And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical
life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. If one's
example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels
by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the
more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to
succeed. _Become the imitable thing,_ and you may then discharge your
minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social
nature will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on
which this precept reposes is a law of very deep and widespread
importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which
we Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is
this: that _strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free
association of one's objective ideas and motor processes._ We get the
extreme example of this in the mental disease called melancholia.
A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely
painful emotion about himself.
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