is that what we
attend to largely determines what we are, or shall be. The interests
which secure our consideration may be the passive result of emotional
life, the things which naturally appeal, which give us sensations that
the mind normally heeds; or they may be the active result of our will
which has forced application upon the things which reason advised as
worth acquiring.

We found that the beginning of health of mind consists in the directing
of thought toward the health-bringing attitude. We have seen how quickly
the normal mind can be diverted from the undesirable by a new or
stronger emotional stimulus. We found that the sole appeal to attention
in the baby-life is through the emotions, and that it is natural
throughout life for the mind to heed and follow the interesting; which
is only another way of saying that thinking follows where emotion leads,
unless volition steps in to prevent. The supreme test of the will's
power is its ability to hold the train of thought in the line that
reason directs, when feeling would draw it elsewhere. This ability marks
the man who does big things; while the inability to ever turn attention
away from the interests proposed by feeling assures weakness.

Some of the most charming people we shall ever know are those
temperamental children of happiness whose interests are naturally
wholesome and externalized, whose natures are spontaneous and joyous,
and who live as they feel, seemingly never knowing the stress of forced
concentration. With them attention follows feeling, feeling is sweet and
true, and volition simply carries out what feeling dictates. And life
may not be complicated.

But there is another class whose attention also follows in the ways of
least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and
unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life
habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the
distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of
pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in
all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These
others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are
storehouses of it. We say that each type has projected himself, that is,
has thrust himself out into the external world, and is standing back,
looking at his own nature and calling that the universe.

But neither of these two groups can long withstand t