nsciousness;
and in a very complex and busied life the number of sensations or states
of consciousness which can struggle up to the front and get attended to,
is comparatively small It is thus that the days seem so short when we
are busy about every-day matters, and that they get blurred together,
and as it were individually annihilated in recollection. When we travel,
a comparatively large number of fresh sensations occupy attention, there
is a maximum of consciousness, and a distinct image is left to loom up
in memory. For the same reason the weeks and years are much longer to
the child than to the grown man. The life is simpler and less hurried,
so that there is time to attend to a great many sensations. Now this
fact lies at the bottom of that keen enjoyment of existence which is the
prerogative of childhood and early youth. The day is not rushed through
by the automatic discharge of certain psychical functions, but each
sensation stays long enough to make itself recognized. Now when once we
understand the psychology of this matter, it becomes evident that the
same contrast that holds between the child and the man must hold also
between the ancient and the modern. The number of elements entering into
ancient life were so few relatively, that there must have been far
more than there is now of that intense realization of life which we can
observe in children and remember of our own childhood. Space permitting,
it would be easy to show from Greek literature how intense was this
realization of life. But my point will already have been sufficiently
apprehended. Already we cannot fail to see how difficult it is to get
more than a minimum of conscious fruition out of a too complex and rapid
activity.

One other point is worth noticing before we close. How is this turmoil
of modern existence impressing itself upon the physical constitutions
of modern men and women? When an individual man engages in furious
productive activity, his friends warn him that he will break down. Does
the collective man of our time need some such friendly warning? Let
us first get a hint from what foreigners think of us ultra-modernized
Americans. Wandering journalists, of an ethnological turn of mind,
who visit these shores, profess to be struck with the slenderness,
the apparent lack of toughness, the dyspeptic look, of the American
physique. And from such observations it has been seriously argued that
the stalwart English race is suffering inevi