to
listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want
to let him hear.

Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years--say
for twenty or thirty years--the inevitable happens and one soon sees why
it is that the majority of people--even very attractive people one goes
around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just
splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being
fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go
about--even the most elegant of them--thinking with their stomachs.

Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were
fresh from heaven--as if they had just been caught passing from the music
of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below.

V

BEING HELPED UP THE CELLAR STAIRS

Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a
singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our
leaders and our people.

We realize--whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of
the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new
opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from
picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who
insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs.

The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more
of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it--the
question of how other people--a hundred million people can be got to
follow in these new brain tracks for a nation--these new ways for a
nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and
national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a
little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and
what kind of people can do it.

The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the
automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds
and re-routing and recooerdinating their ideas and are going to be the
more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes
nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer
backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in
believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing
through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extr