What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear.
Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years--say for twenty or thirty years--the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people--even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go about--even the most elegant of them--thinking with their stomachs.
Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven--as if they had just been caught passing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below.
Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people.
We realize--whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs.
The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it--the question of how other people--a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation--these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it.
The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reëducating and recoördinating their bodies.