y thing that
does reanimate; and therein lies the morbid state. The way to treat
such persons is to discover to them more usual and useful ways of
throwing their stores of vital energy into gear.

Colonel Baird-Smith, needing to draw on altogether extraordinary stores
of energy, found that brandy and opium were ways of throwing them into
gear.

Such cases are humanly typical. We are all to some degree oppressed,
unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at
it. The threshold must be made to shift. Then many of us find that an
eccentric activity--a "spree," say--relieves. There is no doubt that
to some men sprees and excesses of almost any kind are medicinal,
temporarily at any rate, in spite of what the moralists and doctors say.

But when the normal tasks and stimulations of life don't put a man's
deeper levels of energy on tap, and he requires distinctly deleterious
excitements, his constitution verges on the abnormal. The normal
opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will. The
difficulty is to use it, to make the effort which the word volition
implies. But if we do make it (or if a god, though he were only the
god Chance, makes it through us), it will act dynamogenically on us for
a month. It is notorious that a single successful effort of moral
volition, such as saying "no" to some habitual temptation, or
performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of
energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power. "In the
act of uncorking the whiskey bottle which I had brought home to get
drunk upon," said a man to me, "I suddenly found myself running out
into the garden, where I smashed it on the ground. I felt so happy and
uplifted after this act, that for two months I was n't tempted to touch
a drop."

The emotions and excitements due to usual situations are the usual
inciters of the will. But these act discontinuously; and in the
intervals the shallower levels of life tend to close in and shut us
off. Accordingly the best practical knowers of the human soul have
invented the thing known as methodical ascetic discipline to keep the
deeper levels constantly in reach. Beginning with easy tasks, passing
to harder ones, and exercising day by day, it is, I believe, admitted
that disciples of asceticism can reach very high levels of freedom and
power of will.

Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises must have produced this result in
innumerab