excuse. Many people have inherited emotional magnifying glasses, and
carry them through the world, getting and giving unnecessary pain,
and losing more than half of the delight of life in failing to get
an unprejudiced view of it. If the tired man or woman would have the
good sense to stop for one minute and use the power which is given
us all of understanding and appreciating our own perverted states
and so move on to better, how easy it would be to recognize that a
feeling is exaggerated because of fatigue, and wait until we have
gained the power to drop our emotional microscopes and save all the
evil results of allowing nervous excitement to control us. We are
even permitted to see clearly an inherited tendency to magnify
emotions and to overcome it to such an extent that life seems new to
us. This must be done by the individual himself, through a personal
appreciation of his own mistakes and active steps to free himself
from them. No amount of talking, persuading, or teaching will be of
the slightest service until that personal recognition comes. This
has been painfully proved too often by those who see a friend
suffering unnecessarily, and in the short-sighted attempt to wrench
the emotional microscope from his hand, simply cause the hold to
tighten and the magnifying power to increase. A careful, steady
training of the physique opens the way for a better practice of the
wholesome philosophy, and the microscope drops with the relaxation
of the external tension which has helped to hold it.

Emotions are often not even exaggerated but are from the beginning
imaginary; and there are no more industrious imps of evil than these
sham feelings. The imps have no better field for their destructive
work than in various forms of morbid, personal attachment, and in
what is commonly called religion,--but which has no more to do with
genuine religion than the abnormal personal likings have to do with