ar condition of mind of which, as we have already pointed out,
egoism is the pivot.

In this way it is a common occurrence to see people of timidity paying
exaggerated attention to the slightest changes in the condition of their
health.

Such people by shutting themselves out from the world have reduced it to
the circumference of their own personalities and everything which
touches them necessarily assumes gigantic importance in their eyes.

The slightest opposition becomes for them a catastrophe. The smallest
unpleasantness presents itself to them in the light of a tragic
misfortune.

For this reason the lives of the timid become a succession of boredoms
and of pains.

Even in those cases where no really unfortunate incident occurs, these
people so exaggerate what actually does happen to them that the least
little emotion causes them the most profound unhappiness.

On those days when nothing in particular happens they spend their time
anticipating all sorts of disasters, including those which are not the
least likely to happen. To them the tiniest cloud is an omen of a
devastating storm.

When the sun is shining their timidity prevents them from exposing
themselves to the heat of its rays.

The timid man, in his moral isolation, is like the hare, who, crouched
in its form, sleeps with one eye open in constant terror of the
passer-by or of the hunter.

It may be well to add that worry about oneself is invariably an
accompaniment of all these troubles. People without poise are, with very
few exceptions, egotists who exaggerate their own importance.

Moreover, they suffer keenly from the obscurity into which their defects
have forced them as well as from dread of the alternatives presented to
them, the making of an effort to escape this fate, an idea that fills
them with horror, or the continuing to live in the unhappy condition
that has spoiled existence for them through their own faults.

It is hardly then a matter for surprize that so many people who are thus
mentally out of balance end by becoming neurotics or become a prey to
those cerebral disorders that are, unfortunately, all too frequent.

This condition of solitude, at once deplored and self-imposed, has the
still more serious disadvantage of leaving the mind, for lack of proper
control, to the domination of the most false and exaggerated ideas.

It is a well-known fact that any force of exaggeration, however obvious,
becomes less noticeable to u