ws. The only difference is, that, as Jung says, "the
nervous person falls ill of the conflicts with which the well person
battles successfully."

SUMMARY

Since at least seventy-five per cent. of all the people who apply to
physicians for help are nervous patients; and since these thousands of
patients are not among the mental incompetents, but are as a rule
among the highly organized, conscientious folk who have most to
contribute to the leadership of the world, it is obviously of vital
importance to society that its citizens should be taught how to solve
their inner conflicts and keep well. In this strategic period of
reconstruction, the world that is being remodeled cannot afford to
lose one leader because of an unnecessary breakdown.

There is greater need than ever for people who can keep at their tasks
without long enforced rests; people who can think deeply and
continuously without brain-fag; people who can concentrate all their
powers on the work in hand without wasting time or energy on
unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the
top notch of vitality by well-digested food, well-slept sleep,
well-forgotten fatigue, and well-used reserve energy. That such a
state of affairs is no Utopian dream, but is merely a matter of
knowing how, will appear more clearly in later chapters.

CHAPTER II

_In which we learn what "nerves" are not, and get a hint of what they
are_

THE DRAMA OF NERVES

AN EXPLODED THEORY

="Nerves" not Nerves.= Pick up any newspaper, turn over a few pages,
and you will be sure to come to an advertisement something like this:

Tired man, your nerves are sick!
They need rest and a tonic to restore
their worn-out depleted cells!

No wonder people have believed this kind of thing. It has been dinned
into their ears for many years. They have read it with their breakfast
coffee and gazed at it in the street cars and even heard it from their
family physicians, until it has become part and parcel of their
thinking; yet all the time the fundamental idea has been false, and
now, at last, the theory is exploded.

So far as the modern laboratory can discover, the nerves of the most
confirmed neurotic are perfectly healthy. They are not starved, nor
depleted, nor exhausted; the fat-sheath is not wanting, there is no
inflammation, there is nothing lacking in the cell itself, and there
is no accumulation of fatigue products. Paradoxical as it may so