moralist. 
Also there have been instances of great poets and painters who 
were scientists-for example, Leonardo and Goethe. 
The fundamental difference between the scientist and the 
poet is that one is exploring nature and discovering things 
which actually exist, whereas the other is creating new life 
out of his own spirit. But the poet will find that his creations 
take but little hold upon life, if they are not guided and shaped 
by a deep understanding of life's fundamental nature and 
needs-in other words, if the poet is not something of a 
scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest discoveries 
of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as if 
the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and 
sympathetic understanding of what nature wished to be. 
The point about these higher forms of human activity is 
that they renew and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus 
had never lived, others would have embodied and set forth 
with equal poignancy the revolutionary idea of the equality 
of all men as children of one common father. And perhaps 
this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true, 
and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of 
human history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of 
mankind during those centuries would have been if Jesus had 
died when he was a baby. We do not know what modern 
thought might have been without Kant, or what modern music 
might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit 
that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive 
kindness of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its 
independence, and America today might have been a military 
camp like Europe, and the lives and thoughts of every one of 
us would have been different. 
Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the 
writer was asked to name the men who had exercised 48 
Mind and Body 
the greatest influence upon him, and after much thought he 
named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now consider 
the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley, 
was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually 
lived and walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is 
believed there was once a Prince of Denmark by that name, 
but the character who is known to us as Hamlet is the crea- 
tion of a poet's brain. As to the third figure, Jesus, the authori- 
ties dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually lived; 
others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very 
learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which 
a number of traditions have gathered. 
To me it does not make a particle of difference which of 
the three possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he 
was God on earth, he was God in human form, under human 
limitations, and in that sense we are all gods on earth. And 
whether he really lived, or whether some poet invented him, 
matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon others. 
The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the 
high resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his 
name were Jesus or John; and these emotions have been re- 
corded in such form that they communicate themselves to us, 
they become a part of our souls, they make us something 
different from what we were before we encountered them. 
In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, 
and then projects it into the world, and it becomes a force 
which makes over the lives of millions of other people. If 
you read the vast mass of criticism which has grown up about 
the figure of Hamlet, you learn that Hamlet is the type of the 
"modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine what the 
modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and 
say that Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what 
he is; the modern man is more of Hamlet, because he has taken 
Hamlet to his heart and pondered over Hamlet's problem. 
Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the "age of 
chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; 
but how much sooner they died because of the laughter of 
Cervantes! Or take "Les Miserables." Our prison system 
is not ideal by any means, but it is far less cruel than it was 
half a century ago, and we owe this in part to Victor Hugo. 
Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier man 
because of this vision which was projected upon the world The Book of the Mind 
49 
from the soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the 
part which the writings of Tolstoi have played in the present 
revolution in Russia, but this we may say with certainty: there 
is not one man, woman or child in Russia at the present 
moment who is quite the same as he would have been if 
"Resurrection" had never been written. 
In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far 
refrained from using the word "genius." It is a word which 
has been cheapened by misuse, but we are now in position to 
use it. The things which we have just been considering are 
the phenomena of genius-and we can say this, even though 
we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as 
Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up 
into the consciousness of some part of the content of the 
subconscious mind. Or perhaps it is something of what man 
calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the first dawning, the first 
hint of that super-race which will some day replace mankind. 
Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened on 
the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the 
mind of some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; 
but this much we can say: the man of genius represents the 
highest activity of the mind of which we as yet have knowledge. 
He represents the spirit of man, fully emancipated, fully con- 
scious, and taking up the task of creation; taking human life 
as raw material, and making it over into something more 
subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it 
ever was before, or ever would have been without the inter- 
vention of this new God-man. CHAPTER X 
MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR 
(Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the 
relative importance of our various duties.) 
So now we may say that we know what are the great and 
important things in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite 
distress and waste and failure, but yet inevitably, the life of 
man is being made over and multiplied to infinity, by the power 
of the thinking mind, impelled by the joy and thrill of the 
creative action, and guided by the sense of responsibility, 
the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To develop 
these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the 
supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves. 
So now we are in position to define the word moral. 
Assuming that our argument be accepted, that action is moral 
which tends to foster the best and highest forms of life we 
know, and to aid them in developing their highest powers; that 
is immoral which tends to destroy the best life we know, or 
to hinder its rapid development. 
Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices 
of man; first as an individual, and then as a social being. 
What are my duties to myself, and what are my duties to the 
world about me? 
You will note that these questions differ somewhat from 
those of the old morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should 
love the Lord our God, and, second, that we should love our 
neighbor as ourself. Some would say that modern thought 
has dismissed God from consideration; but I would prefer 
to say that modern thought has decided that the place where 
we encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously 
expanding consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty 
to make of ourselves the most perfect product of the Divine 
Incarnation that we can become. Our duty to our neighbor 
is to help him to do the same. 
Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find 
that they overlap and mingle inextricably; the two duties are 
really one duty looked at from different points of view. We 
50 The Book of the Mind 
51 
decide that we owe it to ourselves to develop our best powers 
of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we make our- 
selves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to help 
our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by 
making the city clean and decent, and we find that we have 
helped to save ourselves from a pestilence. 
The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most 
commonly preached, of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do 
unto others as you would have them do unto you." This 
formula is good so far as it goes, but you note that it leaves 
undetermined the all-important question, what ought we to 
want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what 
I would have others do unto me is to give me plenty of 
candy; therefore, under the golden rule, my highest duty 
becomes to distribute free candy to the world. The "golden 
rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of self-indulgence, 
and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a civiliza- 
tion more static than China. 
Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher 
Kant worked out as the final product of his thinking: "Act 
so that you would be willing for your action to become a 
general rule of conduct." Here again is the same problem. 
There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some 
would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way 
of escape from the fact that before men can agree what to 
do, they must decide what they wish to make of their lives. 
To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself," the answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my 
neighbor is not worthy of as much love as myself ?" To be 
sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to decide this ques- 
tion ; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great in- 
ventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, 
of course, a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may 
love the deeper possibilities of his nature, which religious 
ecstasy can appeal to and arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies 
and all efforts, it may be that his disease-physical, mental 
and moral-has progressed to such a point that it is necessary 
to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to asphyxiate him 
painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself 
is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the in- 
discriminate preaching of such a formula would open the 
flood-gates of sentimentality and fraud. 
5 52 
Mind and Body 
Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest pos- 
sibilities of life, and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; 
moreover, because life is always growing, and new possibilities 
are forever dawning in the human spirit, thou shalt keep an 
open mind and an inquiring temper, and be ready at any time 
to begin life afresh. 
Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come 
to apply it, we find that it constantly grows more complex. 
When we attempt to decide our duty to ourselves, we find that 
we have in us a number of different beings, each with separate 
and sometimes conflicting duties and needs. We have in us 
the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor 
for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, 
before we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral 
man, or the artistic man. So our life becomes a series of 
compromises and adjustments between a thousand conflicting 
desires and duties ; between the different beings which we might 
be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain times. 
We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another 
of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, 
never an absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can 
we shut our eyes, and go blindly ahead upon one course of 
action, to the exclusion of every other consideration I On the 
contrary, we sit in the seat of self-determination as a highly 
trained and skillful engineer. We keep our eyes upon a dozen 
different gauges; we press a lever here and touch a regulator 
there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for 
caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely 
of ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the deci- 
sions of each moment. CHAPTER XI 
THE MIND AND THE BODY 
(Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, 
and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.) 
It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems 
of the mind in one section of this book, and the problems of 
the body in another; but just as we found that we could not 
separate our duties to ourself from our duties to our neigh- 
bors, so we find that the mind and the body are inextricably 
interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one, we 
discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body 
is a fascinating problem into which we must look for a 
moment, not because we expect to solve it, but because it 
illuminates the whole subject. 
The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and 
oxygen, and burns them, and gives out carbon dioxide and 
other waste products, and develops energy in proportion to 
the amount of carbon it consumes. This machine has its 
elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory organs 
where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph 
wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them 
and to transform them into reactions. We know to some 
extent how these brain cells work. We know what portions 
of the brain are devoted to this or that activity. We know 
that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we shall paralyze 
the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain drug, 
or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensa- 
tion or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We 
know what poisons are generated in the system by anger, and 
what chemical changes takes place in a muscle that is tired. 
All this is part of a vast new science which is called bio- 
chemistry, or the chemistry of life. 
Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, 
and subject to the laws or ways of being of this universe. 
The first of these laws that we know is the law of causation. 
Every change in the universe has its cause, and that in turn 
53 54 
Mind and Body 
had another cause; this chain is never broken, no matter how 
far we go, and the same causes universally produce the same 
effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know 
that the ball did not move itself; you know that something 
struck the ball or tilted the table. You discover that the motion 
of the ball moves the air around it, and the waves of that 
motion are spread through the room. They strike the walls, 
and the motion is carried on through the walls, and if we 
had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of 
that billiard ball at the other side of the world, arid a few 
million years from now at the most remote of the stars. This 
is what is called the law of the conservation of energy, and 
when we discover something like radium which seems to violate 
that law by giving out unlimited quantities of energy, we 
investigate and discover a new form of energy locked up in 
the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a source 
of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply 
perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use 
on this earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is 
transformed, and in what strange ways it reappears, always 
remains, and is never destroyed, and never created out of 
nothing. 
My friend the great physiologist once took me into his 
laboratory and showed me a little aquarium in which some 
minute creatures were wiggling about-young sea-urchins, if 
I remember. The physiologist took a bottle containing some 
chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and in- 
stantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting 
aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and 
swam all in one direction, toward the light. They swam until 
they touched the walls of the aquarium, and there they stuck, 
trying their best to swim farther. "And now," said my friend, 
"that is what we call a 'tropism,' and all life is a tropism. 
What you see in that aquarium means that some day we shall 
know just what combination of chemicals causes a human being 
to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When bio- 
chemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make 
human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, 
perhaps day by day by means of diet or injection." 
Said I: "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed 
far enough, you will know what combination of chemicals 
causes a man to vote the Democratic or Republican ticket." The Book of the Mind 
55 
"Why not?" answered my friend. (He has a sense of 
humor about all things except this sacred bio-chemistry.) 
Said I: "When you have got to that stage, keep the secret 
carefully, and we will fix up a scheme, and a few days before 
election we will release some gas in our big cities, and sweep 
the country for the Socialist ticket." 
But jesting aside: if the human body is a material thing, 
existing in the material world and subject to causation, there 
must be material reasons for the actions of human bodies, 
just the same as for the moving of billiard balls. We hear 
the sound of a billiard ball striking the cushion, and we are 
prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call hearing in 
us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our ear- 
drums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we 
find every reason to believe that they act according to laws, 
and that there are material causes for their acts. If you get 
up and shout fire in a theater, you know how the audience 
will behave. If you study statistics, you can say that in any 
large city a certain fixed number of human beings are going 
to commit suicide every month; you can even say that more 
are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in 
any other month. You can say that more people are going 
to die at two o'clock in the morning than at any other hour. 
You know that certain changes in the weather will cause all 
human beings to behave in the same way. You know that an 
increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause 
a certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a 
certain additional number of women to become prostitutes. 
You know that if a man overeats, his thoughts will change their 
color; he will have what he calls "the blues." I might cite a 
thousand other illustrations to prove that human minds are 
subject to material laws, and therefore to investigation by 
the bio-chemists. 
But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. 
Something in the book pleases you, and you say, "GoodI" 
Perhaps you slap your knee or clench your fist. Now here 
is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air about you, and 
which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its effects 
to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of 
the stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you 
throw it down in disgust; an entirely different motion, which 
will affect the other side of the world and the farthest of the 56 
Mind and Body 
stars in an entirely different way. The machine of the uni- 
verse will be forever altered because of that slapping of your 
knee or that throwing down of your book. 
And what was the cause of these things? So far as we can 
see, the material cause was exactly the same in each case- 
the reading of certain letters. Two human beings, sitting side 
by side and reading exactly the same letters, might be affected 
in exactly opposite ways. It seems hardly rational to main- 
tain that the material difference of two pairs of eyes, moving 
over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted in 
two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, 
the very same letters may affect the same person in different 
ways. The composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how 
on his birthday his pupils sent him a gift, with a card con- 
taining some lines from the opera "Rheingold," beginning, 
"O singe fort"-that is, "Oh, sing on." But the composer 
happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead 
of German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" 
This, of course, was disconcerting to a famous piano per- 
former, and his pupils, if they had been watching his face, 
would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems manifest, 
does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was 
not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of 
thought? So it appears that thoughts may change the mate- 
rial universe; they may break the chain of causation, and 
interfere with material events. 
Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, 
a steam shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we 
can see, entirely incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone 
imagine how a thought can turn into a steam shovel, or a 
steam shovel into a thought? We can understand how a steam 
shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can 
understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes 
the shovel to act; but we are unable to conceive how a state 
of mind-whether it be a desire for pay, or an ideal of service, 
or a vision of the Panama Canal-can so affect a steam shovel 
as to cause it to move. We can sit and think motion at a 
billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does not move; but 
when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and 
passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. 
When fire touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration 
to the brain, and in some inconceivable way that vibration is The Book of the Mind 
57 
turned into a state of consciousness called pain, and that is 
turned, "as quick as thought," into another kind of motion, 
the jerking back of our hand. 
So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" 
on the chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what 
position this leaves the scientist who is investigating life! 
Imagine if you can, the plight of a doctor who wanted to 
prescribe a diet for a sick person, if he knew that every piece 
of chicken and every piece of fish were free to decide of its 
own impulse whether or not it would be digested in the human 
stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to 
the plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who 
was asked to do his thinking and his planning in a world con- 
taining a billion and a quarter human beings, each one a law- 
less agent, each one a source of new and unforeseeable energies, 
each one acting as a "first cause," and starting new chains of 
activity, tearing the universe to pieces according to his own 
whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It would 
simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could 
be no life in it; there could be no«two things the same in it, 
and no laws of any sort. 
So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," 
who assert one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and 
regard the human body as an automaton. We go back to the 
bio-chemist, who purposes some day to ascertain for us just 
exactly what molecules of matter in just what positions and 
combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare caused 
him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the 
belief that human beings act as they must act, because the 
clock of life, wound up and started, must move in such and 
such a fashion. 
But now, let us see what are the implications of that 
theory! Here am I writing a book, appealing to men to act 
in certain ways. Of course, I know that not all will follow 
my advice. Some will be foolish-or what seems to me foolish. 
Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in certain ways, 
and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just; 
some will be free; some will use their brains-because, you 
see, I am convinced that they can use their brains! I am con- 
vinced that ideas will affect and stir them, in complete defiance 
of the bio-chemist, who tells me that they act that way because 
of certain chemicals in their brain cells, and that I write my 58 
Mind and Body 
book because of other chemicals, and that my idea that I am 
writing the book because I want to write it is a delusion, and 
that the whole thing is happening just so because the universe 
was wound up that way. 
Now, this is an unsolved problem, and I have no solution 
to offer. What I have set forth is in substance one of the 
four "antinomies" of Kant, and you can see for yourself how 
it is possible to prove either side, and impossible to be sure of 
either. Perhaps there is really a duality in life. Perhaps 
there are two aspects of the universe, the material and the 
spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem 
to, but both are guided and determined by some higher reality 
of life of which we know nothing. In that case there would 
really be a chemical equivalent for every thought, and there 
would be a trace of consciousness for every material atom 
in the universe. Maybe the theologians are right, and in the 
universal consciousness of God the whole future exists pre- 
determined. Maybe to God there is no such thing as time; 
the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him. 
There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to 
have to confess its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape 
from the dilemma we are here facing. There is not a man 
alive who does not assume the freedom of the will, who does 
not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr. Samuel 
Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." 
Without a belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, 
we cannot become the masters of our own souls. And yet, the 
man who swallows that idea whole, and goes out into the 
world and preaches personal morality to the neglect of the 
fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its rela- 
tionship to all other bodies-we know what happens to that 
man; he becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a 
fool, or a knave, he quickly discovers his own futility, and 
proceeds to use his common sense, in spite of all his theories. 
"Come to Jesus!" cried William Booth, and he went out in the 
streets of London to save souls with a bass drum; but pres- 
ently, in day by day contact with the degradation of the Lon- 
don slums, he realized that he could not save souls so long 
as those souls were dwelling in starved and lousy bodies. So 
William Booth with his Salvation Army took to starting night 
shelters and cast-off clothing bureaus! 
And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which The Book of the Mind 
59 
falls to the lot of the scientist who is honest and willing to 
face the facts. The bio-chemist with his test tubes and his 
microscopes and his complex apparatus of research sits him- 
self down and accumulates a mass of information about the 
human body. He investigates the diseases of the body and 
learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes 
how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, 
showing the exact stage to which the degeneration of a cer- 
tain organ has proceeded, and perhaps he can suggest to you 
a change of diet or some drug which will, for a time at least, 
check the process of the breakdown. But in other cases he will 
be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were, buried under the 
mass of detail which he has accumulated; he will find the vital 
energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it. 
But along will come some mental specialist, who In a half 
hour's talk with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's 
ideas, will completely make over the patient's life, and set 
going a new vital process which will restore the body to its 
former health. A religious enthusiast may do this, a psycho- 
therapist may do it, a moral genius may do it; and the physi- 
cian with all his learning will find himself like a man on the 
outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying 
in vain to find out something about the life of the family and 
its guests. 
This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but 
they have to face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of author- 
ity over the human body there sits a higher being which, with- 
out any religious implications, we may call the soul; or, if it is 
impossible to get away from the religious implication of that 
word, we will call it the consciousness, or the personality. 
This master of the house of life is in many ways dependent 
upon the house. If the furnace goes out he freezes, and if 
the house takes fire and burns up-well, he disappears and 
leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house 
is really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things 
which we do not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, 
but which often completely make the house over. 
William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonder- 
ful essay, "The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the 
fact that human beings as a general rule make use of only a 
small portion of the energies which dwell in their beings, and 
that one of our problems is to find the ways by which we can 60 
Mind and Body 
draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within us. 
Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious 
Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the 
phenomena which hitherto the physician and the biologist have 
been disposed to ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mis- 
taken, every scientist in the end will be forced to come back to 
the central fact, that life is a unity, and that the heart of it is 
the spirit; that what we call the will is not an accident, not a 
delusion, not some by-product of nature, but is the very secret 
of life; and that behind it is a vast ocean of power, which now 
and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the human 
consciousness. 
The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding 
teacher of a certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he 
might call anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that 
the habit of men to enslave their fellows and exploit them and 
draw their substance from them without return-that this 
habit is destructive to all civilization, and is incompatible with 
any of the higher forms of life, intellectual, moral or artistic. 
He has come to the conclusion that there is no use attempting 
to build a structure of social life until there is a sound founda- 
tion ; in other words, until the capitalist system has been re- 
placed by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought 
he was, a poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful 
thing which we call genius. He saw his own consciousness, as 
it were a leaf driven before a mighty tempest of spiritual 
energy. And he believes that this experience was no delusion, 
but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being. He 
still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it 
in his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like 
a race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which 
"scenteth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and 
the shouting." Because of these things he can never accept 
any philosophy which shackles the human spirit, he will never 
in his thought attempt to set bounds to the possibilities of 
human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the wonder of 
it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New uni- 
verses are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us; 
and the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond any- 
thing that the average man can at present imagine, or that 
any instruments invented by science can weigh or measure. CHAPTER XII 
THE MIND OF THE BODY 
(Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to 
the body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the 
intelligence.) 
The importance of the mind in matters of health be- 
comes clearer when we understand that what we commonly 
call our minds-the mental states which confront us day by 
day in our consciousness-are really but a small portion of 
our total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is an 
enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse 
attached to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, 
but to which we can go in case of need. This storehouse is 
our memory, the things we know and can recall at will. And 
then there is another, still vaster storehouse-no one has ever 
measured or guessed the size of it-which apparently contains 
everything that we have ever known, perhaps also everything 
that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the 
human mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it 
appears above the surface of the sea, but there is seven times 
as much of it floating out of sight under the water. 
This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most 
closely united with the body. It has its seat in the back parts 
of the brain, in the spinal cord and the greater nervous ganglia, 
such as the solar plexus. It is the portion of our mind which 
controls the activities of our body, all those miraculous things 
which went on before we first opened our eyes to the light, 
and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die. 
When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our 
blood, some mysterious power causes millions of our blood 
corpuscles to be rushed to this spot, to destroy and devour the 
invading enemy. We do not know how this is done, but it is 
an intelligent act, measured and precisely regulated, as much so 
as a railroad time-table. When the supply of nourishment in 
the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of our 
stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the 
stomach, something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; 
when this digested food is prepared and taken up in the blood 
61 62 
Mind and Body 
stream, something decides what portion of it shall be turned 
into muscle, what into brain cells, what into hair, what into 
finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes are made and we 
have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely intricate 
process goes on day and night without a hitch, and it is all the 
work of what we might call "the mind of the body." 
And just as our material bodies are the product of an 
age-long process of development repeated in embryo by every 
individual, so is this mental life a product of long development, 
and carries memories of this far-off process. In our instincts 
there dwells all the past, not merely of the human race, but of 
all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely probing 
the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, 
it would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all 
the past. Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of 
evolution is told in a piece of chalk; and we probably do not 
exaggerate in saying that all the history of the universe is in 
the subconscious mind of every human being. When the par- 
tridge which has just come out of the egg sees the shadow of 
the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the partridge 
is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the 
few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowl- 
edge impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience 
of millions of partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of 
years. When the physician lifts the newly born infant by its 
ankle and spanks it to make it cry, the physician is using his 
conscious reason, because he has learned from previous expe- 
rience, or has been taught in the schools that it is necessary for 
the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared. But 
when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not 
moved by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is 
following an automatic reaction, as a result of the experience 
of infants in the stone age, experience which in some obscure 
way has been registered and stored in the infant cerebellum. 
Science is now groping its way through this underworld of 
thought. Obviously we should have here a most powerful 
means of influencing the body, if by any chance we could con- 
trol it. We are continually seeking in medical and surgical 
ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the body, which are 
controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are suf- 
fering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, 
what we call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw The Book of the Mind 
63 
the congested blood away from the place of the pain. On the 
other hand, we may stimulate the functions of the intestines 
by the application of hot fomentations, to bring the blood more 
actively to that region. But if by any means we could make 
clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we should be deal- 
ing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more 
permanent results. 
Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me 
tell you of a simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once 
knew a man who had learned to control the circulation of his 
blood by his conscious will. I have seen him lay his two 
hands on the table, both of the same color, and without moving 
the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other to turn 
pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the 
problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental 
mustard plaster. 
And what was done by this man's own will can be done to 
others in many ways. The most obvious is a device which we 
call hypnotism. This is a kind of sleep which affects only the 
conscious control of the body, but leaves all the senses awake. 
In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we discover that the sub- 
conscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb of the 
Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in 
its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe 
anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who 
climbs into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended 
one of the exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accus- 
tomed to give in country villages. You have seen some bump- 
kin brought upon the stage and hypnotized, and told that he is 
in the water and must swim for his life, or that he is in the 
midst of a hornets' nest, or that his trousers are torn in the 
seat-any comical thing that will cause an audience to howl 
with laughter. 
These facts were first discovered nearly a hundred and 
fifty years ago by a French doctor named Mesmer. He was a 
good deal of a charlatan, and would not reveal his secrets, and 
probably the scientific men of that time were glad to despise 
him, because what he did was so new and strange. There is a 
certain type of scientific mind which sits aloft on a throne with 
a framed diploma above its head, and says that what it knows 
is science and what it does not know is nonsense. And so 
"mesmerism" was left for the quacks and traveling showmen. 64 
Mind and Body 
But half a century later a French physician named Liebault 
took up this method of hypnotism, without all the fakery that 
had been attached to it. He experimented and discovered that 
he could cure not merely phobias and manias, fixed ideas, hys- 
terias and melancholias; he could cure definite physical dis- 
eases of the physical body, such as headache, rheumatism, and 
hemorrhage. Later on two other physicians, Janet and Char- 
cot, developed definite schools of "psychotherapy." They 
rejected hypnotism as in most cases too dangerous, but used a 
milder form which is known as "hypnoidization." You would 
be surprised to know how many ailments which baffle the skill 
of medical men and surgeons yield completely to a single brief 
treatment by such a mental specialist. 
All that is necessary is some method to tap the subconscious 
mind. In many cases the subconsciousness knows what is 
the matter, and will tell at once-a secret that is completely 
hidden from the consciousness. For example, a man's hands 
shake; they have been shaking for years, and he has no idea 
why, but his subconscious mind explains that they first began 
to shake with grief over the death of his wife; also, the sub- 
conscious mind meekly and instantly accepts the suggestion 
that the time for grief is past, and that the hands will never 
shake again. 
Or here is a woman who has become convinced that 
worms are crawling all over her. Everything that touches her 
becomes a worm, even the wrinkles in her dress are worms, 
and she is wild with nervousness, and of course is on the way 
to the lunatic asylum. She is hypnotized and sees the operator 
catching these worms one by one and killing them. She is told 
that he has killed the last, but she insists, "No, there is one 
more." The operator clutches that one, and she is perfectly 
satisfied, and completely cured. Her husband writes, express- 
ing his relief that he no longer has to "sleep every night in a 
fish pond." This instance with many others is told by Pro- 
fessor Quackenbos in his book, "Hypnotic Therapeutics." 
Among the most powerful means to influence the subcon- 
scious personality is religious excitement. Religion has come 
down to us from ancient times, and its fears and ecstasies are 
a part of our instinctive endowment. Those who can sway 
religious emotions can cure disease, not merely fixed ideas, but 
many diseases which appear to be entirely physical, but which 
psycho-analysis reveals to be hysterical in nature. Of course The Book of the Mind 
65 
these religious persons who heal by laying on of hands or by 
purely mental means deny indignantly that they are using hyp- 
notism or anything like it. I am aware that I shall bring upon 
myself a flood of letters from Christian Scientists if I identify 
their methods of curing with "animal magnetism" and "ma- 
nipulation," and other devices of the devil which they repu- 
diate. All I can say is that their miracles are brought about 
by affecting the subconscious mind; there is no other way to 
bring them about, and for my part I cannot see that it makes 
a great difference whether the subconscious mind is affected 
by a hand laid on the forehead, or by a hand waved in the air, 
or by an incantation pronounced, or by a prayer thought in 
silence. If you can persuade the subconscious mind that God 
is operating upon it, that God is omnipotent and is directing 
this particular healing, that is the most powerful suggestion 
imaginable, and is the basis of many cures. But if in order to 
achieve this, it is necessary for me to persuade myself that I 
can find some meaning in the metaphysical moonshine of 
Mother Eddy-why, then, I am very sorry, but I really prefer 
to remain sick. 
But such is not the case. You do not have to believe any- 
thing that is not true; you simply have to understand the 
machinery of the subconscious, and how to operate it. We are 
only beginning to acquire that knowledge, and we need an 
open mind, free both from the dogmatism of the medical men 
and the fanaticism of the "faith curists." A few years ago in 
London I met a number of people who were experimenting in 
an entirely open-minded way with mental healing, and I was 
interested in their ideas. I happened to be traveling on the 
Continent, and on the train my wife was seized by a very 
dreadful headache. She was lying with her head in my lap, 
suffering acutely, and I thought I would try an experiment, so 
I put my hand" upon her forehead, without telling her what I 
was doing, and concentrated my attention with the greatest 
possible intensity upon her headache. I had an idea of the 
cause of it; I understood that headaches are caused by the 
irritation of the sensory nerves of the brain by fatigue poisons, 
or other waste matter which the blood has not been able to 
eliminate. I formed in my mind a vivid picture of what the 
blood would have to do to relieve that headache, and I concen- 
trated my mental energies upon the command to her subcon- 
scious mind that it should perform these particular functions. 66 
Mind and Body 
In a few minutes my wife sat up with a look of great surprise 
on her face and said, "Why, my headache is gone! It went all 
at once!" 
That, of course, might have been a coincidence; but I tried 
the experiment many times, and it happened over and over. 
On another occasion I was able to cure the pain of an ulcer- 
ated tooth; I was able to cure it half a dozen times, but never 
permanently, it always returned, and finally the tooth had to 
come out. My wife experimented with me in the same way, 
and found that she was able to cure an attack of dyspepsia; 
but, curiously enough, she at once gave herself a case of dys- 
pepsia-something she had never known in her life before. 
So now I will not allow her to experiment with me, and she 
will not allow me to experiment with her! But we are quite 
sure that people with psychic gifts can definitely affect the 
subconscious mind of others by purely mental means. We are 
prepared to believe in the miracles of the New Testament, and 
in the wonders of Lourdes, as well as in the healings of the 
Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters, which cannot be 
disputed by any one who is willing to take the trouble to inves- 
tigate. We can face these facts without losing our reason, 
without ceasing to believe that everything in life has a cause, 
and that we can find out this cause if we investigate 
thoroughly. CHAPTER XIII 
EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS 
(Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and 
other methods by which a whole new universe of life has been 
brought to human knowledge.) 
One of the most common methods of exploring the sub- 
conscious mind is the method of automatic writing. I have 
never tried this myself, but tens of thousands of people are 
sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of them, holding a 
pencil on a piece of paper and letting their subconscious minds 
write what they please. Most of them are hoping to get mes- 
sages from the dead-a problem which we shall discuss in the 
next chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic 
writing and table rapping and other devices of mediumship 
have opened up to us a vast mass of subconscious mentality. 
A part of the scientific world still takes a contemptuous atti- 
tude and calls this all humbug, but many of our greatest scien- 
tists have been persuaded to investigate, and have become con- 
vinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled, 
not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those 
present, and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do 
not see how any one can study disinterestedly the proceedings 
of the Society for Psychical Research and not become con- 
vinced that telepathy at least is one of the powers of the sub- 
conscious mind. 
Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought trans- 
mission." Every one must know people who are what is called 
"psychic," and will know what is happening to some friend in 
another part of the world, or will go upstairs because they 
"sense" that some one wants them, or will go to the door 
because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And 
maybe these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific 
if you do not take the trouble to read and learn what modern 
investigators have brought out on such subjects. 
This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investi- 
gator : whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is 
possible to find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old 
67 68 
Mind and Body 
woman, delirious with fever, begins to babble in a strange 
language, and it is discovered that she is talking ancient 
Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her conscious 
memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind 
has no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the 
gossip of the village. But investigation is made, and it is 
discovered that when this woman was a girl, she worked in 
the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard him reading aloud. 
She did not understand a word of what she heard, and was not 
consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it had 
been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innu- 
merable cases of this sort have been established; and, as a 
matter of fact, we might have been prepared for such dis- 
coveries by the memory-feats of the conscious mind. It is 
well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen to a new 
opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present 
there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carry- 
ing on thirty games of chess at the same time. There have 
been others who do sums of mental arithmetic, such as multi- 
plying thirty-two figures by thirty-two figures, or reciting the 
Bible backwards. 
All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still 
more incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are 
stored in our subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds 
of animals! A few years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published 
a book, "The Unknown Guest," in the course of which he tells 
about his experiments with the so-called Elberfeld horses: two 
animals which had been trained for years by their owner to 
give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently 
could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract 
square and cube root, and spell out names, and recognize 
sounds, scents and colors, and read time from the face of a 
watch. Of course, it is easy to say that this is absurd, that 
the horses must have got some signals from their trainer; but, 
as it happened, they would do their work in the absence of 
their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack 
over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were 
unable to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. 
There have been many gigantic frauds in the world, and this 
may have been one of them; on the other hand, there have 
been many new discoveries, and for my part I will finish 
exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man, The Book of the Mind 
69 
before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the sub- 
conscious mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some 
learned person to explain to me how the subconscious minds 
of horses and dogs know enough to build and repair their 
bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern architectural and engi- 
neering science could teach them nothing. I ask, also, if it is 
possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which is com- 
mon to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might 
be a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any 
more absurd than that they should eat the same food and 
breathe the same air and feel the same affection and be 
frightened at the same dangers? 
The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects 
are the persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble 
to investigate, discover more wonderful things every day, and 
they realize that we have here a whole universe of knowledge, 
to which we have as yet barely opened the doors. Consider, 
for example, the facts which we are acquiring on the subject 
of personality and what it means. You would say, perhaps, 
that if there is anything you know positively, it is that you are 
one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your 
body belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever 
can use it. But what would you say if I told you that tomor- 
row "you" might cease to be, and somebody else might be in 
possession of your body, walking it around and wearing its 
clothes and spending its money? What if I were to tell you 
that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen 
different personalities which you have never known or dreamed 
of, and that tomorrow there might break out a war between 
them and "you," as to which of the half dozen people should 
hear with your ears and speak with your tongue and walk 
about with your clothes on ? Unless you are familiar with the 
literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that 
this was unbelievable-quite as much so as a mathematical 
horse! 
Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, 
who was many years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in 
a Rhode Island town. One day he disappeared, and his family 
did not hear of him. A year or two later there was a store- 
keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly came to him- 
self as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had 
been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store. 70 
Mind and Body 
Under hypnotism it developed that he had in him two per- 
sonalities, and his trance personality recollected all that had 
been happening in the meantime and told about it freely. 
Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady 
who is known in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beau- 
champ. Her story is told in a book, "The Dissociation of a 
Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of Boston. Some thirty 
years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and dignified 
young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange 
things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. 
Under hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple 
personality. The other personality, who finally gave herself 
the name of Sally, was entirely different in character from 
Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous, vain, and primitive as a 
child. She conceived an intense dislike for Miss Beauchamp, 
whom she called by abusive names; at times when she could 
get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in 
playing humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her 
money, running her into debt, breaking her engagements, dis- 
gracing her before her friends. Sally was always well and 
Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take the 
body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for 
long and exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, 
lost and penniless, in the possession of Miss Beauchamp ! And 
of course this made Miss Beauchamp more and more a wreck, 
and Sally took possession of more and more of her time. 
Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and thought, 
but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only 
knew that there were gaps in her life, during which she did 
things she could not explain. And because she did not want 
her friends to think her insane, she would try to hide this 
dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally would spoil her plans 
by writing letters to her friends, and also by writing insulting 
letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took possession 
again. 
Then one day, after several years of treatment, there 
appeared yet another personality, who knew nothing about 
Miss Beauchamp or Sally either, and only knew what Miss 
Beauchamp had known up to some years before. Miss Beau- 
champ had a college education, and wrote and spoke French; 
Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new 
personality did not have a college education at all. Neverthe- The Book of the Mind 
71 
less, after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating 
as any novel you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was 
the real Miss Beauchamp; the others were "split off" per- 
sonalities. He traced the cause to a severe mental shock, and 
succeeded in the end in combining the first Miss Beauchamp 
with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate and wanton 
Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally mur- 
dering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but 
he condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sen- 
tence. It is a "movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I 
should think it would make disconcerting reading to persons 
who believe that each of us is one immortal soul, or "has" one 
immortal soul, and is responsible for it to a personal God. 
There is never any end to the problems of these multiple 
personalities, and each case is a test of the judgment and 
ingenuity of the specialist. He will try to make one personality 
"stick," and will fail, and will have to accept another, or a com- 
bination of two. In one case, he found that he could not get 
the right personality to "stick" except under hypnosis, so he 
decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and the new 
personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If 
you wish to know more about this subject you can find books 
in any well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of 
Personality," by H. Addington Bruce, because it contains in 
the appendix an excellent list of the literature of the subcon- 
scious in all its many aspects. 
There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring 
this underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. 
Some fifteen years ago a psychotherapist in New York told 
me about the discoveries of a physician in Vienna, and gave me 
some pamphlets, written in very difficult and technical Ger- 
man. Since then this Professor Freud has been translated, 
and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers 
make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up 
Jesus because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves 
Christians, and in the same way we have no right to blame 
Freud for all the absurdities of the psychoanalysts. 
Probably there never was a time in human history when 
there were not people who interpreted dreams, and you can 
still buy "dream books" for twenty-five cents, and learn that 
a white horse means that you are going to get a letter from 
your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another dream 72 
Mind and Body 
book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to 
be a death in your family within the year. Naturally this 
prejudices thinking people against dream analysis; yet, dreams 
are facts, and every fact has its cause, and if you dream about 
a white horse, there must assuredly be some reason for your 
dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know that if 
you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream 
about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a 
railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you? 
Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and 
what is it that picks out this or that from the infinite store 
of your memory, and brings it into the region of half- 
consciousness which we call the dream? 
Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a 
wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a 
great mass of impulses and desires, and among these the con- 
sciousness selects what it pleases, and represses and refuses to 
recognize or to act upon the others. But maybe these decisions 
are not altogether satisfactory to the subconsciousness. The 
mind of the body is in rebellion against the mind-shall we say 
of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of society, 
otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a 
good little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are 
told, and on Sunday go to church and sit very still through a 
long sermon; whereas, the body of a boy would rather be a 
savage, hunting birds' nests and scalping enemies and explor- 
ing magic caves full of precious jewels. So the subconscious- 
ness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time, and finds 
its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor has 
relaxed its control. 
This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the 
conscious mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not 
deal in abstractions. It is far more interested in things than 
in words; it does not present us with formulas, but with pic- 
tures, and with stories of weird and wonderful happenings. It 
is like the mind of the race, which we study in legends and 
religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a mass of incan- 
descent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it 
tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black 
dragon of night. So the mind of our body presents us with 
innumerable pictures and symbols, exactly such as we find in 
poetry. There may be, and frequently is, dispute as to just The Book of the Mind 
73 
what a poet meant by this or that particular image, but if we 
read all the work of any particular poet, we get a certain 
impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talk- 
ing about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the 
white flesh of nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt 
as to what is wrong with this poet. 
And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all 
the dreams that any one person can remember, day after day, 
sooner or later the expert observes that these dreams hover 
continually about one particular subject; and by questioning 
the person, he can find out what is the secret which is troubling 
the person, perhaps without the person himself being aware of 
it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so much 
as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their 
time and their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," 
who would, in any properly organized world, be put to work 
at hoeing weeds or washing their own clothes. Nevertheless, 
it is a fact that there are real mental disorders in the world, 
and innumerable honest and earnest people who have some- 
thing the matter with them which they do not understand. 
Here is one way by which the conscientious investigator can 
find out what the trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by 
establishing harmony between their conscious and their sub- 
conscious minds, can many times put them in the way of health 
and happiness. 
Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand 
the "split" personality and its cause. We discover that almost 
everyone has more or less rudimentary forms of multiple per- 
sonality hidden within him; made out of desires and traits 
which he does not like, or which the world forces him to drive 
into the deeps of his being. These may be evil impulses, of 
sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or 
artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A 
quite normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart 
from the world, living a Jekyll life of business propriety and 
a Hyde life of religious or musical ecstasy. Or again, the 
repressed impulses may integrate themselves in the un- 
conscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or both- 
"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge 
on such dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychol- 
ogy of Insanity." CHAPTER XIV 
THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY 
(Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of 
view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live 
forever?) 
As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own 
and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange 
question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living 
people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of 
those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some 
very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the 
case, and we have now to consider their arguments. 
When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost 
stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to 
understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take 
ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or dragons or nymphs 
or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts seriously 
-well, such a person would be almost as comical as that 
supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you 
believe it, in those days there actually were people who believed 
they could learn to fly in the air, and spent their time manu- 
facturing machines for this purpose! There was a scientist in 
Washington who had this "bug," and built himself a machine 
and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac river. We all 
laughed at him-we laughed so long and so loud that we killed 
the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that 
machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! 
But that was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not 
quite so ready to laugh at an idea because it was new. 
I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who 
believed in ghosts. He was a Unitarian clergyman, the 
Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York. I was sixteen years 
old, and just breaking out of my theological shell, and 
Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and 
kindly man, of great learning and intelligence, and I remember 
vividly my consternation when one day he told me-oh, yes, he 
had seen many ghosts, he was accustomed to talk with ghosts 
74 The Book of the Mind 
75 
every now and then. There was no doubt whatever that 
ghosts existed! 
He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do 
not have to go back to his books to look up the details. It was 
in the days before the Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who 
took a steamer to England. One night Doctor Savage was 
awakened and found the ghost of his friend standing by his 
bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so the 
ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to 
think that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he 
had been struck on the left side of the head by a beam of the 
ship and had been killed instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down 
these circumstances and had them witnessed by a number of 
people, and two or three weeks later he received word that the 
body of his friend had been found on the Irish coast, with the 
left side of the head crushed in. 
So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have 
studied it off and on ever since, and have read most of the 
important new discoveries and arguments of the psychic 
researchers. To begin with, I will mention the contents of two 
large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living." In this 
book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which 
Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the 
moment of death, or in times of great mental stress, do some- 
how have the power to communicate with other people, even 
at the other side of the world. A few such cases might be 
attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when you have so 
many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of 
otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply 
stupid if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt. 
Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. 
We know, of course, that hallucinations are among the most 
common of psychic phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can 
be caused to see and hear and feel anything; likewise it has 
power to cause you to see and hear and feel anything. In 
practically all cases of multiple personality some of the split- 
off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and feel. 
And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things 
to be just as real as real things; there is no way you can 
tell an hallucination from reality-except to ask other people 
about it. And if we admit the idea of telepathy, we may 
say that phantasms are hallucinations caused by this means; 76 
]\1ind and Body 
that is, the subconscious mind of your wife or your mother or 
your friend who is ill or dying, transmits to your subconscious 
mind some vivid impression, which causes your own subcon- 
scious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image 
of that person, walking and talking with you, and your con- 
sciousness has no way of telling but that the image is real. 
So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any 
phantasms of the dead? Are there any cases in which the 
time of the appearance can be proven to be subsequent to the 
time of death? Even this would not prove survival, of course; 
it is perfectly possible that the telepathic impulse might be 
delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into consciousness 
until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say that 
there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as 
to convince us that the person was already dead, and was 
telling us something as a dead person and not as a living one ? 
Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for 
the subject by discussing the survival of personality from a 
more general standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? 
What are the probabilities of its being true? What would be 
the consequences of its not being true ? Have we any grounds, 
other than those of psychic research, for thinking that it is 
true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true ? What, 
so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality? 
Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death 
and forever is one of the principal doctrines of the Christian 
religion. Many devout Christians will read this book, and I 
will seem to them blasphemous when I say that this argument 
does not concern me. I count myself one of the lovers and 
friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if 
he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with 
him excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should 
believe this, that, or the other doctrine about life because any 
religious sect, founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me 
so to believe. I see no more reason for adopting the idea of 
heaven because it is a Christian idea than I see for adopting 
the idea of reincarnation because it is a precious and holy idea 
to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some very good 
friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this 
idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into 
life over and over again in many different bodies, thus com- 
pleting itself and renewing itself and expiating its sins. My The Book of the Mind 
77 
Theosophist friends have a most elaborate and complicated 
body of what they consider to be knowledge on this subject; 
yet I have to take the liberty of saying that I cannot see that 
it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as completely 
unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend-for 
example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and 
complicated torments that are suffered there. 
But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus 
proved the immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, 
there are many learned investigators who consider there is 
insufficient evidence for believing that Jesus ever lived; and 
certainly if this be so, it will be difficult to prove that he rose 
from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence for cru- 
cified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards 
allowed them to be spirited away-even nowadays we have 
known of prison guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to 
escape. Again, the events of the return of Jesus may have 
been just such psychic phenomena as we are trying in this 
chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been purely 
legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person 
that the people of that time were ready to believe anything, 
and to accept facts upon such authority, and to make them the 
basis for a scientific conclusion, is simply to be childish. 
I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and there- 
fore it must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and per- 
haps this is so. But then, a great deal of other literature is 
inspired, and that does not relieve me of the task of compar- 
ing these various inspirations, and judging them, and picking 
out what is of use to me. The Bible is the literature of the 
ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It repre- 
sents what the race mind of a great people for one generation 
after another judged worth recording and preserving. You 
may get an idea what this means, if you will picture to your- 
self a large volume of English literature, containing some 
Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles, and the "Morte 
d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some Irish 
fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's 
"Venus and Adonis," and the English prayer-book, and the 
architect's specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good 
part of "Burke's Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," 
a number of Wesley's hymns, and Pope's "Essay on Man," and 
some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and Present," and Glad- 78 
Mind and Body 
stone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain Cook's story 
of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of Nel- 
son," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's 
"Merrie England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which 
is the equivalent of our Congressional Record. You may find 
this description irreverent, but do not think it is meant so. Do 
me the honor to get out your Bible and look it over from this 
point of view! 
But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this 
earthly life, what becomes of moral responsibility and the pun- 
ishment of sins? What shall we say to the wicked man to 
make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven 
and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that 
we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand 
years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better 
seek out some other method of inducing men to behave them- 
selves. They do not believe so completely in heaven and hell 
these days, but there were times in history when they did 
believe completely, and not merely were the believers just as 
cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as gluttonous and 
just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this point, 
I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129. 
Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines 
of a system of rewards and punishments automatically work- 
ing in the life of men. I am not sure that I can prove that the 
wicked always get punished and the virtuous always rewarded; 
yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I would not care to 
change places with any of the wicked people that I know m 
this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has 
a way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be 
entirely happy if I knew that my son and his sons were going 
to share the fate which I now observe befalling, for example, 
the grand dukes of Russia and their children. Life is one 
thing, and it does not exist for the individual, but for the race; 
its causes and effects do not always manifest themselves in one 
individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are they called 
dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a stu- 
dent brought the session to an end by answering: "Because 
that is what they always seem to do!" 
But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not 
perfect, from the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, 
what else is there in the world that is perfect from that point The Book of the Mind 
79 
of view? Why should our justice be any more perfect than, 
for example, our health or our thinking or our climate or our 
government? And, may it not very well be that our justice is 
up to us, in precisely the same way that some of these other 
things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to 
work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and 
vice does always get punished, right here and now, instead of 
waiting for an omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypo- 
thetical heaven. 
I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously 
interesting. I am willing to take it on the terms that it is 
given, and to try to make the best of it; and I do not see that 
I have any right to dictate what shall be given me in some 
future life. If my father gives me a Christmas present, I am 
happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is going 
to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more 
happy; but I do not see that I have any right to argue that 
because he gives me one Christmas present, he must give me 
an unlimited number of them, and I think it would be very 
ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a Christmas 
present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time I 
Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I 
can assert that the morality of the universe absolutely depends 
upon the fact that I am immortal. Of course, I should like to 
live forever, and to know all the wonderful things that are 
going to happen in the world, and if it is true that I am so to 
live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot say that it 
must be true, and all I can do is to investigate the prob- 
abilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of 
Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire 
that God love him in return." 
To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a ques- 
tion of fact. It is one to be approached in a spirit of open- 
minded inquiry, entirely unaffected by hopes or fears or dog- 
mas or moral claims. It is worth while to get clear that we 
may be immortal, even though we do not now know it and 
cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic research 
might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake 
up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of 
us are immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts 
of us are immortal and not the rest. It might be that our sub- 
consciousness is immortal and not our consciousness. It might 80 
Mind and Body 
be that all of us, or some part of us, survive for a time, but 
not forever. This last is something which I myself am 
inclined to think may be the case. 
Also, it seems worth while to mention that it is no argu- 
ment against immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we 
cannot picture a universe consisting of uncountable billions of 
living souls, or what these souls would do to pass the time. It 
may very well be that among these souls there is no such thing 
as time. It may be that they are thoroughly occupied in ways 
beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not occupied, and 
under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who 
presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the 
brain cells manage to store up the uncounted millions of 
memories which you have, the thousands of words and com- 
binations of words, and the thoughts which go with them, 
musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual impres- 
sions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and 
dreams that never were. Where are all those hundreds of 
millions of things, and what are they like when they are not 
in our consciousness, and how do they pass the time, and 
where were they in the hundreds of millions of years before 
we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of mil- 
lions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer 
these questions completely, it will be time enough for them to 
tell us about the impossibility of immortality. CHAPTER XV 
THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL 
(Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of 
spiritism thus put before us.) 
Let us now take up the question of survival of personality 
after death from the strictly scientific point of view; let us 
consider what facts we have, and the indications they seem to 
give. First, we know that to all appearances the conscious- 
ness and the subconsciousness are bound up with the body. 
They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they 
seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the 
consciousness by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the 
lungs, or by sticking a pin into the brain, or by clogging one 
of its tiny blood vessels with waste matter. It is terrible to us 
to think that the mind of a great poet or prophet or statesman 
may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but then, it is 
no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible. Insanity 
is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also are 
tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all 
these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to 
put an end to its work on this earth at least. 
And now we come with the new instrument of psychic 
research, to probe the question: What becomes of this con- 
sciousness when it disappears ? Can we prove that it is still in 
existence, and is able by any method to communicate with us ? 
Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the dead 
person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, 
manages in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of 
another person, called a "medium," and by it to make some 
kind of record to identify itself. 
This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal 
of proof. The law of probability requires us not to accept an 
unlikely explanation, if there is any more simple one which can 
account for the facts. When we examine the product of auto- 
matic writing, table-tipping, and other psychic phenomena, we 
have first to ask ourselves, Is there anything in all this which 
cannot be explained by what we already know ? Then, second, 
81 82 
Mind and Body 
we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will 
explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit 
theory ? 
These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their 
reality, and they tell us many things which are expected to 
convince us; they tell us things which we ourselves do not 
know, and which spirits might know. But here again we run 
up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with its in- 
finite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for 
the "spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our sub- 
conscious mind could not possibly contain. Also, there comes 
the additional element of telepathy. It appears to be a fact 
that under trance conditions, or under any especially exciting 
conditions of the consciousness, one mind can reach out and 
take something out of another mind, or one mind can cause 
something to be passed over to another mind; and so informa- 
tion can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can 
appear in automatic writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal 
gazing. 
One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the in- 
vestigators of this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, 
who many years ago sought to teach me "practical morality" 
(from the bourgeois point of view) in Columbia University. 
Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a medium 
by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and 
was never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor 
Hyslop's books you will find innumerable instances of amaz- 
ing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's trances. You will find 
Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way telepathy can 
account for these facts is by the supposition that there is a 
universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind 
of the medium possesses the power to reach into the sub- 
conscious mind of every other living person and take out 
anything from it. But for my part, I cannot see that the 
case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop recites, for example, 
how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some long dead 
relative-facts which he did not know, but was later able 
to verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because 
there could be no possible way for Professor Hyslop to be 
sure that he had never known these facts about his relatives. 
The facts might have been in his subconscious mind without 
having ever been in his conscious mind at all; he might have The Book of the Mind 
83 
heard people talking about these matters while he was reading 
a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was 
said. 
And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. 
I will say this for his work-he was the first person who was 
able to make real to my mind the startling idea that perhaps 
after all the dead might be alive and able to communicate 
with us. You will find what he has to say in his book, "The 
Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist and 
a great man should have a chance to convince you of what 
seem to him the most important facts in the world. 
Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it 
is claimed that he began at once to communicate with his 
family. Among other things, he told them of the existence 
of a picture, which none of them had ever seen or heard of, 
a group photograph which he described in detail. But, of 
course, other people in this group knew of the existence of 
the photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some 
member of Sir Oliver's family may have taken into his sub- 
conscious mind without knowing it an impression or descrip- 
tion of that picture. If you care to experiment, you will find 
that you can frequently play a part in the dreams of a child 
by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of a thousand 
different ways by which some member of a family might 
acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of 
a photograph. 
There is another possibility to be considered-that a por- 
tion of the consciousness may survive, and not necessarily 
forever. We are accustomed when death takes place to see 
the body before us, and we know that we can preserve the 
body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is it not possible 
that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end, there may 
remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the sub- 
consciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back 
into the universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? 
There is a hard part of the body, the skeleton, which survives 
for some time; why might there not be a central core of the 
mind which is similarly tough and enduring? Of course, if 
consciousness is a function of the brain, it must decay as the 
brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a func- 
tion of the consciousness-which is, so far as I can see, quite 
as likely a guess. 84 
Mind and Body 
I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility 
of this idea. I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits 
of those recently dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. 
Of course, you can go to any seance in the "white light" dis- 
trict of your city and receive communications from the souls 
of Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Poca- 
hontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary, 
you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and 
Siegfried and Achilles; but you will not find much reality 
about any of these people, they will not tell you very much 
about the everyday details of their lives. This fact that so 
much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our own time tends 
to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever. How 
simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles 
would come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to 
find copies of his lost tragedies! You would think that the 
soul of Sophocles, seeing our great need of beauty and wis- 
dom, would be interested to give us his works! From genius, 
operating under the guidance of the conscious mind, we get 
sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums 
give us suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the 
operation of the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, 
for example, from dissociated personalities. 
There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, pro- 
duced by the automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who 
tells us in evident good faith that her conscious personality is 
entirely innocent of Patience, and all her thought and doings. 
Patience -writes long novels and dramas in a quaint kind of 
old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing about 
this language. But does she positively know that when she 
was a child, she never happened to be in the room with 
someone who was reading old English aloud? Nothing seems 
more likely than that her subconscious mind heard some quaint, 
strange language, and took possession of it, and built up a 
personality around it, and even made a new language and a 
new literature from that starting point. 
That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subcon- 
scious revels. It creates new characters, with an imagination 
infinite and inexhaustible. Who has not waked up and been 
astounded at the variety and reality of a dream? Who has 
not told his dreams and laughed over them ? The subconscious 
will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate roles; The Book of the Mind 
85 
it will put on costumes, and delight in being Caesar and 
Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Ham- 
let and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will 
even play at being "spirits"! It will be mischievous and 
impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of its own im- 
portance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's 
most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. 
It will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief- 
stricken family; it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," 
and cause an earnest professor of "practical morality" to give 
up a respectable position in Columbia University and write 
books to convince the world that the dead are sending him 
messages. 
Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss 
Beauchamp. Remember that here we are not dealing with 
any guess work about "spirits"; here we have half a dozen 
different "controls," none of them the least bit dead, but all 
of them a part of the consciousness of one entirely alive young 
lady. A specialist has spent some six years investigating the 
case, day after day, week after week, writing down the minute 
details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant 
known as "Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom 
you ever held in your arms. Sally has love and hate, fear 
and hope, pain and delight-and Sally is a little demon, created 
entirely out of the subconsciousness of a highly refined and 
conscientious young college graduate of Boston. Sally spends 
Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns 
Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; 
Sally uses Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about 
Miss Beauchamp; Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or 
makes her hear exactly the opposite of what is spoken to her. 
Yes, and Sally pleads and fights frantically for her life; Sally 
enters into intrigues with other parts of Miss Beauchamp, 
and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who is her 
Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge! 
And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a 
grieving mother, and made that mother think she was talking 
to the ghost of a long lost child? Can anybody doubt that 
Sally could and would play the part of any person she had 
ever known, or of any historic character she had ever read 
about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the 
conscious Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, 86 
Mind and Body 
and was horrified when she was told about it. So here you 
have the following situation, no matter of guesswork, but 
definitely established: your dearest friend may act as a medium, 
and in all good faith may bring to the surface some part of 
his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in 
a hundred different roles, and plays upon you with deliberate 
malice the most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks. 
And how much worse the situation becomes when to this 
there is added the possibility of conscious fraud! When the 
medium is a person who is taking your money, and thrives 
by making you believe in the "spirits" she produces! You 
may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of the 
Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, 
and in row after row of tents you may hear, and even see, 
every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and 
shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor 
farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their cheeks, listen- 
ing to the endearments of their dead children, and to wisdom 
from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a 
Bowery accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years 
ago by Will Irwin in a book called "The Medium Game"; and 
then-after traveling from one kind of medium to another, 
and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he went into a 
"parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who 
had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most inti- 
mate secrets of his life! 
It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is 
at work upon a device to enable spirits to communicate with 
the living, if there really are spirits seeking to do this. It is 
Edison's idea that spirits may inhabit some kind of infinitely 
rarefied astral body, and he proposes to manufacture an in- 
strument which is sensitive to an impression many millions 
of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This 
should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a 
fairer test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is 
perfected and put to work by scientific men, I wish to suggest 
a few tests which will convince me that there really are spirits, 
and that the results are not to be explained by telepathy. 
First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are 
some useful things which were known to the people of ancient 
time, and are not known to anyone living now. For example, 
let one of the Egyptian craftsmen come forward and tell us The Book of the Mind 
87 
the secret of their glass-staining, which I understand is now 
a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already suggested, 
will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he doesn't 
know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit 
world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give 
us this priceless information. All over the ancient lands are 
buried and forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus 
scrolls and graven tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowl- 
edge are thus concealed from us; and how simple for the 
ancient ones who possess this information to make it known 
to us, and so to convince us of their reality! 
Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but 
that they slowly fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose 
that a Raymond Lodge or other recently dead soldier wishes 
to communicate with his father and to convince his father 
that it is really an independent being, and not simply a part 
of the father's subconscious mind-let him try something like 
this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in 
six envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in 
a hat and draw out one of them. Now, assuming that the 
experimenter is honest, there is no living human being who 
knows the contents of that envelope, and if the medium is 
dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter, the 
chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assum- 
ing that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and 
read a folded letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, 
provided he is honest, and provided there are no mirrors or 
other tricks, holding the envelope behind his back, and tearing 
it open, and spreading it out for the convenience of the spirit. 
And now, if the spirit can read that letter correctly every 
time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever force we are 
dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the experi- 
menter. 
Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel 
in a covered box, or hidden away so that no one but the 
spirit can see it. We spin the wheel, and any one of the 
habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the chance of the little 
ball dropping into any particular number. If now the spirit 
can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall 
know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist 
either in the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living 
human being. 88 
Mind and Body 
Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to 
do, since the days when they first made their appearance with 
the Fox sisters in America, are the lifting of tables and the 
ringing of bells and the assuming of visible forms. These 
are what is known as "materializations," and when I was a 
boy, and used to hear people talking about these things, there 
was always one test required: let the materializations manifest 
themselves upon recording instruments scientifically devised; 
let photographs be taken of them, let them be weighed and 
measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and 
these tests have been met, and it appears that "materializa- 
tions" are facts-although it is still as uncertain as ever what 
they are materializations of. An English scientist, Professor 
Crawford, has published a book entitled "The Reality of 
Psychic Phenomena," in which he tells the results of many 
years of testing materializations by the strictest scientific 
methods. When the medium "levitates" a table-that is, 
causes it to go up in the air without physical contact-it 
appears that her own weight increases by exactly the weight 
of the table. When she exerts any force, which apparently 
she can do at a distance, the recording instruments show the 
exact counter-force in her own body. 
The results of these investigations are calculated at first 
to take your breath away. It begins to appear that the 
theosophists may be right, and that we may have one or 
more "astral" bodies within or coincident with the physical 
body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make 
over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, 
precisely as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our sub- 
consciousness has the power to project from it masses of 
substance, and to cause these to take all kinds of forms, for 
example, human faces, which have been photographed innum- 
erable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or snaky 
projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been 
recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales. 
As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a 
translation just published of an elaborate work by Baron von 
Schrenck-Notzing, a physician of Munich, giving minute de- 
tails of four years' experiments in this field. So rigid was 
this investigator in his efforts to exclude fraud, that not merely 
was the medium stripped and sewed up in black tights, but 
the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black cloth, The Book of the Mind 
89 
everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the 
medium's body was searched before and after the tests, and 
every inch of the "cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat 
within a couple of feet of the medium, and would draw back 
the curtains, and while holding her hands and and feet, would 
watch great masses of filmy gray and white stuff exude from 
the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and sides. 
This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, 
by which print could be easily read; and the medium would 
herself illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. 
The investigators would be privileged to examine these 
"phantom" forms, to touch them gently, and be touched by 
them-soft and slimy, like the tongue of an animal; but some- 
times the things would misbehave, and strike them in the eye, 
hurting them. 
The medium, a young French girl living in the home of 
the wife of a well-known French playwright, had begun with 
spiritualist ideas, but came to take a matter-of-fact attitude 
to what happened, and in her trances would labor to mold 
these emanations into hands or faces, as requested by those 
present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to separate 
the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical 
and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be 
surrounded by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of 
them inside the cabinet; and when the desired emanation was 
in sight, all these cameras would be set off by flashlight, and 
in the book you have over two hundred such photographs, 
showing faces and hands from every point of view. There 
are even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out 
of her mouth and going back! 
It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unex- 
plored phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time 
superstitions which were dumped overboard have now to be 
dragged back into the boat and examined in the light of new 
knowledge. What could smack more of magic and fraud 
than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness 
has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a 
crystal ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well- 
recognized an authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method 
to enable one of the many Miss Beauchamps to recall inci- 
dents in her previous life which were otherwise entirely lost 
to her. Likewise this exploration of the disintegration of 90 
Mind and Body 
personality enables us to watch in the making all the phe- 
nomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do 
with the making of religions. We know now how Joan of 
Arc heard the "voices," and we can make her hear more voices 
or make her stop hearing voices, as we prefer. Also we know 
all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can cast 
out demons-and without having to cause them to enter a 
herd of swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate 
the wonder stories which the Yogis tell us, about their ability 
to leave their physical bodies in a trance, and to appear in 
England at a few moments' notice for the transaction of their 
spiritual business! 
But we want things proven to us, and we don't want 
the people with whom we work to be animated either by 
religious fanaticism or by money greed. We are ready to un- 
limber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into strange 
regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route 
carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want 
to deal rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, 
or to choose a complicated and unlikely solution when a simple 
one will suffice. But, on the other hand, we must be alive to 
the danger of settling down on our little pile of knowledge, 
and refusing to take the trouble to investigate any more. That 
is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say; the law of inertia 
applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects he studies. 
The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into con- 
sidering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, pre- 
cisely as the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to 
watch him drop weights from the tower of Pisa. When he 
told them that the earth moved round the sun instead of the 
sun round the earth, they tortured him in a dungeon to make 
him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to himself, 
"And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and con- 
tinued to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true 
that we have these hidden forces in us, they will continue to 
manifest themselves, and masses of people will continue to 
flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out their hard-earned money, 
until such a time as our learned men set to work to find out 
the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces without 
the aid of either superstition or charlatanry. CHAPTER XVI 
THE POWERS OF THE MIND 
(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance 
is slavery, and what science means to the people.) 
We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and 
its powers. Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, 
this much we may say with assurance: the reader who has 
followed our brief sketch attentively has been disabused of 
any idea he may have held that he knows it all; and this is 
always the first step towards knowledge. 
The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted 
itself out of beasthood.• It is the instrument whereby we hold 
ourselves above the forces which seek to drag us down, and 
whereby we shall lift ourselves higher, if higher we are to go. 
How shall we protect this precious instrument? How shall 
we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws of the 
conduct of the mind? 
The process of the mind is one of groping outward after 
new facts, and digesting and assimilating them, as the body 
gropes after and digests and assimilates food. The senses 
bring us new impressions, and we take these and analyze them, 
tear them into the parts which compose them, compare them 
with previous sensations, recognize difference in things which 
seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to 
be different; we classify them, and provide them with names, 
which are, as it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above 
all, we seek for causes; those chains of events which make 
what we know as order in the world of phenomena. And 
when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds to 
test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and 
principles of experimental science. 
It is a comparatively small number of sensations which 
the body brings to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in 
which we should live if our minds adopted a passive attitude 
toward life. But some minds possess what we call curiosity; 
they set out upon their own impulse to explore life; they dis- 
cover new laws and make new experiences and new sensa- 
91 92 
Mind and Body 
tions for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, 
after the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies 
that idea and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently 
comes the empirical method, which refuses authority to any 
idea unless it can stand the test of experiment, and prove 
that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the thinker 
amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and 
then proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method 
that he or his critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work" 
-that is, if it doesn't explain all the facts and stand all the 
tests-it is thrown away like a worn-out shoe. So little by 
little a body of knowledge is built up which is real knowledge; 
which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can use as 
foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization. 
By this method of research man is expanding his universe 
beyond anything that could have been conceived in the pre- 
scientific days. Hour by hour, while we work and play and 
sleep, the mind of our race is discovering new worlds in which 
our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man walked 
upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life 
of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of 
the spectrum beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they 
did to him, whether good or evil. He lifted his head and saw 
vast universes of suns, in comparison with which his world 
was a mere speck of dust; yet to him these universes were 
globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in the sky. 
One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind 
runs ahead of the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, 
which, less than two hundred years ago, had never been beheld 
by the eye of man. A mathematician seated in his study, 
working over the observations of other planets, their motions 
in relation to their mass and distance, discovered that their 
behavior was not as it should be. At certain times none of 
them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this 
variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. 
He worked out the problem of what must be the mass and 
the exact orbit of this body, in order for it to be responsible 
for the variations observed; and when he had completed these 
calculations, he announced to the astronomical world, "Turn 
your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a certain 
minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of 
a certain size." And so for the first time the human senses The Book of the Mind 
93 
became aware of a fact, which by themselves they might not 
have discovered in all eternity. 
Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new 
planet may not be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the 
thing which is discovered is, for example, an unknown ray 
which will move an engine or destroy a cancer, then we realize 
the worthwhileness of research, and the masters of the world's 
commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance for 
the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who 
have by this time come to a sense of their own dignity and 
importance, understand that there is no knowledge about reality 
which is useless, no research into nature which is wasted. 
You might say that to describe and classify the fleas which 
inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to study 
under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of 
these fleas-that this would be an occupation hardly worthy 
of the divinity that is in man. But presently, as a result of 
this knowledge about fleas and flea diseases being in existence 
and available, a bacteriologist discovers the secret of the dread 
bubonic plague, which hundreds of times in past history has 
wiped out a great part of the population of Europe and Asia. 
Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his 
hero was able to overcome the wizard Merlin, because he 
knew in advance of an eclipse of the sun. And this was 
fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you may read in 
the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was 
able to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French 
government by depriving the great chieftains of their strength. 
He gathered them into a theatre, and invited their mighty 
men upon the stage, and there was an iron weight, and they 
were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and not to lift 
it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard 
of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that 
could operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet. 
Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the 
difference between ignorance and knowledge, and the power 
which knowledge gives. The man who knows is godlike to 
those who do not know; he may enslave them, he may do 
what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless to 
help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin 
by giving them knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such 
thing as freedom without knowledge, and it must be the best 94 
Mind and Body 
knowledge, it must be new knowledge; he who goes against 
new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the Chinese 
who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, 
and with umbrellas over their heads. 
Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings 
and priests and ruling castes; but this supreme power has 
been wrested from them, and this is the greatest step in human 
progress so far taken., "Seek and ye shall find," is the law 
concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall be opened 
unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that 
knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should 
repudiate all men and all institutions and all creeds and all 
formulas which seek to keep this heritage from you. Beware 
of men who bid you believe something because it is told you, 
or because your fathers believed it, or because it is written 
in some ancient book, or embodied in some ancient ceremonial. 
Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at the same 
time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived 
to replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the 
idols of the forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which 
are set as snares for your feet. Beware of cant-that para- 
phernalia of noble sentiments, artificially manufactured by 
politicians and newspapers for the purpose of blinding you to 
their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of class 
conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged 
by secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately 
released by people who seek to make use of you for purposes 
which are theirs and not yours. In the fairy-tales we used 
to love, the hero was provided with magic protection against 
the perils of those times; but what hero and what magic will 
guard the modern man against the propaganda of militarism, 
nationalism, and capitalist imperialism? 
The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can 
be taught sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. 
There are many books on mind and memory training, some 
of which are useful, and some of which are trash. There is 
an English system widely advertised, called "Pelmanism," of 
which I have personally made no test, but it has won endorse- 
ments of a great many people who do not give their en- 
dorsements lightly. 
This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in 
medicine, or in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount The Book of the Mind 
95 
of charlatanry, but there is also genuine knowledge being 
patiently accumulated and standardized. When the United 
States government had to have an army in a hurry it did 
not make its millions of young men into teamsters or aviators 
at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction 
times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently 
I visited the Whittier Reform School in California, where 
delinquent boys are educated by the state. A boy had been 
set to work in the tailor shop, and it had been found that 
he was unable to make the buttons and the buttonholes of a 
coat come in the right place. For nine years the state of 
California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been labor- 
ing to teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; 
the effort had cost some five thousand dollars, to say nothing 
of all the coats which were spoiled, and all the mental suffer- 
ing of the victim and his teachers. Finally someone persuaded 
the state of California to spend a few thousand dollars and 
install a psychological bureau for the purpose of testing all 
the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's examination 
the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective. 
Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was 
only eight years old, and so he would never be able to achieve 
the feat of making buttons and buttonholes meet. 
This is a new science which you may read about in Ter- 
man's "The Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal 
children, it is established that certain tasks can be performed 
at certain ages. A child of three can point to his eyes, his 
nose and his mouth; he can repeat a sentence of six syllables, 
and repeat two digits, and give his family name. Older chil- 
dren are asked to look at a picture and then tell what they saw; 
to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according 
to their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note ab- 
surdities in statements, to count backwards, and to make 
change. Children of fifteen are asked to interpret fables, to 
reverse the hands of a clock, and so on. Of course there are 
always variations; every child will be better at some kinds of 
tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and 
taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child- 
which may be widely different from its physical age. You 
may find some whose minds have stopped growing altogether, 
and can only be made to grow by special methods of educa- 
tion. Enlightened communities are now conducting separate 96 
Mind and Body 
schools for defective children-replacing the old-fashioned 
schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor 
little wretches to learn what was beyond their power. 
In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, 
and in the detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast 
amount of "fake," but also the beginning of a science. Our 
laws do not as yet permit the use of automatic writing and 
the hypnotic trance in the investigation of crim£, but they 
have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for 
example, those of memory association. The examiner pre- 
pares a list of a hundred names of objects, and reads those 
names one after another, and asks the person he is investigat- 
ing to name the first thing which is suggested to him by each 
word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or perhaps it 
will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or per- 
haps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds 
a stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one 
of these reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying 
to conceal anything, will give all his associations promptly, 
and the reaction times will be approximately alike. But sup- 
pose the man has just murdered somebody with an axe, and 
buried the body in a cellar with a fire shovel, and taken a 
pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number of various 
objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the 
glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects 
the psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these 
things. In each case the first memory association of the 
criminal will be one which he does not wish to give. He will 
have to find another, and that inevitably takes time. One or 
two such delays might be accidental; but if every time there 
is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of 
the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be 
sure that the conscious mind is interfering with the subcon- 
scious mind. The difference between the conscious and the 
subconscious mind is always possible to detect, and if you are 
permitted to be thorough in your experiments, you can make 
certain what is in the subconscious mind that the conscious 
mind is trying to conceal. 
Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and 
expert knowledge confers mastery over the shrewdest un- 
trained mind. The only trouble is that under our present 
social system the trained mind is very apt to be working in The Book of the Mind 
97 
the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is em- 
ployed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may 
be as little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in 
making poison gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for 
the extermination of its rebellious slaves. But what this proves 
is not that scientific knowledge is untrustworthy, but merely 
that the workers must acquire it, they must have their own 
organizations and their own experiments in every field. To 
give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful 
as the process seems, is now the most important task con- 
fronting the enlightened thinker. 
The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight 
into the phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may 
ultimately come to understand it. At present we are em- 
barrassed because genius is so often closely allied to eccentric- 
ity ; the supernormal appears in connection with the subnormal 
-and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets and 
painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, 
adopt irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of 
their own, they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, 
or to be true to their wives. They are followed by a host of 
disciples, who adopt the defects of the master as a substitute 
for his qualities. And so there grows up a perverted notion of 
what genius is, and wholly false standards of artistic quality. 
There is nothing mankind needs more than sure and exact 
tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to acquire 
languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability 
to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time 
shaping and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting 
masses of facts and weaving them into a pattern calculated to 
awaken the emotion in others. This is the last and greatest 
work of the human spirit, and to select the men who can do it, 
and foster their activity, is the ultimate purpose of all true 
science. CHAPTER XVII 
THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND 
(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to 
preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our lives 
and the lives of all men.) 
Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the 
best time to acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is 
now." It is easier to learn things when you are young, but 
you cannot be young when you want to be, and if you are 
old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are old. 
It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, 
and it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but 
it can be done, and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at 
eighty, I know several old men whom the recent war has 
shaken out of their grooves of thought and compelled to deal 
with modern ideas. 
But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the 
divine thrill of curiosity is keenest; then your memory is 
fresh, and can be trained; your mind is plastic, and you can 
form sound habits. You can teach yourself to respect truth 
and to seek it, you can teach yourself accuracy, open-minded- 
ness, flexibility, persistence in the search for understanding. 
First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! 
Let your mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities 
and falsehoods, cutting its way to the facts. When you set 
out to deal with a certain subject, acquire mastery of it, so 
that you can say, "I know." And yet, never be too sure that 
you know! Never be so sure, that you are not willing to 
consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it 
should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see 
tigers and serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two 
centimeter shells-yet I see nothing in the world so deadly to 
men as an error of the mind. Look at the mental follies 
about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions, the lies 
deliberately maintained-and realize the waste of it all, the 
pity of it all! 
Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs 
98 The Book of the Mind 
99 
to his bosom and loves because they are his own. If you try 
to deprive him of those delusions, it is as though you tore 
from a woman's arms the child she has borne. I have written 
a book called "The Profits of Religion," and never a week 
passes that there do not come to me letters from people who 
tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, 
they are grateful to me for teaching them so much about the 
follies and delusions of mankind, and it is all right and all 
true, save for two or three pages, in which I deal with the 
special hobby which happens to be their hobby! What I say 
about all the other creeds is correct-but I fail to understand 
that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired religion, 
a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the 
"Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all 
right, except what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the 
Theosophists, or perhaps one particular sect of the The- 
osophists, who are different from the others. Today there lies 
upon my desk a letter from a man who has read many of my 
books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part com- 
pany from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak 
disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, 
whereas he is prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy 
now achieving themselves in the world. How could any save 
a divinely revealed religion have foreseen the present move- 
ment to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes, and presently I 
shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled-there will be 
a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law! 
Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. 
Keep your thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, 
but from the more deadly compulsions of its own making- 
from prejudices and superstitions. The prejudices and super- 
stitions of mankind are like those diseased mental states which 
are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a "complex" 
in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center 
of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of con- 
fusion. Each group of men, each sect or class, have their 
precious dogmas, their shibboleths, their sacred words and 
stock phrases which set their whole beings aflame with fanati- 
cism. They have also their phobias, their words of terror, 
which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a 
brain-storm. 
At present the dread word of our time is "Communist." 100 
Mind and Body 
You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning 
for the police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what 
is he? A worn and fragile student, who has thought out a 
way to make the world a better place to live in, and whose 
crime is that he tells others about his idea I Or perhaps you 
belong to the other side, and then your word of terror is the 
word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you 
find ? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his 
personal impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, 
still more irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that 
nearly all men are better than the institutions and systems 
under which they live; you realize the urgent need of applying 
your reasoning powers to the problem of social reorganization. 
Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient 
virtue of humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps 
was in your school readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of 
mortal be proud?" My answer is, for innumerable reasons. 
The spirit of mortal should be proud and must be proud be- 
cause life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous thing, 
and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a 
young mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets 
against the pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and 
her face lighted up with delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he 
said "Goo!"-and never since the world began had there been 
a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it will be, 
"Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting 
marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of 
genius. Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young 
mother to realize that there are other children in the world 
as wonderful as her own; and perhaps it will take many gen- 
erations of mental effort before there will be young mothers 
capable of realizing that some other child is more wonderful 
than her child. 
In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening 
our minds that we come to realize the lives of others, to trans- 
fer to them the interest we naturally take in our own lives, 
and to admit them to a state of equality with ourselves. This 
is one of the services the mind must render for us; it is the 
process of civilizing us. And there is another, and yet more 
important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that we 
do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a uni- 
verse of power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which The Book of the Mind 
101 
we draw. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," 
said the Psalmist. We know now that fear is an ugly emotion, 
destructive to life; but it may be purified and made into a true 
humility, which every thinking man must feel towards life and 
its miracles. 
Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to 
share the high, marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures 
of the body there is a limit, and it comes quickly; but the 
pleasures of the mind are infinite, and no one who truly under- 
stands them can have a moment of boredom in life. To a 
man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows 
what knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the 
mind is a panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before 
him. To the minds of our ancestors there was one universe; 
but to our minds there are many universes, and new ones con- 
tinually discovered. 
The only question is, which one will you choose? Will 
you choose the universe of outer space, the material world of 
infinity? Consider the smallest insect that you can see, crawl- 
ing upon the surface of the earth; small as that insect is in 
relation to the earth, it is not so small, by millions of times, 
as is the earth in relation to the universe made visible to our 
eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the photographic 
camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the miracles 
of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the 
Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." 
Suffice it here to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by 
means of the spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and 
direction of stars by the same means; that we have learned 
to measure the size of the stars, and are studying stars which 
we cannot even see! And then along comes Einsteinx with 
his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we have to 
revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact 
that not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, 
are flying every which way through space! 
Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity 
of the material world followed the other way, so to speak? 
Big as is the universe in relation to our world, and big as is 
our world in relation to the insect that crawls on it, the insect 
is bigger yet in relation to the molecules which compose its 
body; and these in turn are millions of millions of times bigger 
than the atoms which compose them; and then, behold, in the 102 
Mind and Body 
atom there are millions of millions of electrons-tiny particles 
of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute 
things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs 
our trolley cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count 
and measure them, and deal with them in complicated mathe- 
matical formulas, and be just as certain of their existence as 
we are of the dust under our feet. If you wish to explore 
this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or 
Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science." 
Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our 
racial past locked up in the secret chambers of our mind ? Or 
will you choose the universe of the superconscious, the infinity 
of genius manifested in the arts? By the device of art man 
not merely creates new life, he tests it, he weighs it and 
measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the physicist with 
the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out what 
works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral 
and spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker 
of life. 
Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders 
that are found in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here 
are palaces of splendor beyond imagining, here are temples 
with sacred shrines, and treasure-chambers full of gold and 
priceless jewels. Into these places we enter as Aladdin in 
the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and all that we see is 
ours. He who has once got access to it-he possesses not merely 
the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy properties 
of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and 
the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the 
sword Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet 
which brings down all game, and the flying carpet upon which 
to travel over the earth, and the house made of ginger-bread, 
and the three wishes which always come true, and the philter 
of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of the spheres, 
and-who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with 
St. Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and 
the happy blest conversing! PART TWO 
THE BOOK OF THE BODY CHAPTER XVIII 
THE UNITY OF THE BODY 
(Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is 
not a matter of many different organs and functions, but is one 
problem of one organism.) 
The reader who has followed our argument this far will 
understand that we are seldom willing to think of the body 
as separate from the mind. The body is a machine, to be 
sure, but it is a machine that has a driver, and while it is 
possible for a sound machine to have a drunken and irrespon- 
sible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very 
long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, 
we find the fault to be with the driver; in other words, we 
find that what is needed for the body is a change in the 
mind. 
If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound 
as long as possible, the first problem for you to settle is 
what you want to make of your life; you must have a pur- 
pose, and confront the tasks of life with energy and interest. 
What is the use of talking about health to a man who has no 
moral purpose? He may answer-indeed, I have heard vic- 
tims of alcoholism answer-"Let me alone. I have a right 
to go to hell in my own way." 
I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition 
is equally true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health 
while he has a sick body. It is a good deal like the old 
question, Which comes first, the hen or the egg? The mind 
and the body are bound up together, and you may try to deal 
with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to 
deal with both. Most physicians have a tendency to over- 
look the mind, and Christian Scientists make a religion of 
overlooking the body, and each pays the penalty in greatly 
reduced effectiveness. 
My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, 
is that it has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and 
functions, and to overlook the central unity of the system. 
You will find a doctor who specializes in the stomach and its 
105 106 
Mind and Body 
diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach were a thing 
that went around in the world all by itself. He will discuss 
the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook 
to point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your 
blood-stream, which is contik^led by your nervous system, 
which in turn is controlled by hope, by ambition, by love, by 
all the spiritual elements of your being. A single pulse of 
anger or of fear may make more trouble with the contents 
of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive fer- 
ments can remedy in a week. 
Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, 
and so for a time have a purely local problem. You may 
smash your finger, and that is a problem of a finger; but 
neglect it for a few days, and let blood poison set in, and 
you will be made aware that the human body is one organ- 
ism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you 
may hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control 
your mind. 
Some one has said that the blood is the life; and cer- 
tainly the blood is both the symbol and the instrument of 
the body's unity. The blood penetrates to all parts of the 
body and maintains and renews them. If the blood is normal, 
the work of renewal does not often fail. If there is a fail- 
ure of renewal-that is, a disease-we shall generally find 
an abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the 
blood is controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered 
pump. One chamber drives the blood to the lungs, a mass 
of fine porous membranes, where it comes into contact with 
the air, and gives off the poisons which it has accumulated 
in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply 
of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is 
then sucked out of the lungs, and by the next chamber it 
is driven to every corner of the body. It takes to every cell 
of the body the protein materials which are necessary for the 
body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which are to be 
burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty 
million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the 
carriers of oxygen, and an even greater number of the white 
corpuscles, which are the body's scavengers, its defenders 
from invasion by outside germs. 
There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails 
and the scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced The Book of the Body 
107 
by the body and pushed out from it and no longer nourished 
by the blood. But all the still living parts of the body are 
fed at every instant by the stream of life. Each cell in the 
body takes the fuel which it needs for its activities, and com- 
bines it with the oxygen brought by the red corpuscles; and 
when the task of power-production has been achieved, the 
cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon 
dioxide, but many complex chemical products-ammonia, uric 
acid, and the "fatigue poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The 
blood-stream bears these along, and delivers some to the 
sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the kidneys, and 
the rest to the lungs. 
All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal 
health perfectly regulated and timed by the nervous system. 
You lie down to sleep, and your muscles rest, and the vital 
activities slow up, your heart beats only faintly; but let some- 
thing frighten you, and you sit up, and these faculties leap 
into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a fresh 
supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and 
these organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not 
do so, your muscles would have no fresh energy; they would 
become paralyzed by the fatigue poisons, and you would be, 
as we say, exhausted. 
All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter 
and accessory to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is 
the blood-stream's means of protecting itself and renewing 
itself. The stomach is to digest and prepare new blood ma- 
terial, the teeth are to crush it and grind it, the harids are to 
seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to figure out its 
whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little world 
as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who 
lives somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after 
the welfare of our blood-stream-he has far better reason 
for believing that all our consciousness and our personality 
exist for him! 
Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly 
to renew itself or properly to protect itself and its various 
subsidiary organs. When you find yourself with a disease, 
you call in a doctor; and unless this doctor is a modern and 
progressive man, he makes the mistake of assuming that the 
disease is in the particular organ where it shows itself. You 
have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical men 108 
Mind and Body 
have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing 
you, and convincing you that you are in desperate need of 
attention.) Your throat is sore, your tonsils are swollen 
and covered with white spots; so the doctor hauls out his 
little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and dips it, say 
in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the 
microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a 
mass of foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he 
knows that lysol kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle 
ior the same purpose, puts you to bed, and gradually the 
swelling goes down, and he tells you that he has cured you, 
and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe the 
swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. 
Then he tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature 
is to blame for your death, but it never occurs to anyone to 
ask what nature may have had to do with your recovery. 
I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical 
science has now classified. And for each separate disease 
there are complex formulas, and your system is pumped full 
of various mineral and vegetable substances which have been 
found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps you have a fever; 
then we give you a substance which reduces the temperature 
of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that 
maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the 
temperature of the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the 
heat of conflict, a struggle she is waging to drive out invading 
germs; and that possibly it would be better for the tempera- 
ture to stay up until the battle is over. Or maybe the heart 
is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get something 
into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of 
the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine di- 
rectly into the blood-stream. It does not occur to him to 
reflect that maybe the heart is slowing up because it is over- 
loaded with fatigue poisons, of which it cannot rid itself, and 
that the effect of stimulating it into fresh activity will be 
to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before. 
We are dealing here with processes which our ancient 
mother nature has been carrying on for a long time, and 
■which she very thoroughly understands. We ought, there- 
fore, to be sure that we know what is the final effect of our 
actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we under- 
stand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and The Book of the Body 
109 
not simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters 
on a cancer. This is the fundamental problem of health; 
and in order to make clear what I mean, I am going to begin 
by telling a personal experience, a test which I made of med- 
ical science some twelve or fourteen years ago, in connection 
writh one of the simplest and most external of the body's 
problems-the hair. First I will tell you what medical science 
was able to do for my hair, and second what I myself was 
able to do, when I put my own wits to work on the problem. 
I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down 
condition. I was having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, 
many symptoms of a general breakdown; among these I 
noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided that it was 
foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I -would 
take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my 
hair attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted 
the best authority available, so I wrote to the superintendent 
of the largest hospital in New York, asking him for the name 
of a reliable specialist in diseases of the scalp. The super- 
intendent replied by referring me to a certain physician, who 
was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went to 
see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth 
Avenue. 
He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff 
in my hair, and that he would give me a prescription which 
would remove this dandruff and cause my hair to stop fall- 
ing out. He charged me ten dollars for the visit, which in 
those days was more money than it is at present. Being of 
an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth 
by learning what there was to learn about the human hair. 
I questioned this gentleman, and he told me that the hair 
is a dead substance, and that its only life is in the root. He 
explained that barbers often persuade people to have their 
hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that this was 
an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and 
massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. 
It was better even not to wash the hair too often. All that 
was needed was a mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff 
germs; and so I had the prescription put up at a drug store, 
and for a couple of years I religiously used it according to 
order, and it had upon my hair absolutely no effect what- 
ever. 110 
Mind and Body 
So here was the best that medical science cQuld do. But 
still, I did not want to be bald, so I went among the health 
cranks-people who experiment without license from the med- 
ical schools. Also, I experimented upon myself, and now I 
know something about the human hair, something entirely 
different from what the rich and successful "consulting der- 
matologist" taught me, but which has kept me from becoming 
entirely bald. 
First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, 
like everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It 
is perfectly true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, 
and makes trouble, and that the process of killing this germ 
can be helped by chemicals; but it does not take a ten-dollar 
prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth of borax and salt 
from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer, moisten 
it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But infi- 
nitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair 
roots are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy 
blood produces sick hair roots, which cannot hold in the 
hair. Most important of all is the fact that in order to make 
healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully and freely to 
these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many 
hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight 
band which almost entirely stopped the circulation of the 
life-giving blood to my sick hair roots. In other words, by 
wearing civilized hats, I was literally starving my hair to 
death. 
As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and 
have never worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. 
On the few occasions when I go into the city, I wear a soft 
cap. Now and then I experience inconvenience from this- 
the elevator boy in some apartment house tells me to come 
in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car 
will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these em- 
barrassments with Jack London, who went even further in 
his defiance of civilization, and wore a soft shirt. It was 
his custom, he said, to knock down the elevator boys and 
sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be all right 
for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to 
the painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about 
without the customary symbols of my economic superiority. 
The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly and The Book of the Body 
111 
elaborately warned me concerning the danger of moving my 
hair too violently, and thus causing it to come out; but now 
my investigations brought out the fact that moving the hair, 
that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow of blood to 
the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease. As 
for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more 
quickly you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance 
of your getting another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the 
root, it kills that root forever, but if it is pulled out before 
it dies, the root will make a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" 
specialist knows this; she knows that if a hair is pulled, it 
grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so to pull 
out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid 
of hairs! 
I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well- 
endowed with physical graces by o,ur mother nature. He 
finds it worth while to preserve them-they being accessory 
to those amorous experiences which form so large a part of 
the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values his beautiful 
hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his fireplace, 
reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there 
over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and 
twists it. He has cultivated this habit for many years, and 
as a result his hair is as thick and heavy as the "fuzzy- 
wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a favorite sport of this 
poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He will mildly 
suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a 
tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the 
challenge, and my friend will proceed to haul him all over 
the place, to the accompaniment of howls of anguish from 
the victim, and howls of glee from the victor, who has, of 
course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros hide. 
I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be 
beautiful, and I have been too busy to remember to pull my 
hair; but by giving up tight hats, and by limiting the amount 
of my overworking, I have managed to keep what hair I had 
left when the hair specialist had got through with me. I tell 
this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health, 
because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in 
every case of disease, and which you must understand in 
seeking to remedy the trouble. 
We have a phrase which has come down to us from the 112 
Mind and Body 
ancient Latins, "vis medicatrix naturae," which means the 
healing power of nature. So long ago men realized that it 
is our ancient mother who heals our wounds, and not the 
physician. Out of this have grown the cults of "nature cure" 
enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly 
to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those 
of the "pill doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a 
man who taught me probably more than any other writer on 
health questions, and with whom I once discussed the sub- 
ject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied men in 
the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was con- 
trary to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a 
simple way of meeting the argument-he refused to believe 
it. He insisted that, as with all other germ infections, it must 
be a question of bodily tone; no germ could secure lodgment 
in the human body unless the body's condition was reduced. 
"But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You 
know that if you go into the jungle, you are not immune 
against the scorpion or the cobra or the tiger. There is noth- 
ing in all nature that is safe against every enemy. What pos- 
sible right have you to assert that you are immune against 
every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?" 
We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the 
truth lies somewhere between the extremes of two warring 
schools. Our race has been existing for a long time in a cer- 
tain environment, and its very existence implies superiority 
to that environment. The weaklings, for whom its hardships 
were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites invaded 
their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But 
those who survived were able to make in their blood-stream 
the substances known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help 
the white blood corpuscles devour the germs. As the result 
of their victory, we carry those anti-bodies in our system, 
which gives us immunity to those particular diseases, or at 
any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases without 
dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into 
our throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examina- 
tion proves that we carry around with us in our mouths the 
germs of all the common throat and nose diseases, colds, 
bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what precautions we might 
take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats every few 
minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And they The Book of the Body 
113 
wage continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in 
vain upon the gates of our sound health. But take us to 
some new environment to which we are not accustomed; take 
us to Panama in the old days of yellow fever, or take us to 
Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect us with 
"sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems 
are not accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as 
the ancient knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything 
in sight, and ruled the continent of Europe for many hundreds 
of years, but were wiped off the earth by a chemist mixing 
gunpowder. 
In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived 
a beautiful and happy race of savages, believed to have been 
descended, long ages ago, from Aryan stock. From the point 
of view of physical perfection, they were an ideal race, living 
a blissful outdoor life, which you may read about in Mel- 
ville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the 
South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements 
of the nature enthusiast. They went practically naked, their 
houses were open all the time, they lived on the abundant 
fruits of the earth. To be sure, they were cannibals, but 
this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of diet. 
They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, 
and not often enough to count, one way or the other, in 
matters of health. They had lived for uncounted ages in 
perfect harmony with their environment; they were happy 
and free; and certainly, if such a thing were possible to human 
beings, they should have been proof against germs. But a 
ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor 
dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the 
population of this island had been wiped out by the disease. 
What tuberculosis left were finished by syphilis and small- 
pox, and today the Marquesans are an almost extinct race. 
But there is another side to the argument-and one more 
favorable to the nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, 
by soft living, by self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may 
reduce the tone of our body too far below the standard which 
our ancestors set for us; and then the common disease germs 
get us, then we have colds, sore throats, tuberculosis. The 
nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that there 
is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the 
body to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our 
normal environment and its strains. 114 
Mind and Body 
You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay," which was 
so perfectly built in every part that it ran for fifty years and 
then collapsed all at once in a heap. But the human body is 
not built that way. It always has one or more places which 
are weaker than the others, and which first show the effects 
of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia, 
in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another 
decaying teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffen- 
ing of the joints. But whatever the symptoms may be, the 
fundamental cause is always the same, an abnormal condi- 
tion of the blood-stream, and a consequent lowering of the 
body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its cure, 
you have first the emergency question, are there any germs 
lodged in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? 
As part of the problem, you have to ask whether your blood- 
stream is normal, and if not, what are the methods by which 
you can make it normal and keep it so? Also you have to 
ask, what are the reasons why your trouble manifests itself 
in this or that particular organ? Is there some weakness or 
defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your 
habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? 
Are there any measures you can take to increase the flow of 
blood to that organ, and to promote its activity ? In the study 
of your health, you will find that circumstances differ, and 
the importance of one factor or the other will vary; but you 
will seldom find any problem in which all these factors do 
not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless 
you take all the factors into consideration. CHAPTER XIX 
EXPERIMENTS IN DIET 
(Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and 
his conclusions as to what to eat.) 
Students of the body assure us that every particle of 
matter which composes it is changed in the course of seven 
years. It is obvious that everything that is a part of the 
body has at some time to be taken in as food; so the problem 
of our diet today is the problem of what our body shall con- 
sist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner. 
I begin this discussion by telling my own personal ex- 
periences with food. I am not going to recommend my diet 
for anyone else; because one of the first things I have to 
say about the subject is that every human individual is a 
separate diet problem. But I am going to try to establish a 
few principles for your guidance, and more especially to 
point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mis- 
takes, because it happens that I know them more intimately. 
I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of 
people to give a great deal of time and thought to the sub- 
ject of eating. Among the people I knew it was always taken 
for granted that there should be at least one person in the 
kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing of delicious 
things for the family to eat. This person was generally a 
negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the 
chemistry of foods, nothing about their constituents or nu- 
tritive qualities. All she knew was about their taste; she had 
been trained to prepare them in ways that tasted best, and 
was continually being advised and exhorted and sometimes 
scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the 
table the family and the guests never failed to talk about 
the food and its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be 
behind the door listening to their comments; or else she would 
wait until after the meal, for the report which somebody 
would bring her. 
In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled 
in what is called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with 
115 116 
Mind and Body 
the meats and vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and 
made all kinds of elaborate desserts, and exchanged these 
treasures and the recipes for them with other ladies in the 
neighborhood. In addition to this, there were certain periods 
of the week and of the year especially devoted to the pre- 
paring and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once 
every seven days the members of the family expressed their 
worship of their Creator by eating twice as much as usual; 
and at another time they celebrated the birth of their Redeemer 
by overeating systematically for a period of two or three 
weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up 
in such an environment all had large appetites and large stom- 
achs, and their susceptibility to illness was recognized by 
the setting apart for them of a whole classification of troubles 
-"children's diseases," they were called. In addition to 
children's diseases, there were coughs and colds and sore 
throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and diarrhea, 
which the children shared with their adults. 
I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. 
Always a doctor would be sent for, and always he was wise 
and impressive, and always I was impressed. He gave me 
some pills or a bottle of liquid, a teaspoonful every two hours, 
■or something like that-I can hear the teaspoon rattle in the 
glass as I write. I had a profound respect for each and every 
one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in 
trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to 
get well; and I did, which proved the case completely. 
Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen 
became possessed of a desire for knowledge, and took to 
reading and studying literally every minute of the day and a 
good part of the night. I seldom let myself go to sleep before 
two o'clock in the morning, and was always up by seven and 
ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until 
nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years 
I was a regular experiment station in health; that is, I had 
every kind of common ailment, and had it over and over 
again, so that I could try all the ways of curing it, or failing 
to cure it, and keep on trying until I was sure, one way or 
the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying by John 
Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This 
writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot 
and your feet cold, and it stops the digesting of your food." The Book of the Body 
117 
This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing 
my second novel, camping out on a lonely island at the foot 
of Lake Ontario. I went to see a doctor in a nearby town, 
and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia. The cause of it, he 
said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough pepsin, and 
the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the 
stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle 
of red liquid, and I religiously took some after each meal. 
It helped for a time; but then I noticed that it helped less 
and less. I got so that a simple meal of cold meat and boiled 
potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in spite of any 
amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery, because 
I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let 
me. 
All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this 
problem, groping for causes. I found that the trouble was 
worse if I worked immediately after eating. I found also 
that it was worse when I was writing books. When I got 
sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off 
on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over 
the mountains, looking for deer, and I would come back at 
night too tired to think, and in a week or two every trace 
of my trouble would be gone. So my life regimen came to 
be-first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip to 
get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed 
that the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The 
working times grew shorter, and the hunting times grew 
longer, until finally I had got to a point where I couldn't 
work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days if I tried it. 
It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of my 
sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were 
decaying, not merely outside but inside; I would have ab- 
scesses, and most frightful agonies to endure. I would lie 
awake all night, and it would seem to me that I could feel 
my body going to pieces-an extremely depressing sensation 1 
I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been 
going to one doctor after another, and had got to realize that 
the doctors only treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" 
when they appeared-but nobody ever told you how to keep 
the "diseases" from appearing. Why could there not be a 
doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell you 
everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right ? 118 
Mind and Body 
A doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you 
might keep well all the time! I was studying economics, and 
becoming suspicious of my fellow man; it occurred to me that 
possibly it might be embarrassing to a doctor, if he cured 
all his patients, and taught them how to live, so that none of 
them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred to 
me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive 
medicine," constructive health work, was getting so little at- 
tention from the medical fraternity. 
Two things that plagued me were headache and constipa- 
tion, and they were obviously related. For constipation, the 
world had one simple remedy; you "took something" every 
night or every morning, and thought no more about it. My 
stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi 
water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and 
that she finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" 
was not connected with this in the mind of anyone who knew 
her. As for the headaches, people would tell you this, that, 
and the other remedy, and I would try them-that is, unless 
they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and more 
shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me 
from stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, 
alcohol or tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I 
never took to putting myself to sleep with chloral, or to stop- 
ping my headaches with phenacetin. 
At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon 
a prospectus of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed 
to me exactly what I wanted; this was constructive, it dealt 
with the body as a whole. So I spent a couple of months 
at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand dol- 
lars to tell me all they could about myself. 
The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was 
killing me. It was perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat 
is a horrible feeding place for germs, that rotten meat is 
dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested meat-consider the 
excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly while 
Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria 
per gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. 
It certainly seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" 
should be a vegetarian, so I became one, and did my best to 
persuade myself that I enjoyed the taste of the patent meat- 
substitutes which are served in hundred calory portions in 
the big Sanitarium dining-room. The Book of the Body 
119 
There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew 
every particle of food thirty-two times, and often more. I 
exercised in the Sanitarium gymnasium, and watched the ster- 
ilized dancing-the men with the men and the women with 
the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day 
Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on 
Friday evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went 
once a day to the "treatment rooms," and had my abdomen 
doctored alternately with hot cloths and ice. By this means 
I kept up a flow of blood in the intestinal tract, and stimu- 
lated these organs to activity; so my constipation was relieved, 
and my headaches were less severe-so long as I stayed at 
the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day. 
But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treat- 
ments, the troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I 
had written a book in praise of vegetarianism-a book which 
has got into the libraries, and cannot be got out again! 
I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real 
"nature cure" practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, 
they insisted; the evil had begun long before, when man first 
ruined his food and destroyed its nutritive value by means of 
fire. There was only one certain road to health, and that was 
by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel diet. I had 
gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I would 
give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by 
myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat 
biscuit. For the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and 
dried fruits; and during this period I enjoyed such health 
as I had never known in my life before. I had literally not a 
single ailment. I was not merely well, but bubbling over 
with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up just 
to see me walk down the street. 
I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I 
had solved the problem forever; but I overlooked the fact 
that during those five months I had done no hard brain work, 
no writing. I went back to writing again, and things began 
to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making trouble 
in my stomach-and I assure you that until you try, you have 
no idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your 
stomach by a load of bananas and soaked prunes which has 
gone wrong! For a year or two I agonized; I could not give 
up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had always before 120 
Mind and Body 
me the vision of those months in California, and could not 
understand why it was not that way again. 
But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, 
and for hours afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown- 
up football. Then somebody gave me a book by Dr. Salis- 
bury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all the horrible 
things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; 
I had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought 
of eating meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there 
has never been a time in my life when I would not hear 
something new, and give it a trial if it sounded well; so I 
read the books of Doctor Salisbury, wThich have long been 
out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the med- 
ical profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experi- 
menter. He wrote in the days before the germ theory, and 
so missed his guess regarding tuberculosis, but he perceived 
that most of the common diseases are caused by dietetic errors, 
and he set to work to prove it. He showed that hog cholera 
and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from the 
same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army 
biscuit for two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, 
and then he put them on a diet of lean beef and completely 
cured them in a few days. He did this same thing with one 
kind of food after another, and in each case he would bring 
his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure 
them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains 
all the elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a 
person can live for an unlimited period. As Salisbury said, 
"Beef is first, mutton is second, and the rest nowhere." 
It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused 
by spores of fermenting starch clogging the minute blood 
vessels. He claimed that there is an early stage of tubercu- 
losis, in which the spores are floating in the blood stream; he 
put large numbers of patients upon a diet of lean beef, 
ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis, and 
if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving 
for starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it 
out an hour or two later by examining a drop of their blood 
under the microscope. In his books he described vividly the 
effects of an excess of starch and sugar in the diet. He 
called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach"; and you 
can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested 
bananas and prunes! The Book of the Body 
121 
I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this 
one fact, that lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily 
assimilated of all foods. Salisbury claimed that you could 
not overeat on meat, but I do not believe there is any food 
you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that anyone should 
try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature omnivorous 
animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs 
and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One 
of the common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite 
the monkey and the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, 
when the fact is that monkeys and squirrels eat meat when 
they can get it, and the ardor with which they go bird-nesting 
is evidence enough that they crave it. If there is any race of 
man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is from neces- 
sity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the 
theme of the raw fooders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time 
catching fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate 
the event precisely as Christians celebrate the birth of their 
Redeemer. 
From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as 
the result of much painful blundering and experimenting. 
So far as diet is concerned, I belong to no school; I have 
learned something from each one, and what I have learned 
from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements 
and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who 
argue that it is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer 
that they cannot go for a walk in the country without com- 
mitting that offense, for they walk on innumerable bugs and 
worms. We cannot live without asserting our right to sub- 
ject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill in- 
numerable germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or 
for that matter a glass of plain water. I shall be much sur- 
prised if the advance of science does not some day prove to 
us that there are rudimentary forms of consciousness in all 
vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of Mr. 
Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could 
not see how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato 
in its prime, or to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in 
the pod I 
There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, ex- 
pensive, and dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall 
know enough to be able to find for every individual a diet 122 
Mind and Body 
which will keep him at the top o£ his power, without the 
maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not possess 
that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not pos- 
sess it. I happen to be one of those individuals-there are 
many of them-with whom milk does not agree; and if you 
rule out milk and meat, you find yourself compelled to get 
a great deal of your protein from vegetable sources, such as 
peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a great deal of starch, 
and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet to escape 
an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has 
convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also 
the commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the com- 
mon throat and nose infections, but of constipation, and like- 
wise of diarrhea, of anemia, and thus, through the weakening 
/of the blood stream, of all disorders that spring from this 
source-decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad complexion, 
and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore 
they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible 
for the diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are 
liable. 
On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite 
diseases of overnourishment; high blood pressure, which cul- 
minates in apoplexy; kidney troubles, which result from the 
inability of these organs to eliminate all the waste matter that 
is delivered to them; fatty degeneration of the heart, or of 
the liver, or any of the vital organs. You may cause a head- 
ache by clogging the blood stream through overeating, or you 
may cause it by eating small quantities of food, if those foods 
are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements 
necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the 
trouble with your health, it is my judgment that in two cases 
out of three you will find it dates back to errors in diet. I 
do not think I exaggerate in saying that a knowledge of what 
to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the knowledge 
of how to keep yourself in permanent health. CHAPTER XX 
ERRORS IN DIET 
(Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they 
play in the making of health and disease.) 
It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general 
principles to aid you in the practical problem of selecting 
the best diet for yourself. But it must be made clear at the 
outset that there can be no hard and fast rule. All human 
bodies are more or less alike, but on the other hand all are 
more or less different. Modern civilization has given very 
few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some 
weakness, some abnormality, and need some special modifi- 
cation in diet to fit their particular problem. The ideal in 
each case would be a complete study of the individual system. 
Some day, no doubt, medical science will analyze the digestive 
juices and the gland secretions and the blood-stream of every 
human being, and say, you need a certain percentage of starch 
and a certain percentage of protein; you need such and such 
proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid cer- 
tain acids-and so on. But at present we are devoting our 
science to the task of killing and maiming other people, in- 
stead of enabling ourselves to live in health and happiness; 
so it is that most of those who read this book will be too 
poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The best 
you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, 
watching your own body and learning its peculiarities. 
Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and 
carbohydrates. The proteins are the body-building material, 
and the foods which are rich in proteins are lean meat, the 
white of eggs, milk and cheese, nuts, peas and beans. A cer- 
tain amount of this kind of food is needed by the body. If 
it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too 
much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making 
material, but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence 
appears to be that it is a strain upon the system. Experi- 
ments conducted by Professor Chittenden of Yale have proven 
conclusively that men can live and maintain body weight upon 
123 124 
Mind and Body 
much less protein food than previous dietetic standards had 
indicated. 
The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and 
in nuts, olives, and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to 
digest and assimilate a certain amount of fat, no one knows 
how much. I have found in my own case that I require a 
great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have for many 
years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more 
fat than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never 
use butter or olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason 
for this is that fats are the most highly concentrated form of 
food, and the easiest upon which to overeat. Excess of fat 
is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of boils and pim- 
ples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged 
blood-stream. 
The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of 
these there are two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the 
white material of the grains and tubers; the principal food 
element of bread and cereals, rice, potatoes, bananas, and 
many prepared substances such as corn-starch, tapioca, farina 
and macaroni. Starchy foods compose probably half the 
diet of the average human being. In my own case, they com- 
pose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs 
differ from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the 
diet at all. I have a friend who is subject to headaches, and 
finds relief from them by a diet of meat, salads, and fresh 
fruits exclusively. The first thing that excess of starch or 
sugar does is to ferment in the system, and cause flatulence 
and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of starch 
is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the con- 
dition may be worse yet, because you may have a great 
quantity of energy-producing material, without the necessary 
mineral elements which the body requires in the handling of it. 
If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chem- 
ically, you find a score or more of mineral salts. You find these 
in the blood, and no blood is normal and no body can be kept 
normal which does not contain the right percentage of these 
elements. It is not merely that they are needed to build 
bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for the 
chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you 
fill the cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste 
matter. You may prove how deadly this matter is by bind- The Book of the Body 
125 
ing a tight cord about your arm, and then trying to use the 
arm. We are only at the beginning of understanding the 
subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know, the 
cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out 
of the system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this proc- 
ess the blood must have a continual supply of many mineral 
salts. 
So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, 
that it is far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat 
improperly balanced foods, or foods which are deficient in the 
organic salts. You may prove this to yourself by a simple 
experiment. Put two chickens in separate pens, where nobody 
can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water and 
white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making 
substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed 
the other chicken on plain water. You will find that the 
one which has the food will quickly become droopy and sickly; 
its feathers will fall out, it will have what in human beings 
would be known as headaches, colds, sore throats, decaying 
teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it will be 
a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will 
not be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, 
but it will be a live chicken, and a chicken without disease. 
I am going later on to discuss the subject of fasting. For 
the present I will merely say that a chicken which has nothing 
but water is living upon its own flesh, and therefore has a 
meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to the 
elimination of the fatigue poisons. 
I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and 
not to say things that I do not know. I confess to innumer- 
able uncertainties about the subject of diet; but one thing I 
think I do know, and that is that human beings should elim- 
inate absolutely from their food those modern artificial prod- 
ucts, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and are 
put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some 
way artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities- 
including the vital mineral salts. Among such food substances 
I include lard and its imitations made from cottonseed oil, 
white flour, all the prepared and refined cereals, polished 
rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and granulated and powdered 
sugar. Any of these substances will kill a chicken in a couple 
of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer time to kill 126 
Mind and Body 
you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But 
to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and 
do not console yourself with the idea that the mineral ele- 
ments will be made up from other foods, because you don't 
know that, and nobody else knows it. Nobody knows just 
how much of any particular organic salt the body needs. All 
we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods, 
enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who 
consume the greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" 
foods, have the very best dentists and the very worst teeth 
in the world. 
There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane 
and the beet, and in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from 
any form of starch; this is glucose, which is put up in cans 
and sold as an imitation of maple syrup. The ordinary gran- 
ulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from the natu- 
ral syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no hesi- 
tation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar 
of our breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a 
food, but a slow poison. The causes of the wonderful prog- 
ress of American dentistry, which is the marvel of the civi- 
lized world, are cane sugar, white flour, and the frying-pan, 
each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in turn. 
We have the richest country in the world; we eat more 
food, probably by 50 per cent, and we waste more food, 
probably by 500 per cent, than any other people in the world; 
and yet, go to any small farming community in America, and 
what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children 
rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before 
their second teeth come. You find these second teeth rot- 
ting often before the age of twenty. A friend of mine, 
who knows the American farmer, sums it up this way: "He 
has two things that he requires if he is to be really respectable 
and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his 
home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and sec- 
ond, he wants to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set 
installed. Out of the farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not 
one in ten keeps her own teeth until she is thirty." 
If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour 
milk, with grains which they grind at home; or to southern 
Italy and Sicily, where they live on cheese and black bread 
and olives; or among savage people, where they hunt and The Book of the Body 
127 
fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old men without a 
single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this, 
and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. 
The farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter 
and cheeses, and take them to the store and bring back cans 
of lard and packages of sugar. The farmer will sell his per- 
fectly good wheat and corn meal, and bring back in his wagon 
cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he has paid ten 
times the price of the grain! 
Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth 
is by sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which 
destroy the tooth structure. And that may be a part of the 
reason. But the principal reason why the teeth decay is 
because the blood-stream is abnormal, and is unable to keep up 
the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living structures, 
just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist 
decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment. 
You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it 
every day. Nature provides this sugar in combination with 
the organic salts, and also with the precious vitamines, whose 
function in the body we are only beginning to investigate. All 
the mineral substances which give the color and flavor to 
oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins-all 
these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you 
put in some imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, 
and drink them at your soda fountains! So little apprecia- 
tion has the American farmer's wife of natural fruits, that 
when she preserves them, she considers it necessary to fill 
them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they 
won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snob- 
bish are we Americans about our eating, that we make the 
best of our foods into bywords. We make jokes in our comic 
papers about the "boarding-house prune"; and yet prunes and 
raisins are among the wholesomest foods we have, and if we 
fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and 
coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline. 
And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, 
I thought I had to have hot bread at least twice a day, and 
if I were called upon to eat bread that was more than a day 
old, I felt that I was being badly abused by life. I used 
to read fairy stories, in which something called "black bread" 
was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol of 128 
Mind and Body 
human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating 
a crust of dry "black bread." But now since I have studied 
diet, I have taken my place with Cinderella. I can afford to 
buy whatever kind of bread I want; I can have the best white 
bread, piping hot, three times a day, if I want it; but what 
I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry "black bread." 
"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of 
the whole grain. It is eaten that way by the peasant because 
he has no patent milling machinery at his disposal, to fan 
away the life-giving elements of his food. Nearly all the 
mineral elements of the grain are contained in the outer, 
dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; 
and when you use white flour, you are not merely starving 
your blood-stream, your bones, and your teeth, you are also 
depriving the digestive tract of the rough material which it 
is accustomed to handle, and which it needs to stimulate it 
to action. I am aware that whole grain products are a trifle 
less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken 
our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get 
flabby for lack of action. We should require our stomachs 
to handle the ordinary natural foods, precisely as we accustom 
our body to react from cold water, and to stand honest hard 
work. 
For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with 
a little dried fish. Quite recently there began to spread through- 
out Japan a mysterious disease known as beri-beri. It w'as 
especially prevalent in the army, and so the scientists of Japan 
set out to discover the cause, and it proved to be the modern 
practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer coating of 
the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if 
it is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that 
state in this country, you have to find a special food store of 
the health cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You 
have to pay a higher price for whole wheat bread-because 
ninety-nine people out of a hundred are ignorant, and insist 
upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at 1 
Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the hor- 
rors of scurvy. Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, 
with a similar cause. The men on the old sailing ships used 
to have to live on white biscuit and salt meat, and they always 
knew that to recover from their gnawing illness, they must 
get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially The Book of the Body 
129 
onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as 
the salts. But you will see the modern housewife going into 
the grocery store, and surveying the shelves of "package" 
goods, and in her ignorance picking out the scurvy-making 
products, and frequently paying for them a much higher 
price than for the health-making ones! 
Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane 
sugar, and her lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and 
put it in the frying pan, and serve it hot to her husband and 
children. Nature has so constituted her husband and chil- 
dren that they digest starch before they digest fat; that is to 
say, the starch is digested mainly in the stomach, while the 
fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed on into 
the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is eaten, 
the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and 
protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive 
juices of the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch 
goes down into the small intestine a good part undigested. If 
some evil spirit, wishing to make trouble for the human or- 
ganism, had charge of the laying out of our diet, he could 
hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would 
be no exaggeration to say that the average American, espe- 
cially the average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his 
potatoes have to be warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; 
his precious batter-cakes and doughnuts are cooked in a fry- 
ing-pan, and all his precious hot breads are mixed with lard. 
If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a beefsteak 
over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step 
toward health for the average American would be to throw 
the frying-pan out of the window, and to throw the cook- 
book after it. 
The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; 
a product of idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of 
the monstrous growths consequent upon our system of class 
exploitation. We have a number of idle people with nothing 
to do but eat, and who demonstrate their superiority to the 
rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and superior 
ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world 
at their disposal, also the services of their fellow man with- 
out limit, and they set their fellow man to work to enable 
them to give elaborate banquets, and to sit in solemn state 
and gorge themselves, and to have a full account of their be- 130 
Mind and Body 
havior published in the next morning's newspapers. A great 
part of this perverse art we owe to what is called the "ancient 
regime" in France-a regime which starved the French peas- 
antry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves 
and hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food 
depravity parades itself in French names, and American snob- 
bery requires of its devotees a course in the French language 
sufficient to read a menu card. Needless to say, this elaborate 
gastronomic art has been developed without any relation to 
health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is 
one of the products of the predatory system which we can 
say is absolute waste. Having done my own cooking for the 
past twenty-five years, I make bold to say that I can teach 
anybody all he needs to know about cooking in one lesson of 
half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking required 
for a large family can be done by one person in twenty 
minutes a day. 
In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be 
cooked at all, and are made less fit by cooking. In the next 
place, the only cooking that is ever required is a little boil- 
ing, or in the case of meat, roasting or broiling. In the next 
place, the art of combining foods in cooking is a waste art, 
because no foods should be combined in cooking. Every 
food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, 
and if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of sim- 
ply cooked foods, there is one thing to say to that person, 
and that is to wait until he is hungry. Let him take a ten- 
mile walk in the open air, and he will have more interest 
in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have no desire to 
destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people 
that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, 
and those pleasures are not found in standing over a cook 
stove, nor in compelling others to stand over a cook stove. 
Moreover, I know that the artificial mixing of foods to tempt 
peoples' palates is one of the principal causes of overeating, 
and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the ultimate 
destruction of the pleasures of life. 
I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. 
I wanted to write a book, and to be let alone while I was 
doing it. I lived by myself, and found out about cooking by 
practical experience. On a few occasions since then, I have 
lived in a house with a servant, and had some cooking done The Book of the Body 
131 
for me, but it was always because somebody else wanted it, 
and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had 
no servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give 
her energy to more important things than feeding me, I do 
my share of getting every meal. We have worked out a 
system of housekeeping by which we get a meal in five min- 
utes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear 
things away. 
If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression 
that I am advising you to eat these same things. My diet 
consists of the foods which I have found by long experience 
agree with me. There are many other foods which are just 
as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either because they 
don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for 
them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that 
than of anything else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but 
you can save a good deal if you buy it in quantities, as I do. 
A little later I am going to discuss the prices of foods. 
For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three 
good-sized apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes 
practically no time to prepare this breakfast. The bread has 
to be baked, of course, but this is done wholesale; we buy 
four loaves at a time, and it is just as good at the end of 
a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the 
world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant 
that somebody had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, 
mix them with sugar, grate a little nutmeg over them, set 
them on ice, and serve them to me on a glass dish, with a 
little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that I put 
a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while 
I am eating. We have a rule in our family that we do 
not do any cooking except while we are eating, because if 
we try it at any other time of the day, we get buried in a 
book or in a manuscript, and forget about it until the smoke 
causes somebody in the street to summon the fire depart- 
ment. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during 
last night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be 
some vegetable cooking for lunch. 
At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large 
slice of beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London 
used to say that the only man who could cook a beefsteak 
was the fireman of a railway locomotive, because he had a hot, 132 
Mind and Body 
clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a hot, clean 
frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get 
hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the 
juices inside, and to do that you must cook it quickly. When 
you slap it down on a hot frying-pan, the meat is seared, and 
the juices stay inside, and if you do not turn it over until it 
is almost ready to burn, you don't need to cook it very long 
on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking worth 
knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of 
wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of 
learning it, I reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of 
my family duties. 
To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and 
a large quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or let- 
tuce and tomatoes, without dressing. For a part of this may 
be substituted a vegetable, one or two beets or turnips, cooked 
during a previous meal, and warmed up in a couple of 
minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips 
and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they 
serve for the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quan- 
tity of such "greens" once a day, you would escape many of 
the ills that your flesh is at present heir to. Finally, for 
dessert, an orange and a small handful of raisins, or one or 
two figs. 
The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast; except 
once in a while when I am especially hungry, and want some 
meat. I am writing in the winter season, so the fruits sug- 
gested are those available in winter. The menu will be varied 
with every kind of fruit at the season when it is cheapest 
and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear at about 
three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by 
the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may 
be replaced by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, 
and occasionally by graham crackers. I know that these 
contain a little fat and sugar, but I try not to be fanatical 
about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not carry the death 
penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my friends 
to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with 
special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I 
tell them to "forget it," and I politely nibble a little of every- 
thing, and eat most of what I find wholesome; if there is 
nothing wholesome, I content myself with the pretense of a The Book of the Body 
133 
meal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I quite shamelessly 
get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of the 
crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or 
twice a month, I do not have to worry about such indulgence. 
The main thing is to arrange one's home diet on sound lines, 
and learn to enjoy the simple and wholesome foods, of which 
there is a great variety obtainable, and at prices possible to 
all but the wretchedly poor. 
In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now 
and then, I specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. 
Assuming that I am your guest for a day, and that you wish 
to "blow" me, regardless of expense, here will be the menu. 
Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch of raisins, a can of 
sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of watermelon in 
summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a 
baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, 
and a dish of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this 
next Christmas! 
P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced 
to be looking over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On 
Board the Good Ship Earth." Discussing the importance of 
certain organic salts to the body, Dr. Quick states: "Animals 
have been fed, as an experiment, on foods deficient in phos- 
phorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they 
collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without 
phosphorus to wreck an animal. Individual creatures were 
killed after a month of this diet, and it was found that the 
flesh was taking the phosphate-for the phosphorus exists in 
the body in that form-from the bones to supply its need. In 
other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this 
process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, 
and the animal could never recover." CHAPTER XXI 
DIET STANDARDS 
(Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities 
we need, and their money cost.) 
I think there is no more important single question about 
health than the question of how much food we should eat. 
It is one about which there is a great deal of controversy, even 
among the best authorities. We shall try here for a common- 
sense solution. At the outset we have to remind ourselves 
of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. 
To what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to 
keep him in perfect health? 
Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their 
diet problem solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are 
adjusted to certain foods which they find in nature, and so 
long as they can find it, they have no diet problem. Man 
comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them; he 
observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely ap- 
proaching the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But 
suppose the man, with his superior skill in agriculture, taking 
wild grain and planting it, reaping and threshing it by machin- 
ery, puts before his horse an unlimited quantity of a con- 
centrated food such as oats, which the horse can never get 
in a natural state-will that horse's instincts guide it? Not 
at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain. 
I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is 
a good place for an author to live, provided he can be per- 
suaded not to farm it. But once upon a time I had not 
heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to run a farm. 
I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one 
morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got 
into the pear orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. 
In a few hours they both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. 
A farmer told me afterwards that I might have saved their 
lives, if I had stuck a knife into their stomachs to let out 
the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not. But 
my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reason 
134 The Book of the Body 
135 
why civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his 
appetites to tell him when he has had enough to eat. He can 
only do this, provided he rigidly restricts himself to the foods 
which he ate in the days when his teeth and stomach and 
bowels were being shaped by the process of natural selection. 
If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural 
foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule. 
In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the 
amount that he finds is generally limited, and requires a lot 
of exercise to get. Explorers in Africa give us a picture of 
man's life in the savage state, guided by his instincts and very 
little interfered with by reason. The savages will starve for 
long periods, then they will succeed in killing a hippopotamus 
or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly all 
of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, 
even in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint 
is needed, and reason and moral sense have a part to play. 
What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about 
diet? Our bodily processes go on continuously, and we need 
at regular intervals a certain quantity of a number of different 
foods. The most elementary experiment will convince us that 
we can get along, maintain our body weight and our work- 
ing efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than 
we naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great 
variety of delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are 
disposed to overeat; and we are slow observers indeed if we 
do not note the connection between this overeating and ill 
health. So we are forced to the conclusion that if we wish 
to stay well, we need to establish a censorship over our habits; 
we need a different diet regimen from the haphazard one 
which has been established for us by a combination of our 
instincts with the perversions of civilization. 
Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted 
by authorities on diet that what the average man actually 
eats must be the normal thing for him to eat. Governments 
which were employing men in armies, and at road building, 
and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large 
scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were 
established the old fashioned "diet standards." They are ex- 
pressed in calories, which is a heat unit representing the 
quantity of fuel required to heat a certain small quantity of 
water a certain number of degrees. In order that you may 136 
Mind and Body 
know what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of 
the quantity of the more common foods which it takes to 
make 100 calories: one medium sized slice of bread, a piece 
of lean cooked steak the size of two fingers, one large apple, 
three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked rice or potatoes, one 
large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five dates, one large 
fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size of your 
thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized 
tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. 
You observe, if you compare these various items, how little 
guidance concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat 
a whole head of lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no 
more food value than from a half ounce of olive oil which 
you pour over it. You may eat enough lean beefsteak to 
cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a 
generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will 
not count half so much as the cream and sugar you put over 
them. So you may realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, 
cream, and sugar, you are in the same danger as the horse 
eating oats, or as my two cows in the pear orchard; and if 
some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife into you, 
it may be for the same reason. 
The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows: Swedish 
laborers at hard work, over 4,700 calories; Russian workmen 
at moderate work, German soldiers in active service, Italian 
laborers at moderate work, between 3,500 and 3,700 calories; 
English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories; Austrian farm labor- 
ers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the United 
States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, 
and established the following, known as the "Atwater stand- 
ards": men at very hard muscular work, 5,500 calories; men 
at moderately active muscular work, 3,400 calories; men at 
light to moderate muscular work, 3,050 calories; men at 
sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700 calories. 
In the last ten or fifteen years there has arisen a new 
school of dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden 
and Fisher of Yale University. Professor Chittenden has 
published an elaborate book, "The Nutrition of Man," in which 
he tells of long-continued experiment upon a squad of soldiers 
and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon average 
students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all 
these various groups have been able to maintain full body The Book of the Body 
137 
weight and full working efficiency upon less than half the 
quantity of protein food hitherto specified, and upon any- 
where from one-half to two-thirds the calory value set forth 
in the former standards. 
When I first read this book, I set to work to try its 
theories upon myself. During the five or six months that I 
lived on raw food, I took the trouble to weigh everything that 
I ate, and to keep a record. It is, of course, very easy to 
weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I lived an active 
life and kept physical health upon slightly less than 2,500 
calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have 
accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without 
wasting any thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; 
for I still crave the delightful cakes and candies and ice 
cream upon which I was brought up. I always pay the pen- 
alty, and know that I will not get back to my former state 
of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a 
chance to clean house. The average man will find the regi- 
men set forth in this book austere and awe-inspiring; I do 
not wish to pose as a paragon of virtue, so perhaps I should 
quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked when I was a boy 
that the way to my heart was with a bag of ginger-snaps. I 
live in the presence of candy stores and never think of their 
existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and 
puts it in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy 
in letting it alone. A few years ago I had a young man as 
secretary who discovered this failing of mine, and used to 
afford himself immense glee by buying a box of chocolates 
and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him back the 
box-with some of the chocolates missing-but he would per- 
sist in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh 
hilariously behind the door, until my wife discovered his 
nefarious doings, and warned me of them. 
Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense 
procedure in the matter of food quantity. Find out by prac- 
tical experiment what is the very least food upon which you 
can do your work without losing weight. That is the correct 
quantity for you, and if you are eating more, you certainly 
cannot be doing your body any good, and all the evidence 
indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have 
the least fear in making this experiment that you will starve 
yourself. Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to 138 
Mind and Body 
you that you carry around with you in your body sufficient 
reserve of food to keep you alive for eighty or ninety days; 
and if you draw on a small quantity of this you do not do 
yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of your 
food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, 
and weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to 
discover how much less you need to eat than you have been 
accustomed to. 
One of the things you will find out is that your stomach 
is easily fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a 
meal consisting of a moderate quantity of lean meat, a very 
little bread, a heaping dish of turnip greens, and a big slice 
of watermelon, you will feel fully satisfied, yet you will not 
have taken in one-third the calory value that you would at an 
ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and dessert. The 
bulky kind of food is that for which your system was adapted 
in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large 
stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you 
had lived on refined and concentrated foods such as butter, 
sugar, olive oil, cheese and eggs. You have a long intestinal 
tract, adapted to slowly digesting foods, and to the work of 
extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage. You have a 
very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian 
scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the 
problems of health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous 
stage of evolution, and a source of much disease. The best 
thing you can do with that lower bowel is to give it lots of 
hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat the salads and greens 
which contain cellulose material. This contains no food value, 
and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and stimulates 
it to activity. 
If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, 
it may not be digested, and in that case it will fill your sys- 
tem with poisons. Second, it may be assimilated, but not 
burned up by the body. In that case it has to be thrown out 
by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and this puts upon these 
organs an extra strain, to which in the long run they may 
be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up 
as fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to 
tide you over the times when food was scarce. If you were 
a bear, you would naturally want to eat all you could, and be 
as fat as possible in November, so that you might be able The Book of the Body 
139 
to hunt your prey when you came out from your winter's 
sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to 
teat your regular meals all winter; you have established a 
system of civilization which makes you certain of your food, 
and the place where you keep your surplus is in the bank, or 
sewed up in the mattress, or hidden in your stocking. In 
other words, a civilized man saves money, and the habit of 
storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is a sur- 
vival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health. 
Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra 
weight around with him, but his body has to keep it and tend 
it; and what are the effects of this is fully shown by life 
insurance tables. People who are five or ten per cent over 
weight have five or ten per cent more chance of dying all 
the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under 
weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of 
life expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which 
are the result of the tabulation of many hundreds of thou- 
sands of cases. The meaning of them to the fat person is to 
put himself on a diet of lean meat, green vegetables and 
fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not merely 
to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal 
leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the 
student who has more important things to think about than 
stuffing his stomach. 
There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is 
the result of ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuber- 
culosis, for example, and anemia. There are people who 
worry themselves thin, and there are a few rare "spiritual" 
people, so-called, who fade away from lack of sufficient in- 
terest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness that 
I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives 
a hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people 
are spare eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy 
plumpness, both for adults and children, is a wholly false 
notion. We once had in our home as servant an Irish girl, 
who was what is popularly called "a picture of health," with 
those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English women 
so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody 
who knew her had any idea but that her health was perfect. 
But one morning she was discovered in bed with one side 
paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks she was dead with ery- 140 
Mind and Body 
sipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing but dis- 
eased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with 
the blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain 
had become clogged. 
In the same way I have seen children, two or three years 
old, plump and rosy, and considered to be everything that 
children should be; but pneumonia would hit them, and in 
two or three days they would be at death's door. I do not 
mean that children should be kept hungry; on the contrary, 
they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do 
not have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals 
they should eat in great part the bulky foods, which contain 
the natural salts needed for building the body. If a child 
asks for food, you may give it an apple, or you may give it 
a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it. The child will 
be equally well content in either case; but it is for you, with 
your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with 
butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutri- 
ment as the apple, but contains practically none of the pre- 
cious organic salts which will make the child's bones and 
teeth. 
So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew 
on bushes outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do 
was to go and pick off what you wanted. But as a matter 
of fact, foods cost money, and under our present system of 
wage slavery, the amount of money the average person can 
spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am going to 
discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All 
that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to 
have, and if society does not pay you enough for your work 
to enable you to buy such foods, you may know that society 
is starving you, and you may get busy to demand your rights 
as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as you 
do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of 
you spend it very unwisely indeed. 
In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most 
wholesome foods are cheap-often because people do not know 
enough to value them. We insist upon having the choice 
cuts of meats, because they are more tender to the teeth, 
but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We insist upon 
having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an 
abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a The Book of the Body 
141 
grave error in diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits 
are a pest, and in the market they sell for perhaps one- 
fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can hardly ever get them, 
because people value them so little as food; they prefer the 
meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and 
has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk! 
I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and 
invaluable food. All the dried fruits are rich in food values, 
and if we could get them untreated by chemicals, they would 
be worth their cost. I was brought up to despise the cheaper 
vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never tasted boiled 
cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise 
I made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as 
valuable as any other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest 
for some people, but I do not believe in pampering the 
stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap and wholesome, 
if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would 
leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. 
Nearly all the mineral salts of the potato are just under the 
outer skin, and are removed by the foolish habit of peeling 
them. 
The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons 
and in different parts of the world, that there is not much 
profit in trying to figure how cheaply a person can live. I 
have found that I spend for the diet I have indicated here, 
from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not buy any fancy 
foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to 
economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods 
in their season. Most everyone will find that it is a good 
business proposition to buy the foods which he needs to keep 
in health. If the average workingman would add up the money 
he spends, not merely in the restaurants, but in the candy 
stores, the drug stores, the tobacco stores, and the offices 
of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think, that he could 
afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome 
natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I 
live, enough of these foods can be purchased for a dollar 
a day, and this is about one-fourth what common labor is 
being paid, and one-eighth of what skilled labor is being paid. 
I will specify the foods: a pound and a half of shoulder 
steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded 
wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and 
four or five pounds of apples. 142 
Mind and Body 
There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food 
if you put your mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, 
you may pay as high as fifty cents or a dollar a pound for the 
big ones, and they are not a bit better than the tiny ones, 
which you can buy for as low as eight cents a pound in bulk. 
When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price, despite 
the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy 
canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and 
they will be heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you 
find what are known as "pie peaches," put up in gallon tins 
without sugar, and at about half the price. The butcher 
will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a very low 
price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will 
fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you 
watch, and then you have a very good food. One of my 
diet rules is that I do not trust the capitalist system to fix 
me up any kind of mixed or ground or prepared foods. I 
have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago. 
Also there is something to know about the cooking of 
foods, since it is possible to take perfectly good foods and 
spoil them by bad cooking. Once upon a time our family 
discovered a fireless cooker, and thought that was a wonder- 
ful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife who 
is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations 
which have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," 
food ferments which are only partly understood, suggest that 
prolonged cooking of food may be a great mistake. The 
starch has to be cooked in order to break the cell walls by the 
expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will be 
enough in the case of everything except beans, which need 
to be cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, 
except in the case of pork, which harbors a parasite danger- 
ous to the human body; therefore pork should always be 
thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less digestible 
by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to 
boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon 
as the water begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either 
fresh fruit or dried. The dried fruits may be soaked and 
eaten raw, but I find that several fruits, especially apples and 
pears, do not agree with me well if they are eaten raw, so 
I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no ob- 
iection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes The Book of the Body 
143 
the trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of 
spoiling. If you put up your own fruits, do not put in any 
sugar. All you have to do is to let them boil for a few 
minutes, and to seal them tightly while they are boiling hot. 
The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the air with its 
bacteria. 
If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in fol- 
lowing the diet here outlined, for you can produce for your- 
selves all the foods that I have recommended; only do not 
make the mistake of shipping out your best foods, and taking 
back the products of a factory, just because you have read 
lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and 
oats and corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make 
your own breads and cereals. Try the experiment of mix- 
ing whole corn meal with water and a little salt, and baking 
it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat these-but 
only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make 
them. 
Another common article of food which I do not recom- 
mend is salted and smoked meats. I do not pretend to know 
the effects of large quantities of salt and saltpetre and wood 
smoke upon the human system, but I know that Dr. Wiley's 
"poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these in- 
organic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take 
fresh meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of 
common salt on meat and potatoes, because there seems to 
be a natural craving for this. I know that many health en- 
thusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain on my kidneys, 
but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear to 
me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel 
many miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to 
make plausible statements about health, but not so easy to 
prove them. For example, I was told that it is injurious 
to drink water at meals, and for years I religiously avoided 
the habit; but it occurred to some college professor to find 
out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of 
experiments which proved that the stomach works better 
when its contents are diluted. The only point about drink- 
ing at meals is that you should not use the liquid to wash 
down your food without chewing it. 
I can suggest two other ways by which you may save 
money on food. One is by not eating too much, and another 144 
Mind and Body 
is by eating all that you buy. The amount of food that is 
wasted by the people of America would feed the people of 
any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown 
out from any one of our big American leisure class hotels 
would feed the children of a European town. I think it may 
fairly be described as a crime to throw into the garbage pail 
food which might nourish human life. In our family we 
have no garbage pail. What little waste there is, we burn 
in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of 
the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and 
the bones of meat, and the skins of some fruits and vege- 
tables. It would never enter into our minds to throw out a 
particle of bread, or meat, or other wholesome food. If we 
have something that we fear may spoil, we do not throw it 
out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes. 
If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop 
at least that much of the waste of American life; and as to ' 
the big leisure class hotels, and the banquet tables of the 
rich-just wait a few years, and I think the social revolu- 
tion will attend to them I CHAPTER XXII 
FOODS AND POISONS 
(Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon 
the system of stimulants and narcotics.) 
A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had 
devoted some twenty years of his life to teaching people 
to chew their food. Horace Fletcher was his name, and his 
ideas became a fad, and some people carried them to comical 
extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called 
"the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swal- 
lowing apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which 
has been sufficiently prepared for digestion. If you chew a 
mouthful of food without ever performing the act of swal- 
lowing, you will find that the food gradually disappears. 
What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a 
thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may 
go on putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and 
can eat a whole meal without ever performing the act of 
swallowing. Fletcher claimed that this is the proper way to 
eat, and that you can train yourself to follow this method. 
I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules, 
to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time 
to chew my food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip 
that meal. 
The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be 
sure, the carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are 
tougher than we are, and do not carry the burden of a 
large brain and a complex nervous system. If you swallow 
your meals half chewed, and wash them down with liquids, 
you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will 
pay for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the 
same thing applies to your habit of jumping up from meals 
and rushing away to work, whether it be work of the muscles, 
or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion requires the pres- 
ence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach and 
digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subcon- 
scious mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers. 
145 146 
Mind and Body 
If you cannot rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, 
or make it a light one, of fruit juices, which are almost im- 
mediately absorbed by the stomach, and of salads, which do 
not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not hurt you 
to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to 
be quiet. I have been many times in my life under very 
intense and long continued nervous strain; for example, dur- 
ing the Colorado coal strike, I led a public demonstration 
which kept me in a state of excitement all the day and a 
good part of the night several weeks. During this period 
I ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard 
would be as near as I would go to a meal, and as a result 
I came through the experience without any injury whatever 
to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in weight, but that 
was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way 
of life. 
I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal 
of hard work to do, carrying a canoe long distances on my 
back, or paddling it forty miles a day. On the mornings 
of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an elaborate 
breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, 
and make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My 
meal, on the contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed 
prunes, or perhaps some huckleberries or raspberries, if they 
could be found. I will not say that I could do as much as 
the guide, because he was used to it, and I was not. But I 
can say this-if I had eaten his breakfast at the start of 
the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the 
word "dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to 
climb Whiteface mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed 
half way, and then ate lunch, which consisted of nine hard 
boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the rest of the moun- 
tain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion. 
There are few poisons which can affect the system more 
quickly, or more dangerously, than a mass of food which is 
not digested. The stomach is an ideal forcing-house for 
the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth and moisture, 
and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the material 
upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stom- 
ach pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let 
this gastric juice for any reason be lacking-because your 
nervous energy has gone somewhere else, or because your The Book of the Body 
147 
blood-stream, from which the gastric juice must be made, 
has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor; then you 
have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons. 
In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains 
and convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of 
the body. But what you should understand is that you may 
produce a milder case of such poisoning, and may do it day 
after day habitually, and little by little your vital organs 
will be weakened by the strain. 
It does not make any difference at what hour of the 
twenty-four you take the great bulk of your food. It is 
one of the commonest delusions that you get some strength- 
ening effect from your food immediately, and must have this 
strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are 
substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no 
digesting; you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be 
digested by the saliva, and absorbed at once into the blood- 
stream. But unless you have been starved for a long period 
you do not need to get your strength in this rush fashion. 
If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your 
blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been 
put through a long process of preparation, and you can get 
up in the morning and work all day, if necessary, upon what 
is already in your system. To be sure, you may feel hungry, 
and even faint, but that is merely a matter of habit; your 
system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But if 
you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train your- 
self to eat a light meal in the morning, and another light 
meal at noon, and to eat a hearty meal when your work is 
done and you can rest. Two light meals and a hearty meal 
are all that any system needs, and you can prove it to your- 
self by trying it, and watching your weight once a week. 
I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which 
I have come is that there is no virtue in any particular meal- 
hours or any particular number of meals. For several years 
I tried the experiment of two meals a day. I was living 
a retired life, and had little contact with the world, and I 
would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the morning, and 
another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that 
inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two mod- 
erate-sized meals at the conventional hours of lunch and 
dinner. I can arrange my own time, so after meal times is 
11 148 
Mind and Body 
when I get my reading done. Sometimes, when I am tired, 
I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to yield to 
this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have 
observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to 
be a natural thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep 
after a meal, nature makes clear to me that I have made a 
mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never eat at night, and 
always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always hungry 
when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it 
is not to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so 
regular that I could set my watch by my stomach. 
Another common habit which is harmful is eating be- 
tween meals. I have known people who are accustomed to 
nibble at food nearly all the time. Shelley records that he 
tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be a convenient 
way to get digestion done-but he found that it did not work. 
The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do 
a job of digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices 
for another job. It will accustom itself to a certain regime, 
and will work accordingly, but if, when it has half digested 
a load of food, you pile more food in on top, you make as 
much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if you 
required your cook to prepare another meal before she has 
cleaned up after the last one. Three times a day is enough 
for any adult to eat. Children require to eat oftener, be- 
cause their bodies are more active, and they not merely have 
to keep up weight, but to add to it. The simplest way to 
arrange matters with children is to give them three good 
meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a 
couple of pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and 
again between lunch and supper. I have never seen a child 
who would not be satisfied with this, when once the habit 
was established. 
I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. 
I consider that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously 
called, is ninety-nine per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if 
foods are appetizingly prepared, and look good and smell 
good and taste good, they will cause the gastric juices to flow 
abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has demonstrated 
by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know 
without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my 
gastric juices flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I The Book of the Body 
149 
come home from five sets of tennis, and have a cold shower 
and a rub-down, my gastric juices will flow for a piece of 
cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as well as for 
anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless 
to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, 
but I have other things to do with my time and money than 
to pamper my appetites and encourage food whims. 
If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know 
what grandmothers tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but 
I have tried the experiment, and satisfied myself that there 
is absolutely no difference in nourishing qualities between hot 
food and cold food. If you chew your food sufficiently, it will 
all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree food when it gets 
to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach wants it. 
Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are chilled, 
and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will 
be one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, 
you may even add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you 
are suffering from heat, it is sensible to cool your body by 
a cold drink. But you should use as much judgment with 
yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not permit 
to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is 
going into his stall to stand still. 
I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens 
a large subject. There are drugs which affect the body in 
two different ways: some excite the nerves, and through the 
nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more intense activity; 
others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and dulling 
the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is 
called stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a 
matter of fact the stimulants are really narcotics, because they 
operate by dulling the nerves whose function it is to prevent 
the over-accumulation of fatigue poisons; in other words, 
they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing that they 
are tired, and so they go on working. 
It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in 
which that is necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, 
I had been traveling all day, and was caught in a rain storm, 
and exhausted and chilled to the bone; I had to make camp 
without a fire, so when I got the tent up I wrapped myself 
in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of whiskey. 
That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life, 150 
Mind and Body 
and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In 
the same way there were two or three occasions when I was 
on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and could not sleep, 
and let the doctor give me a sleeping powder. But in each 
case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous habit, and 
I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make 
use of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emer- 
gency, and never but a few times in a lifetime. What you 
should do is to change your habits so that you will not need 
to over-strain. 
All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they 
leave the body no better, and with a craving for a repetition 
of the relief. When you are tired, it is because your muscles 
and nerves are storing up fatigue poisons more rapidly than 
your blood-stream can get rid of them. You need to know 
about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's 
protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you 
are as unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut 
off the head of the messenger who brought bad tidings. If, 
when you have a headache, you go into a drug store and let 
the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy drinks, what 
you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your blood- 
stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so 
as to keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching 
blood vessels and nerves. You may try that trick with your 
heart a number of times, but sooner or later you will try it 
once too often-your heart will stop a little bit quicker than 
you meant it to! 
Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their 
poisoning some particular portion of the body, and tempo- 
rarily paralyzing it. And bear this in mind, they are none 
the less poisonous because they are "natural" products. You 
can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which comes out 
of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead 
with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the con- 
tents of the venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning your- 
self none the less certainly if you use alcohol, which is made 
from the juices of beautiful fruits, and has had hosts of 
famous poets writing songs about it; or you can poison 
yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown 
bean which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and 
delicious to the taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee The Book of the Body 
151 
for a hundred years, and have your picture published in the 
newspapers as a proof that these habits conduce to health; 
but nothing will be said about the large number of people 
who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long, and about 
how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these 
habits. 
I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged 
to a generation which had grown up in war time. For this 
reason many of the men both drank and smoked to excess, 
and in my boyhood I lived among them and watched them, 
and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I conceived 
a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets 
could not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the 
hospitals. I had seen one man after another, beautiful and 
kindly and gracious men, dragged down into a pit of tor- 
ment and shame. 
Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set 
for the feet of the human race. It is responsible for more 
degradation and misery than any other evil in the world; 
and I say this, knowing well that my Socialist friends will 
cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I doubt 
if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, 
if it had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been 
systematically poisoned, and all their savings taken from 
them by the gin-mill, they would never have submitted to 
the capitalist system, they would have built the co-operative 
commonwealth at the time they were building the first fac- 
tories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about 
"personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a 
question of making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, 
the first thing the leaders did was to drag out the contents 
of the wine-cellars of the palaces, and smash them in the 
gutters. 
Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects 
than alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punish- 
ment will be less severe. But if you make habitual use of 
them, you will pay the penalty which all drugs exact from 
the system. Your brain and your nerve centers will be less 
sensitive, less capable of working except under the influence 
of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will 
wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the 
"morning cup of coffee," and know how they suffer when 152 
Mind and Body 
they do not get it. Likewise, I have watched the tea drinkers. 
It is comical to live in England, and see all the able-bodied 
men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in the after- 
noon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. 
If you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the 
ceremony is set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess 
will be uncomfortable, unable to talk about anything but the 
strange, incredible notion that one can live without tea. I 
discovered after a while the solution of this problem; I 
would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you please, 
and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I 
would sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be per- 
fectly content: I was conforming to the outward appearance 
of normality, which is what the British conventions require. 
I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know 
what its effect on me would be. But some fifteen years ago 
I drank a glass of very weak iced tea at eight o'clock in the 
evening, and did not get to sleep until four or five the next 
morning. So I know that there is really a drug in tea. I 
know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I 
might learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being 
made immediately and suddenly ill; but why should I wish 
to do this? Life is so interesting to me that I do not need 
to stimulate my brain centers in order to appreciate the thrill 
of it. And when I am tired, I can rest myself by listening 
to music, or by reading a worth-while novel-things which I 
have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine. 
I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meet- 
ing consisted in good part of his "kidding" me, because I 
was lacking in the congenial vices of the cafe. He told me 
how much I had missed, because I had never been drunk; 
one ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor 
Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and 
nothing could seem more ungracious than to point out that 
I am still alive, and finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this 
book we are trying to find out how to live, and if there are 
habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent physique, and 
bring a great genius to death at the age of forty-surely the 
rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. 
I mention Jack London in this connection, because he has 
said the last word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John 
Barleycorn," and especially read between the lines of it, The Book of the Body 
153 
and you will not need my argument to persuade you to be 
glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written into 
the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not 
merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement. 
I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of 
importance to you; that you have a job to do which you know 
to be worth while, and to which you desire to apply your 
powers. You agree with me that the workers of the world 
are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to find their 
freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. 
You may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is 
done to the system by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. 
Well, let us assume that in moderate quantities they do no 
harm at all: even so, I have the right to ask you to show 
that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a mistake for 
the workers to spend their savings upon them. 
Consider, for example, the amount of money which the 
wage slaves of the world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they 
could be persuaded for two or three years to spend this 
amount upon good reading matter-do you not think there 
would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you 
cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the 
activities of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man 
has to have a cigarette in order to stimulate his thoughts, or 
to smoke a pipe to rest himself after his work is done! I 
offer myself as evidence in such a controversy; I have writ- 
ten as many books as any man in the radical movement, and 
the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half 
of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and 
somebody told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught 
me, and I threw away the cigarette, and ran and hid in an 
alley, and have not yet got over my scare. 
In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, 
is an article entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a 
Strenuous Mental Occupation." Experiments were conducted 
among telegraph operators, and the result showed that "the 
heavy smokers of the group show a higher output rate at 
the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but their 
rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their 
production for the whole day is definitely less than that of 
the light smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability 
than the light smokers to respond to increasing pressure of 154 
Mind and Body 
work in the late hours of the day by handling their full share 
of the work presented." 
One point upon which every medical authority agrees is- 
that the use of nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature 
organism. Half-grown youths who smoke cigarettes will 
never be full-sized men; they will never have normal lungs 
or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities agree about 
the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave 
what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, 
and to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained 
when I discovered that some of my feminist friends understood 
by woman's emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's 
vices. I would say to these ardent young female radicals, who 
cultivate the art of dangling a cigarette from their lower lip, 
and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in Greenwich Village 
cafes, that they will never be able to bear sound children; 
but I know that this would not interest them-they don't 
want to bear any children at all. So I say that they will 
never be able to think straight thoughts, and will be nervous 
invalids when they are thirty. 
We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, 
and we put several millions of our young men into armies, 
and if there were any of them who did not already know 
how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under official sanc- 
tion. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up 
to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class 
C" rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading 
my books, I say: We want to make the world over, to make 
it a place of freedom and kindness, instead of the hell of 
greed and hate that it is today. For that purpose we need 
a new moral code, and we can never win our victory without 
it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unven- 
tilated halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to 
men wrangle all through the day and a great part of the 
night; I have watched the fatal dissensions in the movement, 
the quarrelings of the right wingers and the left wingers and 
all stages and degrees in between, and I have wondered- 
not jestingly, but in pitying earnest-how much of all those 
personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin 
in carbon dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting 
such ideas to the older men, whose habits are fixed; but a 
new generation is coming on, with a new vision of the enor- The Book of the Body 
155 
mous task before it; and is it too much to expect of these 
young men and women, that they shall realize in advance 
the grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the 
machine of their body so as to get out of it the maximum 
amount of service? Is it too much to hope for, that some 
day we shall have a race of young fighters for truth and 
justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and con- 
secrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from 
wage slavery and war? CHAPTER XXIII 
MORE ABOUT HEALTH 
(Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing, 
bathing and sleep.) 
In discussing the question of health, we have given the 
greater part of the space to the subject of diet, for the rea- 
son that experience has convinced us that diet is two-thirds 
of health, and that nearly always in disease you find errors 
of diet playing a part. There are, however, other important 
factors of health, now to be discussed. 
Everything of which the body makes use is taken in 
the form of food and drink, with the exception of one sub- 
stance, the oxygen we get out of the air. Every time we draw 
a breath we take in a certain amount of oxygen, and every 
time we expel a breath, we drive out a certain amount of a 
gas called carbon dioxide, which is what the body makes of 
the fuel it burns. The body can get along for several days 
without water, and for two or three months without food, but 
it can only get along for two or three minutes without oxygen. 
It should be obvious that when the body expels carbon dioxide, 
with a slight mixture of other more poisonous gases, and sucks 
back what it expects will be a fresh supply of oxygen, it 
wants to get oxygen, and not the same gases it has just ex- 
pelled, nor gases which have been expelled from the lungs 
of other people. 
In the days when primitive man lived outdoors, he did 
not have to think about this problem. When he breathed 
poison from his lungs, the moving air of nature blew it away, 
and the infinite vegetation of nature took the carbon dioxide 
and turned it back into oxygen. And even when man built 
himself shelters, he was not cunning enough to make them 
air-tight; he had to leave a big hole for the smoke to get 
out, and smaller holes through which to get light. But now 
our wonderful civilization has solved these problems; we 
make our walls of air-tight plaster, and we have invented a 
substance which will admit light without admitting air. So 
we have the "white plague" of tuberculosis, and so we have 
156 The Book of the Body 
157 
innumerable minor plagues of coughs and colds and sore 
throats. 
In the summer time the solution of the problem is easy. 
Have as many doors and windows in your home as possible, 
and keep them open, and have nothing in your home to make 
dust or to retain dust. But then comes stormy and cold 
weather, and you have to close your doors and windows, and 
keep your home at a higher temperature than the air outside. 
How shall you do this, and at the same time get a continual 
supply of fresh air? 
I will take the various methods of heating one by one. 
The problem in each case is simple and can be made clear 
in a sentence or two. 
First, the open fireplace. This is a perfect solution, if 
you have enough fuel, and do not have to worry about the 
waste of heat. An open fireplace draws out all the air in 
the room in a short time, and you do not have to bother 
about opening doors or windows; you may be sure that the 
air is getting in through some cracks, or else the fire would 
not burn. 
Second, a wood or coal or gas stove in the room, provided 
with a proper vent, so that all the gases of combustion are 
drawn up the chimney. This changes the air more slowly 
than an open fireplace, but it does the work fairly well. All 
that you have to be careful about is that your vent is suf- 
ficiently large and is working properly. If your fire does 
not "draw," you will have smoke or coal-gas in the house, 
and this is bad for the lungs; but worse for the lungs is a 
gas that you can neither see nor smell nor taste, the deadly 
carbon monoxide. This gas is produced by incomplete com- 
bustion, and whenever you see yellow flames from gas or 
coal, you are apt to have this poisonous substance. Small 
quantities of it are sufficient to cause violent headaches, and 
repeated doses of it are fatal. Men who work in garages 
which are not properly ventilated run this risk all the time, 
because carbon monoxide is one of the products of imper- 
fect combustion in the gas engine. 
Next, the furnace. A furnace sends fresh warm air into 
your house; the only trouble is that it takes out all the 
moisture, and some authorities say that this is bad for the 
lungs and throat. I do not know whether this is true, but all 
furnaces are supposed to have a water chamber to supply 158 
Mind and Body 
• 
moisture to the air, and you should keep a pan of water on 
every stove or radiator in your house. 
Next, steam heat, which includes hot-water heating. This 
is one of the abominations of our civilization, and one of the 
methods by which our race is committing suicide. There is 
nothing wrong about steam heat in itself; the room is warmed 
in a harmless way; but the trouble is it stays warm only so 
long as the doors and windows are kept shut. You are in 
an air-tight box, and can be warm provided you do not mind 
being suffocated. The moment you open a door or window, 
you have a cold draft on your feet, and if you wish to change 
the air entirely you have to let out all the heat; so, of course, 
you never do change it entirely, but go on breathing the 
same air over and over, and every time you breathe it the 
condition of your body is a little more reduced. 
The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the 
room, but to use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then 
drive this air, already warmed, into the room, at the same time 
providing a vent through which the old air can be pushed out. 
This is the hot air system of heating, and it requires some kind 
of engine or dynamo, and therefore is expensive. It has been 
installed in a few office buildings and theaters. One of the 
most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of 
the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in 
winter, and cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and 
exactly the right quantity is supplied. It is a humorous com- 
mentary upon our civilization that we take perfect care of 
the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay no 
attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and con- 
gressmen, whose one business in life is to use their lungs. 
The stately old building with its white marble domes looks 
impressive in moving pictures and on illustrated postcards, 
but it has no system of ventilation whatever, and is a death- 
trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to spend their 
days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This con- 
trast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and 
the collapse of political democracy. 
We have reserved to the last a method of heating which 
is the worst, and can only be described as a crime against 
health: the use of gas and oil stoves set out in the middle 
of the room, without a vent, and discharging their fumes into 
the room. These stoves are simply instruments of slow death, The Book of the Body 
159 
and their manufacture should be prohibited by law. In the 
meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a 
room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. 
I have heard dealers insist that this or the other kind of 
gas or oil stove was so contrived as to consume all the fumes. 
Do not let anybody fool you with such nonsense. There has 
never been any form of combustion devised which consumes 
all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products 
of combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless 
blue flame" stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regu- 
lated gas stove will burn all the gas, but that simply means 
that it turns the oil and gas into carbon dioxide, the very sub- 
stance which your lungs are working day and night to get 
out of your body. 
Moreover, there is no oil or gas stove which ever burns 
perfectly all the time, either because there is too much gas 
or insufficient air. Oil and gas stoves sometimes give a partly 
yellow flame. You can cause them to give a yellow flame at 
any time by blowing air against them, and that yellow flame 
means imperfect combustion, and a probability of the deadly 
carbon monoxide. These facts are known to every chemist and 
to every student of hygiene, and the fact that civilized people 
continue to burn such oil and gas stoves in their homes and 
offices is simply one more proof that our civilization values 
human welfare and health at nothing whatever in compari- 
son with profits. 
Not merely should you see that you have a continuous 
supply of fresh air in your home, but you should try to keep 
down dust in your home, and especially fine particles of lint. 
Once upon a time our ancestors were unable to make houses 
and floors tight, and so they put rugs on the floors and hung 
tapestries on the walls to keep out the wind. We civilized 
people are able to make both floors and walls absolutely tight, 
and yet we continue to use rugs and curtains, it being the 
first principle of our education that propriety requires us to 
continue to do the things which our ancestors did. I am 
unable to think of a more silly or stupid thing in the world 
than a rug or a curtain, but I have lived in the house with 
them all my life, because, alas, the ladies cannot be happy 
otherwise. They want their homes to be "pretty," and so 
they continue to set dust traps, and to set themselves futile 
jobs of house cleaning and shopping. 160 
Mind and Body 
Not all of us are able to be out of doors as much as we ought 
to be, but all of us spend seven or eight hours out of every 
twenty-four in sleep, and this time at least we ought to spend 
out of doors. I understand that this is futile advice to give 
to the very poor. I was poor myself for many years, and had 
to put all my clothes on at night in order to keep warm, and 
even then I could not always do it. Nevertheless, from the 
time I first realized the importance of ventilation I never slept 
in a room with a closed window. 
I say, sleep outdoors if you possibly can. You do not 
have to be afraid of exposure, for cold will not hurt you if 
you keep your body in proper condition. I have slept out 
in a rubber blanket, with the rain beating on my head and 
face; I have spread a rubber blanket on a hummock in the 
midst of a swamp, and waked up in the morning with my 
hair and face soaked in cold, white fog, but I never caught 
cold from such things; there is no harm whatever in damp- 
ness or in "night air," if you are in proper condition. Of 
course, you may get your ears frostbitten in the middle of 
winter, but you can have a sleeping hood to remove that 
danger. 
The "nature cure" enthusiasts, who lay so much stress 
upon an outdoor life, also insist that the wearing of clothes 
is a harmful civilized custom. They urge us to take "sun 
baths" and to "ventilate the skin." Now, as a matter of fact, 
the skin does not breathe, it merely gives out moisture, and 
it does not give out any less because we have clothing on us, 
provided the clothing is dry and clean, and will absorb moist- 
ure. But bye and bye the clothing becomes loaded with the 
waste substances given out by the skin, and then it will 
absorb no more, and if you do not change your clothing, no 
doubt it may have some effect upon health. 
But the principal evil of civilized clothing is that it binds 
the body and prevents the free play of the muscles, and, 
more important yet, stops the free circulation of the blood. I 
have already discussed hats, which are the principal cause 
of baldness. I will go to the other extremity of the body, and 
mention tight shoes, which, strange as it may seem, cause 
headaches and colds. You will be able to find a few civilized 
men with normal feet, but you will hardly ever find a woman 
whose toes are not crowded together and misshapen. I have 
said that the human body is one organism, and that it is fed The Book of the Body 
161 
and its health maintained by the blood-stream; I say now 
that the circulation of the blood is one thing, and if you block 
it at any one place, you block it everywhere. Of course, not 
all the blood-stream goes down into the feet, but some of 
it does, and if it is clogged in the feet, and the blood vessels 
cramped and crowded, there is a certain amount of poison 
kept in the system, which the system should have got rid of. 
Why do women wear tight shoes? Because the leisure 
class members of their sex have been kept in harems and 
used as the playthings of men. To be fragile and delicate 
was the thing admired by the masters of wealth, and to have 
small hands and feet was a sign that women belonged to this 
parasite class. Therefore at all hazards women's feet must 
be kept small, even at the expense of their health and happi- 
ness ; and so they put themselves up on several inches of 
heels, which cause them to toddle around like marionettes on 
a stage, with all their toes crowded down into a lump. 
Why do men wear tight bands around their scalps, which 
cause their hair to drop out, and tight, stiff columns around 
their necks, which stop the circulation of the blood into their 
heads, and cause them to have headaches instead of ideas? 
The reason is that for ages the rulers of the tribe have wished 
to demonstrate publicly their superiority to the common herd, 
which does the menial tasks. In England all gentlemen 
wear tall black silk band-boxes on their heads, and in America 
they have a choice among several varieties of round tight 
boxes. All men who work in offices wear stiffly starched 
collars and cuffs, as a means of demonstrating their supe- 
riority to the common workers, who have to sweat at their 
necks. I think it is not too much to hope that when class 
exploitation is done away with, we shall also get rid of these 
class symbols, and choose our clothing because it is warm and 
comfortable, and not according to the perverted imbecilities of 
"style." 
The skin gives out perspiration which is greasy; also the 
skin is constantly growing, putting out layers of cells which 
dry up and are worn off. We need to bathe with soap to 
remove the grease, and we need to rub with a towel to brush 
away the dead cells of the skin, so that the pores may be 
kept open. No one is taking care of his body who does not 
wash and rub it once every twenty-four hours, and once or 
twice a week with warm water and soap. It is often stated 162 
INIind and Body 
that hot baths are weakening, but I have never found it so; 
however, I think it is a bad practice to pamper the body, 
which should be accustomed to the shock of cold water. The 
rule as to bathing, both as to temperature and time, is simple. 
If, after the bath and rub-down, your body has reacted and 
you feel vigorous and fresh, that bath has done you good. 
If, on the other hand, you feel chilled and depressed, then 
you have been too long in the water, or its temperature was 
too low. Every person has to find his own rules in such 
matters. The only general rule is that as one grows older 
the body reacts less quickly. 
All day, as we work and think, we store up more poisons 
in our cells than the body can get rid of, and the time comes 
when the cells are so loaded with poisons that we have to 
stop for a while, and let our blood-stream clean house. The 
quantity of sleep one needs is a problem like that of cold 
water; each person has to find his own rule. In general, one 
needs less and less sleep as one grows older. Infants sleep 
the greater part of the time; growing children should sleep 
ten or eleven hours, adults seven or eight, and old people, 
unless they have let themselves get fat, generally do not want 
to sleep more than six, and part of this in short naps. When 
you sleep, your bodily energies relax, and you make less heat, 
therefore you need extra clothing; but this clothing should 
never cover the mouth and nose, nor should it be so heavy 
as to make breathing a burden. If you are in good condition, 
it will do you no harm to be chilly when you sleep, except 
that you do not sleep so soundly. Sleeping too much is just 
as harmful as sleeping too little. Nature will tell you that. 
The important thing, as in all other problems of health, is to 
have something interesting to think about, some exciting work 
to do in the world, and then you will sleep as little as you 
have too. CHAPTER XXIV 
WORK AND PLAY 
(Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and 
the overworked.) 
In discussing the important question of exercise, there is 
one fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civili- 
zation divides men sharply into two classes, those who do 
not get enough exercise, and those who get too much. 
Obviously it would be folly to make the same recommenda- 
tions to the two classes. 
I begin with those who get too much exercise. They 
include a great number, probably the majority of those who 
do the manual work of the world. They include the farmers 
and the farm-hands, who work from dawn to sunset, and 
sometimes by lantern light. They include also the farmers' 
wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells: 
"Man's work ends from sun to sun, 
But woman's work is never done." 
I am aware that men have worked that way for count- 
less ages, and yet the race is still surviving; but I am aware 
also that men wither up with rheumatism, and contract chronic 
diseases of the kidneys and the blood vessels, consequent upon 
the creation of greater quantities of fatigue poisons than the 
body can regularly eliminate. 
I have very little interest in the past, and none whatever 
in finding fault with it. My purpose is to criticize the present 
for the benefit of the future, and therefore I say that modern 
machinery and the whole development of modern large-scale 
production make it absolutely unnecessary that women should 
slave all their waking hours in kitchens, or that men should 
slave all day. I say it is monstrous folly that men should 
work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and 
eleven hours in factories and mines. Organized labor has 
adopted the slogan, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for 
sleep, eight hours for play"; but my slogan is "Four hours 
for work, four hours for study, eight hours for sleep, and eight 
hours for play." 
163 164 
Mind and Body 
I know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any think- 
ing man, that modern civilization can produce, not merely all 
the necessities, but all the comforts of life for every man, 
woman and child in the community, by the expenditure of 
four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and 
women. So to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, 
the fields and the kitchens, I say that too much exercise is 
what is the matter with you, and what you need is to get off in a 
quiet nook in the woods and read a good novel, not merely for a 
few hours, but for a few months, until you get over the 
effects of capitalist civilization. I know that not many of 
you can get away as yet, but I urge you to insist upon getting 
away, to fight for the chance to get away; and I will here 
suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you 
do get away. I choose the easy ones, which the dullest and 
most tired of you will love; I say, make up your mind to 
read these thirty-two books before you die, and do not let 
the world cheat you out of your chance! 
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's 
Court. Charles D. Stewart: The Fugitive Blacksmith. W- 
Clark Russell: The Wreck of the Grosvenor. R. L. Steven- 
son: Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Jack London: The Sea 
Wolf, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden. Joseph Conrad: 
Youth. H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds, When the 
Sleeper Wakes, The Sea Lady, The Adventures of Mr. Polly, 
The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Upton 
Sinclair: The Jungle, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100 Per 
Cent. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie. George Moore: 
Esther Waters. Frank Norris: The Octopus. Brand Whit- 
lock : The Turn of the Balance. De Foe: Robinson Crusoe. 
Fielding: Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild the Great. Thackeray: 
The Adventures of Barry Lyndon. Marmaduke Pickthall: 
The Adventures of Hadji Baba. Blasco Ibanez: The Fruit 
of the Vine. Frank Harris: Montes the Matador. Frederik 
van Eeden: The Quest. Tolstoi: Resurrection. 
And now for the people who do not get enough exercise. 
In the armies of King Cyrus it was the law that every man 
was required to sweat once every twenty-four hours, and that 
is still the law for every business man and office-worker and 
writer of books. There is no substitute for it, and there is 
no health without it. I have heard Dr. Kellogg say that the 
modern woman sends out her health with her washing, and The Book of the Body 
165 
I have heard the leisure class ladies at the Sanitarium dis- 
cuss this cryptic utterance and wonder what he meant by it. 
I know that there is use telling leisure class ladies what ex- 
ercise at the wash-tub would do for their abdomens and backs. 
I will only tell them that unless they can find some kind of 
vigorous activity which keeps them in a free perspiration for 
an hour or two each day, they will never be really -well, and 
will never bear children without agony and abortion. 
For myself, I have found that the minimum is three or 
lour times a week. Unless I get that much hard exercise I 
am soon in trouble. So my advice to the business man is to 
take off his coat and collar and turn out and help his truck- 
man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a part- 
time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. To the man 
who has cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent 
student and brain-worker, I say that they should find, not 
merely exercise, but play. The distinction between the two 
things is important. There can be play that is not exercise, 
'for example cards and chess; and, of course, there can be 
exercise that is not play. What you must have is something 
that is both play and exercise; something that not merely 
causes your heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, 
and your sweat glands to throw out poisons from your body, 
but something that fully occupies your mind and gives your 
higher brain centers a chance to relax. 
Our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility 
of play and the spirit of play. We civilized people no longer 
know what play is, and regard the desire to play as something 
abnormal-a form of vice. We allow children to play after 
school hours, and on Saturdays; but for grown-up, serious- 
minded men and women to want to play would be almost as 
disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. What could 
be more pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men 
crowding into our baseball parks and amusement fields to 
watch other men play for them! Imagine, if you can, a 
crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or theater to watch 
other people eat for them! Imagine yourself a man from 
Mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, 
and finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, 
under penalty of disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise 
their muscles, to pull on rubber straps and lift weights and 
wave dumb-bells and Indian clubs in the air-methods of ex- 166 
Mind and Body 
pending their muscular energy which are respectable because 
they accomplish nothing! 
When I was a boy, I was fond of all kinds of games. I 
was a good tennis player, and in the country an incessant 
hunter and fisherman. When on the city streets we boys could 
not find any other game to play, we would get up on the roofs 
of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls at the 
"Dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the 
fine game of being chased by the "Dagoes," with the chance, 
real or imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. But then, 
as I grew older, and became aware of the pain and misery 
of the world, I lost my interest in games, and for ten years 
or so I never played; I did nothing but study and write. So 
my health gave way, and I had the problem of restoring it, 
and I spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem, 
before I thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there 
can be no such thing as sound and permanent health without 
a certain amount of play. 
I don't think there is any kind of hard physical work I 
failed to try, in the course of my experiments. I rode horse- 
back, and took long walks, and climbed mountains, and swam, 
and dug gardens, and chopped down whole groves of trees 
and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. I have 
done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, sev- 
eral hours every day, and it has done my health no good to 
speak of; I have been ready for a breakdown at the end of 
it. The reason is that all the time I was doing these things 
with my body, I was going right on working my brain. While 
I was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on horse- 
back, I was absorbed in the next chapter of the book I was 
writing, so that I literally did not know where I was. I would 
make up my mind that I would not think about my work, 
and would make desperate efforts not to do so; but it was 
like walking along the edge of a slippery ditch-sooner or later 
I was bound to fall in, and go floundering along, unable to 
get out again! 
And the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. I have 
experimented with a dozen different systems of exercises, and 
with all kinds of water treatments; I have used dumb-bells 
and Indian clubs and Swedish gymnastics, MacFadden's ex- 
ercises in bed, and the Yogi breathing exercises, and more 
kinds of queer things than I can remember now; but for me The Book of the Body 
167 
there is only one solution of the problem, which is to have 
an antagonist. It may be a deer I am trying to shoot, or 
some trout I am trying to lure out of their holes; it may be 
some boys I am trying to beat at football or hockey, or it may 
be the game I know best and find most convenient, which is 
tennis. If it is tennis, then it has to be 'someone who can 
make me work as hard as I know how; for if it is someone 
I can beat easily, why, before I have been playing ten min- 
utes, I am busily working out the next chapter of a book, 
or answering letters I have just got in the mail. 
Recently I came upon a book, "The Psychology of Relax- 
ation," by Dr. Patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. 
Civilized man is working his higher brain centers more than 
his body can stand; his brain is running away with him, ab- 
sorbing a constantly increasing share of his energies. True 
relaxation is only possible where the higher brain centers are 
lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into activity. 
One of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why 
through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. 
There is a method which is harmless, and does not break 
down the system, and that is play. When we become really 
interested in play, we are as children, or as primitive man; 
we do all the things that our race used to do many ages ago; 
we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our 
enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of 
them. If our play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a 
game or bodily contest, then we are exerting and developing 
all those portions of us which civilization tends to atrophy 
and deaden. 
There are people who will dispute with you about Social- 
ism, and ask, how we are going to provide incentives if we 
do away with wage slavery. When you tell them that activity 
is natural to human beings, and that if there were no work, 
men and women would have to make some, they shake their 
heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human 
nature." But consider games and sports: men do not have 
to work their bodies, yet they go out and deliberately hunt 
for trouble I They invent themselves subtle and complicated 
games, and are not content until they find people who can 
beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the 
limit of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspira- 
tion and thoroughly exhausted! I may be too optimistic about 168 
Mind and Body 
"human nature," but I believe that this is the attitude every 
normal human being takes toward the powers, both mental 
and physical, which he possesses; he wants to use them, and 
for all they are worth. If you don't believe it, just take any 
group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn them 
loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and 
fall to work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! 
There are some races of the earth which do not yet know 
baseball, but the Filipinos and the Japanese have learned it, 
and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the supercilious "Tom- 
mies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you think 
it is only physical competition that young human animals en- 
joy, try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or 
conducting a debate, or building a house-anything whatever 
that involves healthy competition, and is related to the big 
things of life, but without being for the profit of some ex- 
ploiter ! Get clear the plain and simple distinction between 
work and play: play is what you want to do, while work is 
what the profit system makes you do! CHAPTER XXV 
THE FASTING CURE 
(Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make 
use of it.) 
We have next to consider the various human ailments, 
what causes them, and how they can be remedied. As it 
happens, I know of a cure that comes pretty near being 
that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it is so far 
ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover 
three-fourths of the subject. 
When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man 
by the name of Dr. Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He 
was on public exhibition at the time, and was supposed to be 
watched day and night; the newspapers gave a great deal 
of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze at 
him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about 
the matter. People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. 
The man must be getting something to eat on the sly; he 
must have some nourishment in the water he drank; no human 
being could fast more than five or six days without starving 
to death. 
In the year 1910 I published in the United States and 
England a magazine article telling how on several occasions 
I had fasted ten or twelve days, and what I had accomplished 
by it. I found that I had the same difficulty to confront' as 
old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters from people who 
called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper editorials 
to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch 
about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying 
a three-day fast, and the Times commented editorially to the 
effect that these young ladies were "the victims of a shallow 
and unscrupulous sensationalist." 
The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food 
in a few days is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently 
a group of eleven Irishmen in jail set to work to starve them- 
selves to death, as a protest against British rule in their 
country. Day after day the newspapers reported the news 
169 170 
Mind and Body 
from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began 
to state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had 
been sent for, that their relatives were gathered on the prison 
steps. Day after day such reports continued, through the 
thirties, and the forties, and the fifties, and the sixties, and 
the seventies. One man died on the eighty-eighth day, and 
MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other nine gave 
up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I 
watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on 
this incident, yet I did not see a single remark on the med- 
ical aspects of it; I could not discover that scientific men had 
learned anything whatever about the ability of the body to 
go without food for long periods. 
Get this clear at the outset: Nobody ever "starved to 
death" in less than two months, and it is possible for a fat 
person to go without food for as long as three or four months. 
People who "starve to death" in shorter times do not die of 
starvation, but of fright. The first time I fasted happened 
to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was walking 
about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food 
for three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue 
ships had reached Messina, and found the population raven- 
ous, in the agonies of starvation, some of the people having 
been without food for seventy-two hours! (It sounds so 
much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.) 
The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physio- 
logical process; that is to say, it is something which nature 
understands and carries through in her own serene and efficient 
way. When you take a fast, you are not carrying out a freak 
notion of your own, or of mine; you are discovering a lost 
instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not to take food 
when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern 
medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate 
"trays" to invalids. I remember a story about a man who 
made himself a reputation and a fortune by curing the pet 
dogs of the rich. These beautiful little creatures, which sleep 
between silken covers, and have several servants to wrait upon 
them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and 
elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as 
their mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, 
who conducted his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each 
one of the compartments of the brick kiln he would shut up The Book of the Body 
171 
a dog with a supply of fresh water, a crust of stale bread, 
a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old shoe; and after 
a few days he would go back and find that the dog had eaten 
the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner 
that the dog was on the high road to recovery. He would 
go back a few days later and find that the dog had eaten 
the piece of bacon rind, and then he would write that the 
dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the dog 
had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write 
that the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come 
and take it away. 
Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pre- 
tend to know positively. I can only make guesses, and wait 
for science to investigate. I believe that the main source of 
the diseases of civilized man is improper nutrition, and the 
clogging of the system with food poisons in various stages. 
And when you fast you do two things: first, you stop entirely 
the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second, you allow 
the whole of the body's digestive and assimilative tract to 
rest-to go to sleep, as it were-so that all the body's energy 
may go to other organs. The body carries with it at all 
times a surplus store of nutriment, which can be taken up 
and used by the blood stream, apparently with much less 
trouble than is required to convert fresh food to the body's 
uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues 
more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you 
may lose anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight 
per day, and this will be taken, first from your store of fat, and 
then from your muscular tissues. Every part of your muscular 
tissue will be taken, before anything is taken from your vital 
organs, your nerves or your blood-stream. So long as there is 
a particle of muscular material left, so long as you can make 
even the slightest movement of one finger, you are still fasting, 
and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone that you 
begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of Mac- 
Swiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record 
where fasters have died of starvation. 
What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and 
can be told by many symptoms. It begins a thorough house- 
cleaning, throwing out poisonous material by every channel. 
The perspiration and the breath become offensive, the tongue 
becomes heavily coated, so that you can scrape the material 172 
Mind and Body 
off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain this by 
saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is 
following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because 
you can live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself 
that none of these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the 
body is taking advantage of the opportunity to get rid of waste 
products; and this will go on for ten days, for twenty days, 
in some cases for as long as forty or fifty days; and then 
suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the "cannibal 
diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue 
clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appetite suddenly 
awakens. 
During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in 
food. You almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; 
you can look at food without any more desire for it than you 
have to swallow marbles and carpet tacks. But then suddenly 
appetite returns, as I have explained, and you find that you 
can think of nothing but food. This is what students of the 
subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do not want 
to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure 
every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the 
letters which have come to me from people who tried the fast 
at my suggestion, there are cases of every kind of common 
disease. In my book, "The Fasting Cure," I give the results 
in cases reported to me after the publication of my first mag- 
azine article. I quote two paragraphs: 
"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average 
number of days was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 
51 of ten days or over, and six of 30 days or over. Out of 
the 119 person who wrote to me, 100 reported benefit, and 
17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong breaking 
of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where 
the cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned 
that the recurrence of the trouble was caused by wrong eat- 
ing, and about half of the rest made this quite evident by 
what they said. Also it is to be noted that in the cases of 
the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only three 
or four days. 
"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited-45 
of the cases having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion 
(usually associated with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; 
colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4; constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3; The Book of the Body 
173 
headaches, 5; anaemia, 3; scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; 
syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5; general debility, 5; chills and 
fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; 
locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2; excess of uric 
acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels, 1; 
/eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of 
heart, 1; insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1." 
There are many diseases with many causes, and some 
yield more quickly than others to the fast. In the first group 
I put the diseases of the digestive and alimentary tract. 
Stomach and bowel troubles, and the nervous disorders oc- 
casioned by these, stop almost immediately when you fast. 
Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are gen- 
erally a second stage of digestive troubles. Everything im- 
mediately due to impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and 
ulcers, inflammation, badly healing wounds, etc., respond to 
a few days of fasting as to the magic touch of the old-time 
legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ infec- 
tions, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have 
a double method of attack. I would not like to say that 
fasting could cure such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the 
germs of which our systems are not accustomed, and against 
which they may well be helpless. On the other hand, in 
the case of commorf infections, such as colds and sore throats, 
the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued 
a great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed 
to say that I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for 
everything else that I know about health. 
The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is 
to read the literature on the subject and make up your mind 
that the experiment will do you no injury. You should also 
try to get your relatives to make up their minds, because 
you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot withstand 
the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a 
panic and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is 
quite possible for people to die of panic, but I do not be- 
lieve that anybody ever died of a fast. I have known of 
two or three cases of people dying while they were fasting, 
but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their death; 
they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that 
among the people who try the fast, a great many are in a 
desperate condition; some have been given up by the doctors, 174 
Mind and Body 
and if now and then one of these should die, we may surely 
say that they died in spite of the fast, and not because of it. 
There is no physician who can save every patient, and it 
would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters 
from people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" 
diseases as Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty 
degeneration of the heart, and were literally snatched out of 
the jaws of death by beginning a fast. I would not like to 
guess just what percentage of dying people in our hospitals 
might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food from 
them, but I await with interest the time when medical science 
will have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and 
report the results. 
Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a 
chiropractor went on hunger strike, as a protest against im- 
prisonment, and he fasted 41 days, Then he broke his fast, 
the reason being given that his pulse was down to 54, and he 
was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal pulse 
is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a 
ten-day fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not 
dead yet, and if I wait to die from the symptoms of a fast, 
I expect to live a long time indeed! 
The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around 
and hardly cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed 
to the lawn, I was tired in the legs. But since then I have 
grown used to fasting. I have fasted for a week probably 
twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have gone 
about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course 
I would not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but 
it is a fact that on the seventh day of a fast in New York, 
I climbed the five or six flights of stairs to the top of the 
Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill effects from doing 
this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire myself. 
The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do 
on the fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down 
and rest, and read a book, and take as much exercise as 
you find you enjoy. Keep your mind quiet and free from 
worries, and lock out of the house everybody who tells you 
that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few 
minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine 
to start it, and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore 
your strength." Give yourself up to the care of your wise The Book of the Body 
175 
old mother nature, who will attend to your heart just as 
securely and serenely as she attended to it in the days before 
you were born. 
By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I 
know some nature cure teachers who practice what they call 
a "fruit fast." All I know is that if I eat nothing but fruit, 
I soon have my stomach boiling with fermentation, and also 
I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a complete fast, I 
promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the 
water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house- 
cleaning; it is -well to drink a glass of water every half hour 
at least. Do not try to go without water, and then write me 
that the fasting cure is a failure. Also please do not write 
and ask me if it will be fasting if you take just a little crackers 
and milk, or some soup, or something else that you think 
doesn't count! 
I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system 
at the beginning of a fast, because the bowels are apt to 
become sluggish at once, and the quicker you get the sys- 
tem cleansed, the better. It does no good to take laxatives 
if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are going 
to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full 
warm enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings 
any results. There are some people whose bowels are so 
frightfully clogged that I have known the enema to bring 
results even in the second and third weeks. On the other 
hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small 
enema every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; 
and needless to say, you should get all the fresh air you can, 
and should sleep as much as you can. You may have dif- 
ficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to make you nervous 
and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast be- 
cause they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little 
trick, to put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on 
the abdomen, to draw the blood away from the head. So they 
would quickly fall asleep, and they got great benefit from 
their fasts. 
You should supply yourself with good music if you can, 
and with plenty of good reading matter. You will be amazed 
to find how active your mind becomes; perhaps you had 
never known before what a mind you had. Your blood has 
always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't 176 
Mind and Body 
know you could think. My three act play, "The Nature 
Woman," was conceived and written in two days and a half 
on a fast; but I do not recommend this kind of thing-on 
the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because if you work 
your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your 
fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems 
until you have got your health back, and seek only to divert 
your mind while fasting. CHAPTER XXVI 
BREAKING THE FAST 
(Discusses various methods of building up the body after a 
fast, especially the milk diet.) 
There remains the question of how to break the fast, 
and this is the most important part of the problem. You 
may undo all the good of your fast by breaking it wrong, and 
you are a thousand times as apt to kill yourself then, as while 
you are fasting. When your hunger comes back, it comes 
back with a rush, and some people have not the will power 
to control it. 
I do not advocate a complete fast in any case except of 
serious chronic disease, and then only under the advice of 
someone with experience; but I advocate a short fast of a 
week or ten days for almost every common ailment, and I 
know that such a fast will help, even where it may not com- 
pletely cure. You may go on fasting so long as you are 
quiet and happy; but when you find you are becoming too 
weak for comfort, or for the peace of mind of your family 
physician and your friends, you may break your fast, and 
show them that it is possible to restore your strength and 
body weight, and then they won't bother so much when you 
try it again! Take nothing but liquid foods in the break- 
ing of a fast; I recommend the juices of fruits and toma- 
toes, also meat broths. If you have fasted a week or two, 
take a quarter of a glass; if you have fasted a month, take 
a tablespoonful, and wait and see what the results are. Re- 
member that your whole alimentary tract is out of action, 
and give it a chance to start up slowly. Take small quan- 
tities of liquid food every two hours for the first day. Then 
you can begin taking larger quantities, and on the next day 
you can try some milk, or a soft poached egg, or the pulp 
of cooked apples or prunes. Do not take any solid food 
until you are quite sure you can digest it, and then take only 
a very little. Do not take any starchy food until the third 
day. 
I have known people to break these rules. I knew a 
177 178 
Mind and Body 
man who broke his fast on hamburg steak, and had to be 
helped out with a stomach pump. Once I broke a week's 
fast with a plate of rich soup, because I was at a friend's 
house and there was nothing else, and I yielded to the claims 
of hospitality, and made myself ill and had to fast for sev- 
eral days longer. 
The easiest way to break a fast is upon a milk diet. I 
have seen hundreds of people take this diet, and very few 
who did not get benefit. The first time I fasted, which was 
twelve days, I lost 17 pounds, and I took the milk diet for 
24 days thereafter, and gained 32 pounds. I took it at Mac- 
Fadden's Sanitarium, where I had every attention. Since 
then, I have many times tried to take a milk diet by myself, 
but have never been able to get it to agree with me. I do 
not know how to explain this fact; I state it, to show how 
hard it is to lay down general rules. On the milk diet you 
take into your system two or three times as much food as 
you can assimilate, and this is a violation of all my diet 
rules; but it appears that the bacteria which thrive in milk 
produce lactic acid, which is not harmful to the system, 
and if you do not take other foods you may safely keep the 
system flooded with milk. 
After a fast you should begin with small quantities of 
milk, and by the third day you may be taking a full glass of 
warm, milk every half hour or every twenty minutes, until 
you have taken seven or eight quarts per day. It is better 
to take it warm, but sometimes people take it just as well 
without warming. Dr. Porter, who has a book on the milk 
diet, insists upon complete rest, and makes his patients stay 
in bed. MacFadden, on the other hand, recommends gym- 
nastics in the morning before the milk, and during the after- 
noon he recommends a rest from the milk for a couple of 
hours, followed by abdominal exercises to keep the bowels 
open. This is very important during a fast, because you 
are taking great quantities of material into your system and 
it must not be permitted to clog. Therefore take an enema 
daily, if necessary to a free movement. Also take a warm 
bath daily. Take the juice of oranges and lemons if you 
crave them. 
Upon one thing everyone who has had experience with 
the milk diet agrees, and that is the necessity of absolute The Book of the Body 
179 
mental rest. If you become excited, or nervous, or angry 
on a milk diet, you may turn all the contents of your stomach 
into hard curds, and may put yourself into convulsions. The 
wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of physical 
and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of 
breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hun- 
gry; you have all the food you want, and your system is 
bathed in happiness, a sense of peace and well-being which 
is truly marvelous and not to be described. You gain any- 
where from half a pound to two pounds a day, and you feel 
that you have never before in your life known what perfect 
health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you 
discover how nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again 
are you content with that kind of half existence with which 
you managed to worry along before you discovered this 
remedy. 
But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the 
fast as a regular habit of life. The fast is an emergency 
measure, to enable the body to cleanse itself and to cure 
disease. When you have got your body clean and free from 
disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you 
should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so 
that you will not have to fast. If you find that you con- 
tinue to have ailments, then you must be eating wrongly, or 
overworking, or committing some other offense against nature; 
either that, or else you must have some organic trouble-a 
bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you, 
or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and 
infected. I do not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the 
surgeons and the oculists and the dentists. It will not mend 
your bones if you break them, and it will not repair your 
teeth that are already decayed; but it will help to keep your 
teeth from decaying in the future, and it will help you to 
prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it 
more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture 
a couple of years ago, and I fasted for two days before the 
operation, and for three days after it, and I had no particle 
of nausea from the ether, and was able to tend to my mail 
the day after the operation. 
There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend 
the fast, and that is tuberculosis, because I have been told 
of cases in which the patient lost weight and did not recover 
13 180 
Mind and Body 
it. However, in my tabulation of 277 cases, you will note 
four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book is given a letter 
from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the 
misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or 
four day fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. 
The milk diet is pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do 
any harm. If it did not effect a cure, I would try the Salis- 
bury treatment-that is, lean meat ground up and medium 
cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of hot water 
between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there 
is urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in 
tuberculosis; and until these experiments have been made, 
we can only grope. I am quite sure that the "stuffing system," 
ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic mistake. 
In the case of any other disease whatever, even though 
I might take medical or surgical treatment, I would supple- 
ment this by a fast, because there is no kind of treatment 
which does not succeed better with the blood in good con- 
dition. In the case of emergencies, accidents, wounds, etc., 
I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt 
if I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, 
I wrote a letter to the New York Call, saying that his doctors 
had killed him, because they had fed him while he was lying 
in a critical condition in the hospital. To take nutriment 
into the body under such circumstances is the greatest of 
blunders. 
The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only 
they do not need to fast so long. It will help the aged and 
make them feel young. (You need not be afraid to fast, 
no matter how old you are.) It is, of course, an immediate 
cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is also a 
cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites 
are just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what 
you eat that builds up your body, but only what you assim- 
ilate, and if you eat too much, you can make it impossible to 
assimilate anything properly. If you take a fast and break it 
carefully, your body will come to its normal weight, and all 
your functions to their normal activity. 
A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among 
the cures reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. 
This disease, he explained, is caused because a portion of a 
nerve has been entirely destroyed, and it is a disease that is The Book of the Body 
181 
absolutely and positively and forever incurable. I answered 
that I knew this to be the teaching of present day medical 
science, but I invited him to consider for a moment what 
happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not 
take it as a matter of course that the crab must go about 
with one claw for the balance of its life; nature will make 
that crab another claw. Man has lost the power of replac- 
ing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power of replacing 
tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and 
medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall 
anybody say that nature has forever lost the power of re- 
building a bit of nervous tissue? How shall anyone say that 
if the blood-stream is cleansed of poisons, and the energy 
of the whole body restored, one of the results may not be 
the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my 
readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all med- 
ical men among my readers, to make a fair test of the fast- 
ing cure. The results will surprise them, and they will 
quickly be forced to revise their methods of treating illness. XXVII 
DISEASES AND CURES 
(Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what 
is known about their cause and cure.) 
I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a 
"cold." This name implies that the cause of the trouble lies 
in exposure or chill. All the grandmothers of the world 
are agreed about this. They have a phrase-or at least they 
had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death." 
Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with 
wet feet, or sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I 
would hear the formula, "You will catch your death." 
And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," 
who declare vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer 
and a trap for people's thoughts. Cold has nothing to do 
with it, they say, and point to arctic explorers who frequently 
get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold" until they get 
back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts, 
the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air 
moving"; which is supposed to settle the matter. However, 
when you come to think about it, you realize that a cyclone 
is likewise merely "fresh air moving," so you have not decided 
the question by a phrase. 
While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted 
a severe cold-which was a joke on me. The history of 
this cold is as clear in my mind as anything human can be, 
and it will serve for an illustration, showing how much truth 
the grandmothers have on their side, and how much the 
"health cranks" have. 
To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of 
appeals come to me; hundreds of people write me letters, and 
I cannot bear to leave them unanswered. I accepted calls to 
speak, and invitations where I had to eat a lot of stuff of 
which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke up 
with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening 
Sfelt all right. But there came another call, and I consented 
to take a long automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and 
182 The Book of the Body 
183 
when I got back home, after five or six hours, I was thor- 
oughly chilled, and my "cold" came on during the night. 
This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all 
the grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grand- 
mothers know that an automobile ride on a cold, rainy night 
is enough to give any man "his death." But listen, grand- 
mothers! I have lain out watching for deer all night in the 
late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten up 
so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not 
"catch cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle 
twenty miles to the beach in April, with snow on the ground, 
and plunged into the surf and swam, and then ridden home 
again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to run a quarter 
of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier, and 
with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never 
took cold from that, and never got anything but a feeling of 
exhilaration. So it must be that there is some reason why 
exposure causes colds at one time and not at another. 
The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." 
They understand that your blood-stream must be clogged, 
your bodily tone reduced by bad air and lack of exercise, 
and more especially by over-eating, or by an improperly bal- 
anced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and in- 
sist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my 
body had nothing to do with my cold. But I know other- 
wise-I have watched the thing happen so often. In times 
when I was run down, the slightest exposure would cause 
me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got myself a 
sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with 
nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with 
wet feet, or by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, 
when I had been perspiring a little. How to explain this 
I am not sure, but my guess is that you drive the blood 
away from the surface of the body at a time when it is weak- 
ened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army 
of the white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body 
to the germs. 
I know there are nature curists who argue that germs 
have nothing to do with disease; but they have never been 
able to convince me-germs are too real, and too many, and 
too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of meat exposed to 
the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will settle 184 
Mind and Body 
upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat, 
being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose 
and throat are also meat, and just as good food for the 
germs. The only difference is that this meat is alive, there 
is a living blood-stream circulating through it, and several 
score billions of the body's own kind of germs, the blood 
corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly 
nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they 
are able to destroy all the common germs; so it is that you 
do not have diseases, but instead have health. But your health 
always implies a struggle of your organism against other 
organisms, and it is the business of your reason to watch 
your body and give all the help you can in protecting it. 
Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first 
warnings that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule 
these ailments are not serious in themselves, but they are 
signs of a wrong condition, and if you neglect this condi- 
tion, pretty soon you will find that you have to deal with 
something deadly. 
My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, 
eat nothing for twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. 
If you have a severe cold or sore throat, you will be wise to 
lie in bed for a day or two, by an open window. You may 
also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you will find 
them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous 
membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In 
the old sad days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go 
to the doctor, and have my throat and nose pumped full of 
black and green and yellow and purple liquids, which did 
me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay on for 
two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and 
I would be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by 
inches, and not one of the doctors could tell me why. 
The next most common ailment is a headache, and this 
means poisons in your blood-stream. It may be from im- 
proper diet, from alcohol, or drugs, or bad air, or nervous 
excitement. If it is none of these things, then you should 
begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for 
example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths 
and the chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made 
important discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the 
nervous force which directs the blood-stream is carried to The Book of the Body 
185 
the organs of the body by nerves which leave the spinal cord 
through openings between the vertebrae. If any of these 
openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply, 
which means ill-health in that part of the body to which 
the nerve leads. That such trouble can be corrected by 
straightening the bones of the spine, seems perfectly reason- 
able; but like most people with a new idea, the discoverers 
proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have before me 
an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral 
displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety- 
five per cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per 
cent being due to subluxations of other skeletal segments." 
Naturally people who believe this will devote nearly all their 
study to the bones and the nervous system. But surely, there 
are other parts of your body which are necessary besides 
bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts happen 
to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not 
focus properly, and you are continually wearing out the 
optic nerve, thus giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia ? 
What if you have an appendix that has been twisted and 
malformed from birth, and is a center of infection so long 
as it remains in the body? 
Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, 
from which I learned something about one of the commonest 
of human ailments, constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. 
This is a cause of innumerable chronic ailments grouped under 
the head of auto-intoxication, or the poisoning of the body by 
the absorption into the system of the products of fermentation 
and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move freely 
two or three times every day, and the movements should be 
soft. I suffered from constipation for some twenty years, 
and tried, I think, every remedy known both to science and 
to crankdom. In the beginning the doctors gave me drugs 
which by irritating the intestinal walls cause them to pour 
out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating substances 
down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an emergency; 
if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or 
if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned 
out by any and every device. But if you habitually swallow 
mild poisons, which is what all laxatives are, you weaken the 
intestinal tract, and you have to take more and more of these 
poisons, and you get less results. We may set down as posi- 186 
Mind and Body 
tive the statement that drugs are not a remedy for constipation. 
Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say 
the nature curists, and stimulate the intestinal walls to activ- 
ity. I tried that. I listened to the extreme enthusiasts, 
and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and consumed quantities 
of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr. 
Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins 
of oranges, which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure 
you. I would eat things like this until I got myself a case 
of diarrhea-and so was cured of constipation for a time! 
Strange as it may seem to you, there are even people who 
tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many quarts. 
Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole 
series of exercises for developing the muscles of the abdom- 
inal walls and the back, which are greatly neglected by 
civilized man. The fundamental cause of constipation is a 
sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty; but to me 
it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle 
my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing 
applies to hot water treatments, which are effective, but a 
nuisance and a waste of time. I never could keep them up 
except when I was in trouble. 
Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual 
irritating pain in my right side, which I quickly realized must 
lie in the appendix. I tried massage, and hot and cold water 
treatments, and my favorite remedy, a week's fast. The pain 
disappeared, but it returned, so finally I decided, to the dis- 
may of my physical culture friends, to have the appendix 
out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature 
curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of 
the body, which pours an oil or something into the intes- 
tinal tract, and so helps to prevent constipation. Well, evi- 
dently my appendix wasn't doing its job, so I took it to 
a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been twisted 
and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of con- 
tinous infection. From the time I had that operation, I have 
never had to think about the subject of constipation. This 
experience suggests to me how easy it is for people to make 
statements about health which have no relationship to facts. 
I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly 
well realize that if human beings would take proper care of 
their health, the great proportion of surgical operations would The Book of the Body 
187 
be unnecessary. I realize, also, that surgeons get paid by 
the job, and therefore have a money interest in operating, 
and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of them will 
ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is 
true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and 
that by standing a little temporary inconvenience you can 
save yourself a life-time of discomfort. 
Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here 
a natural weakness, from which there results a dangerous 
and uncomfortable affliction. Hundreds of thousands of men 
are going around all their lives wearing elaborate and ex- 
pensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely useless, and 
trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An op- 
eration takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, 
and when our government drafted its young men into the 
army and found that fourteen in every thousand of them 
had rupture, it shipped them into the hospitals wholesale and 
sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords one case 
where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there 
were practically no returns from the great number of army 
cases. 
Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concern- 
ing the evils of vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's 
"History of the Jesuits in North America," you will see 
the horrible conditions under which the Indians lived in the 
United States-noble savages, you understand, entirely un- 
contaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations 
regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of small- 
pox. That these epidemics ceased was due to the discovery 
that by infecting the body with a mild form of the disease, 
it could be made to develop substances which render it im- 
mune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a 
law which makes vaccination for school children optional, 
and so we may some day have another epidemic to test the 
theories of the anti-vaccinationists. 
I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who 
have been given syphilis and other diseases by impure vac- 
cines. I don't know whether such stories are true; but I 
do know that people who live in houses are sometimes killed 
by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to 
live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that 
the remedy for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vac- 188 
Mind and Body 
cination, but to take more care in the manufacture of our 
vaccines. 
This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, 
and are made especially for each person. Germs are taken 
from the sick person, and injected into an animal. The 
body of the animal develops with great rapidity the "anti- 
bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as these 
"anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, 
we can take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then 
inject it into the system of the patient, thus increasing re- 
sistance to the disease. I admit that the best way to increase 
such resistance is to take care of your health; but some- 
times we confront an emergency, and must use emergency 
remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and 
meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who 
has ever seen with his own eyes how the deadly membranes 
of diphtheria melt away as a result of an injection, will be 
less dogmatic about the efforts of science to combat disease. 
Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the 
source of the disease, and keep it from getting into the human 
body. Every few years the southern part of our country 
used to be devastated by yellow fever epidemics. Every kind 
of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people would go 
around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses; 
they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died 
of the disease; they would wear gloves when they went shop- 
ping, so as not to touch the money with their hands. But at 
last medical experimenters traced the disease to a certain 
kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain the swamps and 
screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do 
not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, 
if we keep bur bodies clean with soap and hot water, we 
do not get bitten by lice, and so do not die of typhus. If we 
take pains with our drains and water supply, so that human 
excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy the filth-car- 
rying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid. 
But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men 
to take these precautions, and so when they go into the army 
they get a dose of typhoid serum. And this illustrates the 
difference between a true or hygienic remedy for disease, 
and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you say that 
you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid The Book of the Body 
189 
vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that 
I am trying to do is to point out the folly of flying to 
extremes, and rejecting any remedy which may help. What 
is the use of making the flat statement that vaccinations and 
serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man can 
see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Span- 
ish war, before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers 
died of this disease than died of bullets; but in the late war 
there was practically no typhoid at all in the army camps. 
On the other hand, it was noticed that the men who had just 
come in, and who therefore had just been vaccinated, were 
considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows that 
vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The 
reader may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both 
sides of the fence; but the truth is that I am trying to keep 
an open mind, and to consider all the facts, and to avoid mak- 
ing rash statements. 
One of the statements you hear most frequently is that 
drugs can never remedy disease, or help in remedying it. 
Now, I abhor the drugging system of the orthodox medical 
men; I have talked with them, and heard them talk with one 
another, and I know that they will mix up half a dozen different 
substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will have 
some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they 
are producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing 
symptoms. On the other hand, however, it is a fact that 
medical science has had for a generation or two a specific 
which destroys the germs of one disease in the blood, without 
at the same time injuring the blood itself. That disease is 
malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid 
malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at 
once, nor can you always screen your house and stay in at 
sundown. When you first go into a country, you have no 
house to screen, and some emergency will certainly arise that 
exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need quinine, and 
will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it. 
Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this 
time for syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does 
not always cure, it frequently does. In laboratories today 
men are working over the problem of constructing a com- 
bination of molecules which will destroy the germ of sleep- 
ing sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood. 190 
Mind and Body 
If they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I 
do not see why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at 
the same time making use of physical culture,of diet and fasting. 
W hen the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, 
there appeared in this place a paragraph telling of the work 
of Dr. Albert Abrams of San Francisco, in the diagnosis and 
cure of disease by means of radio-active vibrations. As the 
book is going to press, the writer finds himself in San Fran- 
cisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds it possible 
to give a more extended account of some fascinating dis- 
coveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. 
If I were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in 
the last twelve days, I fear the reader would find his powers 
of credulity overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying 
to tell, in very sober and cautious language, the theory upon 
which Abrams is working, and the technic which he has evolved. 
Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply 
the activity of electrons, minute particles of electric force. 
This is a statement which no present-day physicist would dis- 
pute. The best evidence appears to indicate that a molecule 
of matter is a minute reproduction of the universe, a system 
of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye has 
ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than 
anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the 
effects of electronic activity, and all modern books of physics 
give photographs of such. It is possible to determine the 
vibration rates of electrons, and to Dr. Abrams occurred the 
idea of determining the vibration rates of diseased tissue and 
disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably the same; 
not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield 
the same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer 
yields that rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The 
vibration of cancer, of tuberculosis, of syphilis-each is dif- 
ferent, uniform and invariable. Likewise in the blood are 
other vibrations, uniform and dependable, which reveal the 
sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the disease and 
the period of its duration-yes, and even the location in the 
body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a 
modern miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of 
disease. Dr. Abrams does not have to see the patient; all 
he has to have is a drop of blood on a piece of white blotting 
paper, and he sits in his laboratory and tells all about it, The Book of the Body 
191 
and somewhere several thousand miles away-in Toronto or 
Boston or New Orleans-a surgeon operates and finds what 
he has been told is there! 
And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, 
says Abrams, if you know the vibration rate of the electrons 
of germs, you can destroy those germs. It used to be a 
favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and determine its 
musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and shatter 
it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a 
bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibra- 
tion of the bridge and thus have broken it down. On that 
same principle this wizard of the electron introduces into 
your body radio-activity of a certain rate-and shall I say that 
he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis of many years 
standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because 
you would not and could not believe me. I will content 
myself with telling what my wife and I have been watching, 
twice a day for the past twelve days. 
The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at 
one side for the physicians who attend the clinic. There is 
a table, with the instruments of measurement, and Dr. Abrams 
sits beside it, and before him stands a young man stripped 
to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen of 
this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the 
weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally 
assume that this young man is being examined, and will be 
dazed when some one explains that the patient is in Toronto 
or Boston or New Orleans, and that this young man's body 
is the instrument which the doctor uses in the determining 
of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr. Abrams 
tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing 
so sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He ex- 
plains to his classes that the spinal cord is composed of mil- 
lions of nerve fibres of different vibration rates; hence a 
certain rate communicated to the body, is automatically sorted 
out, and appears on a certain precise spot of the body in the 
form of increased activity, increased blood pressure in the 
cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," 
which can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a 
tapping with a finger. To map out these areas is merely a 
matter of long and patient experiment; and Abrams has been 
studying this subject for some twenty years-he is author of 192 
Mind and Body 
a text-book on what is known as the "reactions of Abrams." 
So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the 
human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his 
assistant places a specimen of blood in a little electrically con- 
nected box, and sets the rheostat at some vibration number- 
say fifty-and Dr. Abrams taps on a certain square inch of 
the abdomen of his "subject," and announces the dread word 
"cancer." Then he places the electrode on another part of the 
"subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces that it 
is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping, 
and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is 
severe; and pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the phy- 
sician who has sent this blood specimen, telling him these facts, 
and prescribing a certain vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," 
the instrument of radio-activity which Dr. Abrams has devised. 
Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you 
say to yourself: "Here is either the greatest magician in the 
history of mankind, or else the greatest maniac." You may 
have come prepared for some kind of fraud, but you soon 
dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately in 
earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians 
who watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he 
must be deluding himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. 
But you talk with these men, and discover that they have 
come from all over the country, and always for one reason- 
they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found 
that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a 
few drops of the patient's blood than they themselves had 
been able to find out from the whole patient. And then into 
the clinic come the doctor's own patients-I must have heard 
sixty or eighty of them tell their story and many of them 
have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind 
from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times 
for cancer and given up for dying; people with tumors on 
the brain, or with one lung gone from tuberculosis. It is 
literally a fact that when you have sat in Abrams' clinic for 
a week, all disease loses its terrors. 
This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can 
measure and control the minute universe of the electron and 
the atom, we have touched the ultimate source of our bodily 
life. I might take chapters of this book to tell you of the 
strange experiments I have seen in this clinic-showing you, 
for instance, how these vibrations respond to thought, how The Book of the Body 
193 
by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a few 
moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs; 
showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at 
different ages, and how they respond to different colors and 
different drugs. Abrams' method has revealed the secret of 
such efficacy as drugs possess-their work is done by their 
radio-activity, and not by their chemical properties. Also the 
problem of vaccination has been solved-for Abrams has dis- 
covered a dread new disease, which is bovine syphilis, 
originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now 
reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming 
the agent which prepares the soil of the body for such dis- 
orders as tuberculosis and cancer. And it appears that we can 
all be rendered immune to these diseases, by a few electronic 
vibrations, introduced into our bodies in childhood; so is opened 
up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race, purified and 
made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of her op- 
timism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take 
my advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out 
about this new work and help to make it known to the world. 
There are many romances of medical science, some of 
them fascinating as murder mysteries and big game hunting. 
Turn to McMasters' "History of the People of the United 
States" and read his account of the terrible epidemic of yellow 
fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have already 
referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in 
their effort to ward off this plague-sponges of vinegar under 
their noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then 
a mosquito would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours 
they would be dead! Or what could be stranger than the 
tracing of the bubonic plague, which has cost literally billions 
of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of fleas which live 
on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected 
than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the 
root canals of the teeth! 
One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity 
is rheumatism, a cause of endless suffering. It was sup- 
posed to be due to damp climate and exposure, and this 
is true to a certain extent, in the same way that colds are 
due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there 
must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and 
they set to work to trace this condition down. The pains 
of rheumatism are caused by uric acid settling in the joints 194 
Mind and Body 
of the body. What causes the uric acid? Well, there is 
uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic people to 
eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body 
itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid 
taken into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the 
time it gets to the blood-stream. We know that you may 
eat a great deal of fruit acid without necessarily making 
acid blood. On the other hand, you can make acid blood 
by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as 
it sounds. 
Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found 
to be the roots of the teeth. Here is a part of the body dif- 
ficult to get at, and as a consequence of bad diet and un- 
wholesome ways of living, infections will start there, and pus 
sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the blood-stream 
and distributed through the body. The first thought is to 
draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, be- 
cause you need your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist 
has to go through a complicated process of opening up the 
tooth and cleaning out the root canals, and treating the in- 
fected spots at the roots. Then he has to fill the tooth all 
the way down to the roots, leaving no place for infection 
to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and 
is one more illustration of the fact that there is one health 
law for the rich and another health law for the poor. 
All the time that I write these chapters about health I 
feel guilty. I know that the wholesome food I recommend 
costs money, and I know that surgery and dentistry cost 
money-yes, even sunlight and fresh air and recreation; even 
a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and you 
have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter 
time, and somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. 
I know that for a great many of the people who read what 
I write, all these things are impossible of attainment; I know 
that for the great majority of the common people the ben- 
efits of science do not exist. Science discovers how to pre- 
vent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because 
the profit system controls the world, and the profit system 
wants the labor of the poor, regardless of what happens to 
their health. If the people fall ill, they are thrown upon 
the scrap heap, and the profit system finds others to take 
their place. The Book of the Body 
195 
Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ 
infection, but it practically never gets hold upon a human 
body except when the body is reduced by undernourishment 
and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis, therefore, is a disease 
of slums and jails. It is definitely and indisputably a dis- 
ease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the earth 
in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and 
typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which 
could be wiped out by measures of public hygiene, plus edu- 
cation. This includes all the infant diseases, and the deadly 
venereal diseases. But the profit system stands in the way; 
and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of the Body, 
I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all, 
and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty. 
I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest 
and conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am 
wasting my time. I am called in by these fat, over-fed rich 
people in their leisure class hotels, and what am I to say to 
them? Shall I say to them, 'You are living an abnormal 
life, and you can never be well until you cut out root and 
branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroy- 
ing you?' But no, I can't say that-not one time in a thou- 
sand. I am expected to be polite and serious, and to listen 
to them while they tell the long tiresome story of their symp-. 
toms, and I have to encourage them, and give them some 
temporary device that will remove some of the symptoms 
of their trouble." 
And what should one say to this honest physician ? Should 
one tell him to go and be a physician to the poor? Would 
he be any happier there? He could tell the poor the causes 
of their diseases, and they would listen patiently-they are 
trained to listen, and to accept what they are told. Here 
is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and work- 
ing ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and 
she is ill with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she 
needs plenty of fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and 
milk in her diet. He tells her that, and he knows that she 
has as much chance of carrying out his orders as of flying 
to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid epidemic, 
and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago, 
that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by 
the political leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case 196 
Mind and Body 
of venereal disease, in a young man who was drafted into 
the army and turned loose amid the joys of Paris. Maybe 
it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full of 
school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is 
the case in New York City, and the parents out of work 
a part of the time, and with no possibility in their lives of 
ever earning enough to feed the children properly. When 
you confront these universal facts of our present social order, 
you realize that the problem of disease is not merely a prob- 
lem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a 
problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole 
way of thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of 
health which did not point out these facts would be, not a 
book of health, but a book of sham. 
But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's 
ideas, we have to live, and we can do our work better if we 
keep as well as possible. I have tried to point out the way; 
it is, as you can see, a matter in part of the body and in part 
of the mind. All the bodily regime here laid out has its basis 
in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can, 
at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second 
nature"-things which we do automatically, without effort or 
temptation to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true 
happiness in the conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self- 
control, to rule our desires and our passions, not harshly and 
spasmodically, but serenely, as one drives a car which he thor- 
oughly understands. It is in vain that we preach freedom to 
men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet tell us: "The 
sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own com- 
pulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can 
attain on this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound 
mind controlling a sound body. I close this book by quoting 
some verses written by Sir Henry Wotton three hundred years 
ago, which I have all my life considered one of the noblest 
pieces of poetry in our heritage: 
THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE 
How happy is he born and taught 
That serveth not another's will; 
Whose armour is his honest thought 
And simple truth his utmost skill! The Book of the Body 
197 
Whose passions not his masters are, 
Whose soul is still prepared for death, 
Not tied unto the world with care 
Of public fame, or private breath. 
Who envies none that chance doth raise 
Or vice; who never understood 
How deepest wounds are given by praise; 
Nor rules of state, but rules of good: 
Who hath his life from rumours freed, 
Whose conscience is his strong retreat; 
Whose state can neither flatterers feed, 
Nor ruin make accusers great: 
Who God doth late and early pray 
More of His grace than gifts to lend; 
And entertains the harmless day 
With a well-chosen book or friend; 
-This man is freed from servile bands 
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; 
Lord of himself, though not of lands; 
And having nothing, yet hath all. INDEX 
Conduct 42 
Consciousness 56 
Constipation 185 
Cooking 129, 142 
Crawford 88 
Cyrus 164 
Abrams, Dr 190 
Adultery 33 
Adventist 99 
Agriculture 25 
Alcohol 151 
Anti-bodies 188 
Antinomies 58 
Appendix 186 
Arnold 42 
Arrhenius 101 
Automatic writing 67 
Dandruff 109 
Dante 77 
Darwin 17, 46 
Dentistry 126, 190 
Determinists 57 
Diet 131 
Diet Standards 135 
Digestion 145 
Diphtheria 188 
Diseases 107, 117 
Dogs 17 
Draft 182 
Drugs 118, 150, 185, 189 
Dubb 63 
Duncan 102 
Dyspepsia 117 
Bairnsfather 29 
Bathing 162 
Battle Creek Sanitarium 118 
Beauchamp 70, 85, 89 
Beethoven 47 
Bergson 17 
Beri-beri 128 
Bible 77 
Bio-chemist 59 
Black bread 128 
Blood 106 
Body 53, 105 
Booth 58 
Bourne 69 
Bruce 71 
Bury 15 
Eddy 65 
Edison 45, 86 
Einstein 101 
Elberfeld horses 68 
Evolution 8, 17 
Exercise 163 
Caffein 150 
Calories 135 
Candy 137 
Capitalist 100 
Carbohydrates 124 
Carbon monoxide 157 
Children 140, 180 
Chiropractors 174, 184 
Chittenden 136 
Christian Scientists 5, 65, 105 
Clothing 160 
Coffee 151 
Colds 183 
Commandments 32 
Communist 99 
Complete fast 172 
Cam stock 25 
Faith 9 
Faith curists 65 
Fast cure 171 
Fatness 139 
Fats 124 
Fever 108 
Food filter 145 
Fourth dimension 5 
Fireless cooker 142 
Fireplace 157 
Fisher 136 
Fletcher 119, 145 
Free thinker 15 
Freud 71 
199 200 
Index 
Fruit fast 175 
Frugality 38 
Frying-pan * 129 
Furnace 157 
Langley 74 
Lankester, Prof. E. Ray.... 23 
Laxatives 175, 185 
Leanness 139 
Leonardo 47 
Liebault 64 
Life 3 
Lily Dale 86, 90 
Lincoln 47 
Locomotor ataxia 180 
Lodge, Sir Oliver 83 
Lodge, Raymond 87 
London, Jack 152 
Gargles 184 
Gastronomic art 148 
Genius 49, 60 
George. 18 
Germs 183 
God 22, 50 
Goethe 47 
Golden rule 51 
Greens 132 
Gymnastic work 166 
Macaulay 39 
MacDowell, Edward 56 
MacFadden 178, 186 
MacSwiney 170 
Maeterlinck, Maurice 68 
Malaria 189 
Malthusian law 25 
Marquesans 113 
Materializations 88 
Matter 3 
Meal-hour 147 
Measurement of Intelligence, 
Terman's 95 
Meat 121 
Medical science 105 
Mesmer 63 
Messina earthquake 170 
Metaphysics 4 
Metchnikofif 138 
Milk diet 128 
Moderation 39 
Monism 3 
Morality 21, 31, 34, 50 
Morgan 45 
Mormon 99 
Mozart 68 
Multiple personality 69 
Mutation 17 
Myers 49 
Hair 109 
Hallucinations 75 
Hamlet 48 
Happiness 9 
Harrison 6 
Hats 110 
Headache 122, 150, 184 
Health cranks 182 
Heart 108 
Houdin 93 
Hugo 48 
Huxley 17, 62 
Hyslop 82 
Iceberg 61 
Infanticide 28 
Instincts 134 
Intelligence 22 
Immortality 79 
Irwin, Will '.... 86 
James 30, 59, 60 
Jesus 47, 48, 50, 51, 76 
John Barleycorn 152 
Johnson 58 
Jonson 44 
Kant, Immanuel.. ..4, 47, 51,58 
Kellogg, Doctor 118, 164, 186 
Kilmer, Joyce 44 
Knowledge 94 
Kropotkin 18, 26 
Nature 21, 24, 29 
Nature cure 160 
Nature Woman 176 
Neighbor ... 50 
J^ewcomb, Simon 101 
Newton 47 Index 
201 
New York Times 169 
Nicotine 154 
Nietzsche 17 
Novels 164 
Nutrition of Man 136 
Rice 128 
Rockefeller 45 
Roosevelt, Theodore 25, 45 
Rugs 159 
Rupture 187 
Sabbath 99 
Salisbury 120 
Sally 70, 85 
Salt 143 
Meats, salted 143 
Salts 124 
Salvarsan 189 
Savages 135 
Savage, Rev. Minot J 74 
Schrenck-Notzing 88 
Scurvy 128 
Seneca 98 
Shakespeare 47 
Shelley 45, 48 
Sleep 162 
Sleeping sickness 113, 173 
Smokers 153 
Socialism 167 
Sophocles 87 
Sore throat 183 
Spencer 8 
Spinoza 79 
Spirits 82 
Spiritualists 86 
Starch 122, 124 
Stealing 33 
Steam heat 158 
Stimulant 149 
Stock Exchange 158 
Stomach 105, 138, 148 
Style 161 
Subconscious mind 61 
Sunday code 40 
Sugar 126 
Surgery 186 
Survival 81 
Survival of the fittest 22 
Syndicalism 15 
Syphilis 189 
Oil stoves 158 
Opsonins 112 
Optimism 42 
Osteopaths 184 
Ouija 67 
Overeating 134 
Oxygen 156 
Patrick, Dr 167 
Pavlov 148 
Phantasms 75 
Phillips, David Graham 180 
Piper, Mrs 
Play 165 
Poisons 146 
Pork 142 
Porter, Dr 178 
Positivists 6 
Poverty 194 
Prices of food 141 
Prince, Dr. Morton 70, 89 
Profits of Religion 78, 99 
Proteins 123 
Prunes 127 
Psychology 96 
Psychotherapy 64 
Puritans 39 
Quackenbos 64 
Quinine 188 
Quixote 48 
Raisins 127 
Raw food 119 
Read, Alfred Baker 28 
Reason 13 
Refined foods 126 
Relaxation 167 
Religion 32 
Reincarnation 76 
Rest 146 
Revelation 12 
Rheumatism 193 
Tanner, Dr 169 
Tariff 37 
Tea 151 
Teeth 127, 193 
Telepathy 67, 75 
Theosophists 76 202 
Index 
Tight shoes 161 
Tobacco 153 
Tolstoi 49 
Tonsilitis 107 
Trance 63 
Tropism 54 
Tuberculosis 
112, 120, 179, 194, 195 
Twain, Mark .' 93 
Typhoid 112, 188, 192 
Vaccination 187, 189 
Vaccines 188 
Vegetarian 121 
Vitamines 127, 142 
Wallace 46 
Wells, H. G 22 
Williams, Dr. Henry Smith.. 102 
Worth, Patience 84 
Uranus 92 
Uric acid 193 
Yellow fever 188 
Yogis 90 
W.B.C.