"And if we are unwilling to believe in this internal mastery over the
body, we are perhaps almost equally unaccustomed to the idea of mastery
over our own inner thoughts and feelings. That a man should be a prey to
any thought that chances to take possession of his mind, is commonly
among us assumed as unavoidable. It may be a matter of regret that he
should be kept awake all night from anxiety as to the issue of a lawsuit
on the morrow, but that he should have the power of determining whether
he be kept awake or not seems an extravagant demand. The image of an
impending calamity is no doubt odious, but its very odiousness (we say)
makes it haunt the mind all the more pertinaciously and it is useless to
try to expel it.

"Yet this is an absurd position--for man, the heir of all the ages:
hag-ridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain. If a pebble in our
boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and shake it out.
And once the matter is fairly understood it is just as easy to expel an
intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. About this there ought to
be no mistake, no two opinions. The thing is obvious, clear and
unmistakable. It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from
your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can
do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and
all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged
phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain.

"Yet the weary and careworn faces that we meet by thousands, even among
the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too clearly how seldom
this mastery is obtained. How rare indeed to meet a _man_! How common
rather to discover a creature hounded on by tyrant thoughts (or cares or
desires), cowering, wincing under the lash--or perchance priding himself
to run merrily in obedience to a driver that rattles the reins and