The Book of Life. Upton Sinclair
we do not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, but which often completely make the house over.
William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonderful essay, "The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the fact that human beings as a general rule make use of only a small portion of the energies which dwell in their beings, and that one of our problems is to find the ways by which we can draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within us. Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the phenomena which hitherto the physician and the biologist have been disposed to ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mistaken, every scientist in the end will be forced to come back to the central fact, that life is a unity, and that the heart of it is the spirit; that what we call the will is not an accident, not a delusion, not some by-product of nature, but is the very secret of life; and that behind it is a vast ocean of power, which now and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the human consciousness.
The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding teacher of a certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he might call anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that the habit of men to enslave their fellows and exploit them and draw their substance from them without return—that this habit is destructive to all civilization, and is incompatible with any of the higher forms of life, intellectual, moral or artistic. He has come to the conclusion that there is no use attempting to build a structure of social life until there is a sound foundation; in other words, until the capitalist system has been replaced by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought he was, a poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful thing which we call genius. He saw his own consciousness, as it were a leaf driven before a mighty tempest of spiritual energy. And he believes that this experience was no delusion, but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being. He still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it in his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like a race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which "scenteth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." Because of these things he can never accept any philosophy which shackles the human spirit, he will never in his thought attempt to set bounds to the possibilities of human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the wonder of it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New universes are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us; and the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond anything that the average man can at present imagine, or that any instruments invented by science can weigh or measure.
CHAPTER XII
THE MIND OF THE BODY
(Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the intelligence.)
The importance of the mind in matters of health becomes clearer when we understand that what we commonly call our minds—the mental states which confront us day by day in our consciousness—are really but a small portion of our total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is an enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse attached to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, but to which we can go in case of need. This storehouse is our memory, the things we know and can recall at will. And then there is another, still vaster storehouse—no one has ever measured or guessed the size of it—which apparently contains everything that we have ever known, perhaps also everything that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the human mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it appears above the surface of the sea, but there is seven times as much of it floating out of sight under the water.
This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most closely united with the body. It has its seat in the back parts of the brain, in the spinal cord and the greater nervous ganglia, such as the solar plexus. It is the portion of our mind which controls the activities of our body, all those miraculous things which went on before we first opened our eyes to the light, and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die. When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our blood, some mysterious power causes millions of our blood corpuscles to be rushed to this spot, to destroy and devour the invading enemy. We do not know how this is done, but it is an intelligent act, measured and precisely regulated, as much so as a railroad time-table. When the supply of nourishment in the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of our stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the stomach, something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; when this digested food is prepared and taken up in the blood stream, something decides what portion of it shall be turned into muscle, what into brain cells, what into hair, what into finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes are made and we have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely intricate process goes on day and night without a hitch, and it is all the work of what we might call "the mind of the body."
And just as our material bodies are the product of an age-long process of development repeated in embryo by every individual, so is this mental life a product of long development, and carries memories of this far-off process. In our instincts there dwells all the past, not merely of the human race, but of all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely probing the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, it would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all the past. Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of evolution is told in a piece of chalk; and we probably do not exaggerate in saying that all the history of the universe is in the subconscious mind of every human being. When the partridge which has just come out of the egg sees the shadow of the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the partridge is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowledge impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience of millions of partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of years. When the physician lifts the newly born infant by its ankle and spanks it to make it cry, the physician is using his conscious reason, because he has learned from previous experience, or has been taught in the schools that it is necessary for the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared. But when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not moved by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is following an automatic reaction, as a result of the experience of infants in the stone age, experience which in some obscure way has been registered and stored in the infant cerebellum.
Science is now groping its way through this underworld of thought. Obviously we should have here a most powerful means of influencing the body, if by any chance we could control it. We are continually seeking in medical and surgical ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the body, which are controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are suffering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, what we call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw the congested blood away from the place of the pain. On the other hand, we may stimulate the functions of the intestines by the application of hot fomentations, to bring the blood more actively to that region. But if by any means we could make clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we should be dealing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more permanent results.
Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me tell you of a simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once knew a man who had learned to control the circulation of his blood by his conscious will. I have seen him lay his two hands on the table, both of the same color, and without moving the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other to turn pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental mustard plaster.
And what was done by this man's own will can be done to others in many ways. The most obvious is a device which we call hypnotism. This is a kind of sleep which affects only the conscious control of the body, but leaves all the senses awake. In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we discover that the subconscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb of the Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who climbs into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended one of the exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accustomed to give in country villages.