title="[pg 45]"/>movements which are performed with apparent ease by experts.

Which of us has not been profoundly astonished at the enormous difficulty experienced in accomplishing some simple act of manual toil that we see performed without the least effort by a workman trained to this particular task?

What looks easier, for instance, than to plane a piece of wood or to dig up the ground?

Is it possible that the laborer, wheeling a barrow, really has to be possest of skill or strength?

It hardly seems so. And yet the man who takes a plane in his hands for the first time will be astounded at the difficulty he experiences in approximating to the regularity and lightness of stroke that comes naturally to the carpenter.

The man who essays to dig a piece of ground or to wheel a barrow, will find himself making irregular ditches and traveling in zigzags, and all this at the expense of a hundred times the energy put forth by the workman who is accustomed to these particular forms of labor.

The person of timidity who boasts of his remarkable exploits is actuated, as a general rule, by sheer lack of experience.

His peculiar fault keeps him always in the background and prevents him from accomplishing any public action, and for this reason those efforts appear easy to him that he has never thought of attempting.

Further than this, aided by his false pride, he considers that his merits are easily greater than those of the people who are not able to understand him, and he is acting in perfect good faith when he professes to be able to accomplish what they can not.

Is it necessary to add that the ironical reception given to such exhibitions of boastfulness rouse in him a feeling of irritation which is all the greater for the fact that he does not openly show it?

The man of resolve will never experience these unpleasant emotions.

He knows exactly what he wants and what he can do. So we see him marching ahead steadily, his eyes fixt upon the goal he has worked out for himself, paying no heed whatever to misleading suggestions, which cripple his breadth of soul and would in the end deprive him of that essential energy which is vital to him if he would preserve his even poise, the foundation of mental balance and the source of every real success in life.

CHAPTER III

WAR ON TIMIDITY

One can not be too insistent in asserting how harmful the lack of poise can be, and when once this weakness has reached the stage of timidity it may produce the most tragic consequences not only so far as the daily routine of our lives is concerned, but also with reference to our moral and physical equilibrium.

So, when the nervous system is constantly set on edge by the emotions to which this fault gives rise, it necessarily follows that all the faculties suffer in their turn.

This is particularly true of those who are constantly haunted by the fear of finding themselves in a condition of mental unpreparedness, to the extent that they prefer to remain in solitude and silence rather than to mingle in a world which really has too many other things to think of to concern itself with their acts or their opinions.

This morbid dread of becoming the subject of ridicule ends by creating a peculiar condition of mind of which, as we have already pointed out, egoism is the pivot.

In this way it is a common occurrence to see people of timidity paying exaggerated attention to the slightest changes in the condition of their health.

Such people by shutting themselves out from the world have reduced it to the circumference of their own personalities and everything which touches them necessarily assumes gigantic importance in their eyes.

The slightest opposition becomes for them a catastrophe. The smallest unpleasantness presents itself to them in the light of a tragic misfortune.

For this reason the lives of the timid become a succession of boredoms and of pains.

Even in those cases where no really unfortunate incident occurs, these people so exaggerate what actually does happen to them that the least little emotion causes them the most profound unhappiness.

On those days when nothing in particular happens they spend their time anticipating all sorts of disasters, including those which are not the least likely to happen. To them the tiniest cloud is an omen of a devastating storm.

When the sun is shining their timidity prevents them from exposing 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.

It is certain that a child ten years old would seem very large if he were five feet high, whereas a man of that stature is considered a dwarf.

Among Oriental races a woman is generally classed as a blonde whose hair is not absolutely black.

Things only take their real appearance from a comparison with others of the same kind.

For all his science, an ethnologist, placed in front of a man of an unknown tribe, would be unable to say whether this man's stature were normal or below the average in relation to others of his race, since no information would be forthcoming as to this people's height or characteristics. It is, therefore, no matter for surprize that the timid man, shut in upon himself and having no other horizon than the limited field of his own observations, is disposed to picture them in colors whose truth he can not verify, since the terms of comparison, vital to the accomplishment of his end, are not available to him.

It is, therefore, impossible for such a man not to become accustomed to the idea as it presents itself to him, to such an extent that he is quite unconscious of its successive changes in character.

Do we notice the growth of a child who is constantly with us until he reaches man's estate?

Can we measure the development of a blossom into the perfect flower?

Assuredly not, if we have lived daily in the company of the child and have glanced several times an hour at the blossom.

Both the one and the other will reach maturity without being sensibly conscious of the fact that they are changing.

But if we go away from the child for a few months, if, in the interval, we see other children, we can form an estimate of his growth and can compare him