ounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on
the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. This follows as a
necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made
reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that
so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense
and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening,
exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you
never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep
your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe
eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite
breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner
panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly
forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to
your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete,
and your muscles all relaxed?

Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning
quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is
that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic
performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary
progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the
rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well,
our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many
parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are
found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every
great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.

To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology
and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to
be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the
imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin
here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one
may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is
social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and
intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only
secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are _bad habits_, nothing
more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitatio