pessimism which has found so many voices in recent years that its cowardly
outcries have almost drowned the great, sane, authoritative voices of the
world.

Despair has many sources, but one of its chief sources is the attempt to
put an incomplete in the place of a complete life, and to substitute a
partial for a full and rounded development. The body keeps that physical
unconsciousness which is the evidence of health only so long as every part
of it is normally used and exercised; when any set of organs is ignored
and neglected, some form of disorder begins, and sooner or later physical
self-consciousness in some part announces the appearance of disease. In
like manner, intellectual and spiritual self-unconsciousness, which is
both the condition and the result of complete intellectual and spiritual
health, is preserved only so long as a man lives freely and naturally in
and through all his activities. Expression of the whole nature through
every faculty is essential to entire sanity of mind and spirit. Every
violation of this fundamental law is followed by moral or spiritual
disorder, loss of balance, decline of power. To see the world with clear
eyes, as Shakespeare saw it, instead of seeing it through distorted
vision, as Paul Verlaine saw it, one must think, feel, and act. To
compress one's vital power into any one of these forms or channels of
expression is to limit growth, to destroy the balance and symmetry of
development, to lose clarity of vision, and to invite that devastating
disease of our time and of all times, morbid self-consciousness. The man
who lives exclusively in thought becomes a theorist, an indifferent
observer, or a cynic; he who lives exclusively in feeling becomes a
sentimentalist or a pessimist; he who lives exclusively in action becomes
a mere executive energy, a pure objective force in society. These types
are found in all times, and exhibit in a great variety of ways the perils
of incomplete development.