How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

CHAPTER SEVEN Of Training Dreams, Humour, and Philosophy Psychic Selectivity and Experience—How We“ Make ” Our Experiences —-Procrustes and the Scheme of Apperception—The Training Formula—The Function of Memory—The Importance of Child¬ hood Memories—-About Dreams—Of Wit and Humour—The Psycho-dynamics of a joke—The Value of Sport—Of Basic Philosophies—Mysticism, Fatalism, and Hedonism. OBSERVING the life and conduct of your fellow-men is like being a Martian spectator at a football match. You see men and women moving, working, striving, and struggling, according to some mysterious plan whose ultimate ends you may appreciate but whose immediate meaning is beyond your comprehension. Positions are taken, signals are given. Suddenly both teams clash in a conflict of purposes. You know in a general way that each team wants to get the ball through the other team's goal posts, but you know little or nothing of the immediate strategy of each move in the struggle. You know even less about the practice, preparation, and training that has preceded the contest for weeks. You see only the dramatic moment—and unless you have been a player yourself, you realize but little of the training that has preceded the successful play. The hours of coaching that preceded and prepared for each single dramatic episode are sensed only by experts who under¬ stand that no play is an accident—that every movement has been thought out and prepared by weeks of gruelling practice. Perhaps you have noticed that, in the great crises of human life, there is always some man who steps into the breach and seems to meet the critical situation as if all his life had been a preparation for that particular emergency. As a matter of fact, we are all in constant