MIND TRAINING
The Galton Institute of Mind Training. (Galton Institute, 90 Great Russell St., London, W.C. 12 lessons. £5 :v.) THE Middle Ages called it " accidie " : Coleridge called it " dejection." How well we know the frame of mind in which life seems so complex and unintelligible that we suffer a great failing of heart and are unable to set ourselves to any action because all actions appear indifferent. Every circum- stance loses its savour, and the very will to life becomes thin and powerless.
Man starts with a confidence in his destiny, and somehow, with what chastening and refinement we need not say, he is meant to keep his quick enthusiasm and the appreciation of everything that befalls him unclouded till the day of his death. It is that confidence that is at the root of all great action and all harmony of nature. But the struggle with bare reality, which ought to keep his enthusiasm to the deepest and most central channels, will often kill it. The vaster our civilization becomes, and the more its mechan- isms overshadow us, the more numerous are the men who grow dull and hopeless, consider themselves misfits, and sink into habitual sloth.
Some great incentive is necessary, in the worst cases, to break the tyranny of dejection. The will becomes diseased, and a diseased will is hard to deal with. The remedies are moderately simple in themselves ; anyone could give most admirable advice : the difficulty is to persuade the patient to act upon your advice. He wants nothing of the sort ; to some degree he feels a gloomy joy in the knowledge of his inefficiency and of the general colourlessness of life. But with that joy and pride in his sickness there goes, nevertheless, a continual nerve-strain and exhaustion and misery.
It is not the worst cases that a course such as the Galton Institute offers may benefit. For them there is only the hope of a sudden eclaircissement, a sudden rousing of interest and forgetfulness of self in working for an ideal of beauty and nobility. It would have been next to impossible to attempt to reclaim Coleridge, and convince him once more that it was " bliss to be alive." He knew all the arguments against his own lethargy ; he knew all the means for his salvation. But his will was dead, and he preferred not to break his own bondage. A martyr may smile with pure happiness under the sharpest torments ; in him the will is fiercely alive and wholly expanded ; it has been fixed un- alterably to some ideal, and in comparison with that the hardships of reality are pure sport. But with Coleridge, the slightest impact of reality seemed, in anticipation, an inconceivably terrible martyrdom ; a black and continual inaction was better than the slightest breath of being.
The business man who does not know what to do with himself in his leisure hours, the clerk who feels himself in a rut and grows sick of doing the same work, day after day, year after year, the teacher or the scholar who has lost am- bition, every man to whom life has become routine, are ill of the same disease in a milder degree, and it is to such people that the Galton System offers most hope. The advice it offers in these small books is sound ; it is based on a wide knowledge of human psychology, and the demands of the human mind. But the advice is almost the least important part of the course. Its value comes from the fact that the directors of the course know that action breaks the chains of indifference. Their effort is always directed towards making men look around them with interest and a new charge of vitality. And for that purpose they attempt to force their pupils to take matters in hand for themselves.
We are convinced that if anyone in whom zest and hopeful- ness had failed were to take up the Galton Course and work through it conscientiously, then he would find new powers in himself and would be able to direct his abilities to the best use. We believe that in many correspondence courses it is of no particular moment to the directors what , happens to their pupils once they have paid their money ; but it is obvious that the directors of the Galton Course are intent upon giving full value to their pupils. In the first of these books they announce " You have begun the Galton Course ; we want you to finish it. Resolve to do so. It means, possibly, the whole difference between success and failure.".
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