Those suffering from shell-shock deafness and muteness were told that an electrode would be applied to their larynx or the neighborhood of their ear and when they felt pain from it, that was a sign that they were able to talk and to hear if they wished, and that they must do so. Relapses had to be guarded against by suggestion, and where relapses became refractory and stronger currents of electricity to ear and larynx were deemed inadvisable, the strict isolation treatment usually proved effective. In a word, discipline and not sympathy was the valuable mode of treating them. Sympathy did them harm as it invariably does. The world has recognized this truism always, but we need to learn the lesson afresh, or the will power is undermined. Character is built up by standing the difficult things of life without looking for the narcotic of sympathy or any other anaesthetizing material. These are "hard sayings," to use a Scriptural expression, but they represent the accumulation of wisdom of human experience. Sympathy can be {67} almost as destructive of individual morale as the dreads, and it is extremely important that it should not be allowed to sap will energy. In our time above all, when the training of the will has been neglected, though it is by far the most important factor in education, this lesson with regard to the harmful effect of sympathy needs to be emphasized. For nervous people, that is, for those who have, either from inheritance or so much oftener from environment, yielded to circumstances rather than properly opposed them, sympathy is quite as dangerous as opium. George Eliot once replied to a friend who asked her what was duty, that duty consisted in facing the hard things in life without taking opium. Healthy living to a great extent depends on standing what has to be borne from the bodies that we carry around with us without looking for sympathy. It has often been emphasized that human beings are eminently lonely. The great experiences of life and above all, death and suffering, we have to face by ourselves and no one can help us. We may not be, as Emerson suggested, "infinitely repellent particles", but at all the profoundest moments of life we feel our alone-ness. The more {68} that we learn to depend bravely on ourselves and the less we seek outside support for our characters, the better for us and our power to stand whatever comes to us in life. Physical ills are always lessened by courageously facing them and are always increased by cringing before them. The one who dreads suffers both before and during the time of the pain and thus doubles his discomfort. We must stand alone in the matter and sympathy is prone to unman us. Looking for sympathy is a tendency to that self-pity which is treated in a subsequent chapter and which does more to increase discomfort in illness, exaggerate symptoms, and lower resistive vitality than anything else, in the psychic order at least.