pply. On
what you now eat and drink you have a certain average weight. Eat,
digest and assimilate a larger quantity of food and your weight will
increase. This increase will be greatest at the start and will
gradually slow up until you shall have reached the point beyond which
you can gain no more. Given the same hygienic conditions that you have
been accustomed to, you will maintain yourself at the increased weight
on the increased supply of food.

[Sidenote: _Pygmies and Giants_]

Now, all this involves clearly enough a greatly increased rate of
activity on the part of the bodily organs of assimilation and repair.
It is a situation on all fours with that of the countryman whose rate
of brain activity has been stimulated by an increased mental demand.

No man will maintain that better, more nourishing and more liberal
food rations, transformed into increased bodily tissue, with a
consequent greater weight and greater muscular strength, would result
in a loss of vitality or the shortening of a man's life.

[Sidenote: _Transforming Inertness into Alertness_]

Pygmies cannot become giants physically or intellectually. But as the
puny youth can by systematic exercise broaden his frame and develop
his muscles into at least a semblance of the athlete, and can then
through his healthier appetite _and his faster rate of repair_
maintain himself without effort at the new standard; _so can the
mentally inert call forth their reserves of energy and maintain a
higher standard of activity and fruitfulness_.

Few men live on the plane of their highest efficiency. Few search the
recesses of the well-springs of power. The lives of most of us are
passed among the shallows of the mind without thought of the
possibilities that lurk within the deeper pools.

[Sidenote: _How the Mind Accumulates Energy_]

This accumulation of potential subconscious reserve energy is a result
of the evolution of man and the growing complexity of his life.

No man could, if he would, respond to all the impulses to muscular
action aroused in him by sense-impressions. It would be still less
possible for him to respond to every impulse to muscular action
awakened from the past with the remembered thought with which it is
associated.

Desire, interest, attention and the selective will must pick and
choose among these multitudinous tendencies to action.

Here, then, is another fact that has immediate bearing upon your
ability to carry out any ambiti