As a Matter of Course

surrounding country. If in the same journey we set a stone in the way and recognize our ability to step over it, we do s

em. Or, if semi-occasionally one of these stones is stepped over as a matter of course, the danger is that attention is immediately called to the action by admiring friends, or by the person himself, in a way so to tickle the nervous system that it amounts to an irritati

tation than is imagined. They are what might perhaps be called the outside elements of life. These

rer the kernel, and have a gro

hose who achieve it, or it may so bind him body and soul that in moments when he recognizes his nervous contr

perversion of civilization, and the cause of

arious trippings on, and endeavors to encircle, this physical stone, raise many phantom stones, and the severity of the fall is just as great when one trips over a stone that is not there. Don Quixote was quite e

d not rested upon. It seems to produce an inability for any sort of recreation, and a scorn of the necessity or the pleasure of being amused. Every one will admit tha

g these pebbles in their natural size would reduce them shortly to a pile of sand which might be easily smoothed to a level, and add to the comfort of the path. Moods are stones which not only may be stepped over, b

nd ignores. In our relations with illness and poverty, so-called, the ghosts of stones multiply themselves as the illness or the poverty is allowed to

r of course, and not as a matter of sentiment, we get a powerful result just

and the man who governed himself and allowed his neighbor to escape unslain was regarded as a hero. Subsequently, general slashing was found to be incompati

has taken us too far for that. But civilization does not necessarily mean repression. There are many refinements of barbarity in our civilization which might be dropped now, as the coarser expressions of such states were dropped by our ancestors to enable them to reach the present stage of knives and forks and napk

ithin us as from the complexity of civilization? The remedy is, not to let the savage have his own way; with many of us, indeed, this would

ician would allow it in bodily disease, and, on careful obse

tones, these survivals of barbaric times, may

ctical way, and not the sentimental. T

t comes to be indeed a matter of course. So, little by little, shall we emerge f