an the people--many of
them--were for people.

From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human
mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain
tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the
body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is
not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch
what they are letting their bodies do to them.

Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind
is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete
mixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and making
one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them
in one--just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep
things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying
spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritual
experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever.

There is ground for belief (and this is what I am trying to have a plan
to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking
with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so
unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What we
really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory
impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a
kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain
type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he
is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not
really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him.

The soul--the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope
has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like
you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing
all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body
all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind,
claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically
defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more
can be said.

What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his
machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and
automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him