t has once been aroused. It is a sad
fact that many people have been argued into long nervous illnesses by
would-be kind friends whose only intention was to argue them out of
illness. Even the kindest and most disinterested friends are apt to
lose patience when they argue, and that, to the tired brain which they
are trying to relieve, is a greater irritant than they realize. The
radical cure for nervous fears is to drop resistance to painful
circumstances or conditions. Resistance is unwillingness to endure, and
to drop the resistance is to be strongly willing. This vigorous
"willingness" is so absolutely certain in its happy effect, and is so
impossible that it should fail, that the resistant impulses seem to
oppose themselves to it with extreme energy. It is as if the
resistances were conscious imps, and as if their certainty of
defeat--in the case of their victim's entire "willingness "--roused
them to do their worst, and to hold on to their only possible means of
power with all the more determination. Indeed, when a man is working
through a hard state, in gaining his freedom from nervous fears, these
imps seem to hold councils of war, and to devise new plans of attack in
order to take him by surprise and overwhelm him in an emergency. But
every sharp attack, if met with quiet "willingness," brings a defeat
for the assailants, until finally the resistant imps are conquered and
disappear. Occasionally a stray imp will return, and try to arouse
resistance on what he feels is old familiar ground, but he is quickly
driven off, and the experience only makes a man more quietly vigilant
and more persistently "willing."

Perhaps one of the most prevalent and one of the hardest fears to meet,
is that of insanity,--especially when it is known to be a probable or
possible inheritance. When such fear is oppressing a man,--to tell him
that he not only can get free from the fear, but free from any
possibility of insanity, through a perfect willingness to be insane,
must seem to him at first a monstrous mockery; and, if you cannot
persuade him of the truth, but find that you are only frightening him
more, there is nothing to do then but to be willing that he should not
be persuaded, and to wait for a better opportunity. You can show him
that no such inheritance can become an actuality, unless we permit it,
and that the very knowledge of an hereditary tendency, when wholesomely
used, makes it possible for us to take every precaution