measles; and thus he may keep himself housed for weeks, perhaps
months, instead of days.

Another advantage in dropping all resistance to illness, is that the
relaxation encourages a restful attitude of mind, which enables us
to take the right amount of time for recovery, and so prevents
either a possible relapse, or our feeling only half well for a long
time, when we might have felt wholly well from the time we first
began to take up our life again. Indeed the advantages of
nonresistance in such cases are innumerable, and there are no
advantages whatever in resistance and unwillingness.

Clear as these things must be to any intelligent person whose
attention is turned in the right direction, it seems most singular
that not in one case in a thousand are they deliberately practised.
People seem to have lost their common sense with regard to them,
because for generations the desire for having our own way has held
us in bondage, and confused our standard of freedom; more than that,
it has befogged our sense of natural law, and the result is that we
painfully fight to make water run up hill when, if we were to give
one quiet look, we should see that better things could be
accomplished, and our own sense of freedom become keener, by being
content to let the water quietly run down and find its own level.

It is not normal to be ill and to be kept from our everyday use, but
it is still less normal for a healthy, intelligent mind to keep its
body ill longer than is necessary by resisting the fact of illness.
Every disease, though it is abnormal in itself, may frequently be
kept within bounds by a certain normal course of conduct, and, if
our suffering from the disease itself is unavoidable, by far our