infected by the gloom, the weakness, the mental
ill-health of other people. This is sympathy perverted. If a friend
is suffering from small-pox or scarlet fever you do not seek to prove
your sympathy by infecting yourself with his disease. You would
recognize this to be a crime against the community. Yet many people
submit themselves to infection by unhealthy ideas as if it were an act
of charity--part of their duty towards their neighbours. In the same
way people deliver their minds to harrowing stories of famine and
pestilence, as if the mental depression thus produced were of some
value to the far-away victims. This is obviously false--the only
result is to cause gloom and ill-health in the reader and so make him a
burden to his family. That such disasters should be known is beyond
question, but we should react to them in the manner indicated in the
last chapter. We should replace the blank recognition of the evil by
the quest of the means best suited to overcome it; then we can look
forward to an inspiring end and place the powers of our will in the
service of its attainment.

Oh, human soul, as long as thou canst so,
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the heaving senses' ebb and flow ...
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night,
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.

Autosuggestion, far from producing callousness, dictates the method and
supplies the means by which the truest sympathy can be practised. In
every case our aim must be to remove the suffering as soon as possible,
and this is facilitated by refusing acceptation to the bad ideas and
maintaining our own mental and moral balance.

Whenever gloomy thoughts come to us, whether from without or within, we
should quietly transfer our attention to something brighter. Even if
we are afflicted by some actual malady, we should keep our thought from
resting on it as far as we have the power to do so. An organic disease
may be increased a hundredfold by allowing the mind to brood on it, for
in so doing we place at its disposal all the resources of our organism,
and direct our life-force to our own destruction. On the other hand,
by denying it our attention and opposing it with curative
autosuggestions, we reduce its power to the minimum and should succeed
in overcoming it entirely. Even in the most serious organic diseases
the element contributed by wrong thought is infinitely greater than
that which is pur