the mental
soil prepared by indifference and fetichism to produce the malady from
which so many are now suffering.

I think physicians will generally agree that where the exciting cause can
be totally removed that method of dealing with the disease is far more
effective than any attempt to secure immunity. I believe that in most
cases it is so in the present instance.

In other words, my prescription is the abandonment, in nine cases out of
ten, of the set programme, and the substitution of something that is
interesting primarily to each individual concerned. This is no new
doctrine. Listen to William James:

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting
through becoming associated with an object in which an interest
already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were,
together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the
whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow
an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any
natively interesting thing.... If we could recall for a moment our
whole individual history, we should see that our professional
ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow
accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from
point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in
the schoolroom, some little story told, some little object shown,
some little operation witnessed, brought the first new object and
new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of
those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the whole
system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us
now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming cling to
one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple
the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our
thinking--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
original source of interest in all of them is the native interest
which the earliest one once possessed.

If we are to exorcise this spirit of indifference that has settled down
like a miasma upon clubdom we must find James's original germ of
interest--the twig upon which our cluster of bees is ultimately to hang.
Here we may introduce two axioms: Everyone is deeply interested in
something; few are supremely interested in the same thing. I shall not
attempt to p