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

stream between the original feeling of inferiority and the imagined (and often unconscious) goal of superiority, power, security, totality, which he believes necessary for happiness. But the world is very large, and the possible range, of experience is so great that an individual “ muddling through ” life will come in contact with a great many experiences which may not only not con¬ tribute to his goal, but may actually detract or divert him from his unconscious purpose. We must exercise some selectivity in our experiences. To accomplish this end every one develops a formula with which to test each experience in advance so as to determine whether or not it may be assimilated into his unit pattern. We call this formula the scheme of apperception. The scheme of apperception is the many-branched antenna with which the personality feels its way through life’s difficulties. Psychic Selectivity and Experience We need not invent a psychological device simply to explain the circumstances of psychic selectivity. As in our other explanations of human conduct we need but apply the sound scientific principles of physiology to our psychological thinking to find the truth. The ingestion and digestion of food is the closest analogy in physiology to the observed facts of psychology. The purpose of eating, comparable to the goal of individual life, is to keep alive. Food is the fuel we utilize to keep alive, just as, in the psychological sphere, we seek experiences to build up our psychic pattern of life. As all the food we eat is not necessarily capable of assimilation in our bodies, so all the experiences we meet in a life-time are not necessarily valuable to our psychic patterns. We must test a morsel before we eat it. To test it we have to use our senses of sight, touch, smell, and feeling, and our experience, plus these valuable feelers, helps us to avoid poisonous food, i.e. material that cannot be assimilated. If a morsel smells as if it were decayed we do not even attempt to put it into our mouths, because experience has taught us that this will lead to pain or disease. In