themselves to the heat of its rays.

The timid man, in his moral isolation, is like the hare, who, crouched
in its form, sleeps with one eye open in constant terror of the
passer-by or of the hunter.

It may be well to add that worry about oneself is invariably an
accompaniment of all these troubles. People without poise are, with very
few exceptions, egotists who exaggerate their own importance.

Moreover, they suffer keenly from the obscurity into which their defects
have forced them as well as from dread of the alternatives presented to
them, the making of an effort to escape this fate, an idea that fills
them with horror, or the continuing to live in the unhappy condition
that has spoiled existence for them through their own faults.

It is hardly then a matter for surprize that so many people who are thus
mentally out of balance end by becoming neurotics or become a prey to
those cerebral disorders that are, unfortunately, all too frequent.

This condition of solitude, at once deplored and self-imposed, has the
still more serious disadvantage of leaving the mind, for lack of proper
control, to the domination of the most false and exaggerated ideas.

It is a well-known fact that any force of exaggeration, however obvious,
becomes less noticeable to us in proportion as it becomes more familiar.

It exists, in the last analysis, only by its comparative relation to
other things.