is
not warranted by the present situation. Hypersensitiveness is never
anything but a makeshift kind of satisfaction. Despite certain
subconscious reasoning, it does not make one more important nor more
beloved. Neither does it furnish a real expression for that great
creative love-instinct whose outlet, if it is to bring satisfaction,
must be a real outlet into the external world. An understanding of the
motives is helpful only when it makes clear that they are
short-sighted motives and that the real desires back of them may be
satisfied in better ways.

SOME LOWERED THRESHOLDS

As the public appetite for specific cases appears to be insatiable, we
will give from real life some examples of low thresholds which were
raised through re-education. One hesitates to write down these
examples because when they are on paper they sound like advertisements
of patent medicines. However, there is no magic in any of these cures,
but only the working out of definite laws which may be used by other
sufferers, if they only know. Re-education through a knowledge of
oneself and the laws at work really does remarkable things when it has
a chance.

="Danger-Signals" without the Danger.= There was the man who had queer
feelings all over his body, especially in his head and stomach, and
who considered these sensations as danger-signals warning him to stop.
This man had worked up from messenger boy to a position next to the
president in one of the transcontinental railroad systems. On the
appearance of these "danger-signals" he had tried to resign but had
been given a year's leave of absence instead. Half the year had gone
in rest-cure, but he was still afraid to eat or work, and believed
himself "done for." After three weeks of re-education he saw that
instead of having overdrawn his capital, he had in another sense
overdrawn his sensations. He went away as fit as ever, finished his
leave of absence doing hard labor on his farm, and then went back to
even harder tasks, working for the Government in the administration of
the railroads during the war. He is still at work.

=Enjoying Poor Health.= There was the woman who had been an invalid
for twenty years, doing little else during all that time than to feel
her own feelings. Because of the distressing sensations in her
stomach, she had for a year taken nothing but liquid nourishment. She
had queer feelings in her solar-plexus and indeed a general luxury of
over-feeling. She could no