How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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into the old trunk of her childhood pattern. She rationalizes her failures, she overlooks her mistakes. She considers herself a very emancipated young lady, but the chief attributes of her pattern of conduct are ignorance and persistence. She can never attain happiness, because a woman can no more find happiness in trying to subvert nature by acting “ as if” she were a man, than a rabbit can achieve happiness acting “ as if ” he were a lion. The Law of Psychic Inertia As a first step in the understanding of human conduct, let us formulate the law of psychic inertia. Human beings tend to maintain a fixed pattern of conduct, determined by the dynamic forces of early childhood, unless some profound experience, or a systematic psychological analysis and re-educa¬ tion diverts that pattern into a new channel. In other words if a human being were to perceive and evaluate himself as a huge block of marble in early childhood, and would pick out the drills and chisels necessary to hew that marble into the heroic statue he wanted to be, that man would tend to continue hacking away at the resistant stone despite all criticism and proof that he was dealing with a small block of wood, unless some distressing accident such as a grave self-injury, or a systematic and friendly review of the pattern of his activities from early childhood, an analysis of his early childhood miscon¬ ceptions, and a re-education in the use of new and more appropriate tools, were instituted. Under such circumstances our man would learn to be objective about himself, and not subjective. By objective we mean that he would know that he was hewing at a block of wood, and finding joy in carving it into a fine, if small, statue. (The subjective man hacks at a block of wood with chisels designed for marble, because he is afraid to look at reality, and acts “ as if” it were marble. To do this, naturally, he must exclude the opinions of his fellows to a large extent, and if he becomes so subjective that he excludes all common sense and lives according to