How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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of God’s will and plan for the universe.” Scientific teleology teaches that the shape of the egg is part of its in-dwelling purpose—the best possible way of safely hatching young birds. Theological teleology is extrinsic : scientific teleology is intrinsic. Dead matter permits of a mechanistic explanation ; but living matter, which has an in-dwelling purpose—to keep alive—must be judged from a teleological point of view. The purposiveness or hormic drift of the neuroses has not been understood until very recent times, and is still not understood by many physicians. In ancient times the aberrations of human conduct were laid at the door of evil spirits, demons, or Satan himself—a purely mechanistic explanation. The treatment of neuroses, until fairly recent times, therefore, was directed chiefly to the exorcism of the evil spirits whose presence caused the unfortunate victim to err from the path of human rectitude. The unspeakable tortures that were inflicted on the victims of nervous and mental disease in the old days are common knowledge. In due time the demonic school of thought fortunately gave way to the more modern method of describing the neuroses according to the symptoms they present, and thus attempting to understand them. Thus one set of neuroses were called anxiety neuroses because the emotion of fear together with the frantic and irresponsible activity of spiritual panic were the most noticeable characteristics of the neurotic’s behaviour. Others were called psychasthenia, because the individual seemed actually to have a spirit too weak for the problems of this world. Aboulia, an apparent absence of will, was considered a cardinal symptom of some neuroses, and compulsive doubt the characteristic of others. The syndrome which we know as dementia prascox was characterized as schizophrenia because the personality seemed to be split into two or more distinct personalities ; another clinical syndrome was known as manic-depressive psychosis, because of the wide variation in the patient’s emotional attidudes, and because of his