"It makes me ten times more nervous than I was before."

"Oh, no, it does not; it only makes you realize your nervousness ten
times more."

"Well, then, I do not care to realize my nervousness, it is very
disagreeable."

"But, unfortunately, if you do not realize it now and relax into
Nature's ways, she will knock you hard against one of her stone walls,
and you will rebound with a more unpleasant realization of nervousness
than is possible now."

The locomotive engine only utilizes nineteen per cent of the amount of
fuel it burns, and inventors are hard at work in all directions to make
an engine that will burn only the fuel needed to run it. Here is a much
more valuable machine--the human engine--burning perhaps eighty-one per
cent more than is needed to accomplish its ends, not through the
mistake of its Divine Maker, but through the stupid, short-sighted
thoughtlessness of the engineer.

Is not the economy of our vital forces of much greater importance than
mechanical or business economy?

It is painful to see a man--thin and pale from the excessive nervous
force he has used, and from a whole series of attacks of nervous
prostration--speak with contempt of "this method of relaxation." It is
not a method in any sense except that in which all the laws of Nature
are methods. No one invented it, no one planned it; every one can see,
who will look, that it is Nature's way and the only true way of living.
To call it a new idea or method is as absurd as it would be, had we
carried our tension so far as to forget sleep entirely, for some one to
come with a "new method" of sleep to bring us into a normal state
again; and then the people suffering most intensely from want of "tired
Nature's sweet restorer" would be the most scornful in their irritation
at this new idea of "sleep."

Again, there are many, especially women, who insist that they prefer
the nervously excited state, and would not lose it. This is like a
man's preferring to be chronically drunk. But all these abnormal states
are to be expected in abnormal people, and must be quietly met by
Nature's principles in order to lead the sufferers back to Nature's
ways. Our minds are far enough beyond our bodies to lead us to help
ourselves out of mistaken opinions; although often the sincere help of
others takes us more rapidly over hard ground and prevents many a
stumble.

Great nervous excitement is possible, every one knows, without muscular
tension; the