I believe that all the above will be found sufficiently well supported by
facts. If so, when we feel that we are getting old we should try and
give our cells such treatment as they will find it most easy to
understand, through their experience of their own individual life, which,
however, can only guide them inferentially, and to a very small extent;
and throughout life we should remember the important bearing which memory
has upon health, and both occasionally cross the memories of our
component cells with slightly new experiences, and be careful not to put
them either suddenly or for long together into conditions which they will
not be able to understand. Nothing is so likely to make our cells forget
themselves, as neglect of one or other of these considerations. They
will either fail to recognise themselves completely, in which case we
shall die; or they will go on strike, more or less seriously as the case
may be, or perhaps, rather, they will try and remember their usual
course, and fail; they will therefore try some other, and will probably
make a mess of it, as people generally do when they try to do things
which they do not understand, unless indeed they have very exceptional
capacity.
It also follows that when we are ill, our cells being in such or such a
state of mind, and inclined to hold a corresponding opinion with more or
less unreasoning violence, should not be puzzled more than they are
puzzled already, by being contradicted too suddenly; for they will not be
in a frame of mind which can understand the position of an open opponent:
they should therefore either be let alone, if possible, without notice
other than dignified silence, till their spleen is over, and till they
have remembered themselves; or they should be reasoned with as by one who
agrees with them, and who is anxious to see things as far as possible
from their own point of view. And this is how experience teaches that we
must deal with monomaniacs, whom we simply infuriate by contradiction,
but whose delusion we can sometimes persuade to hang itself if we but
give it sufficient rope. All which has its bearing upon politics, too,
at much sacrifice, it may be, of political principles, but a politician
who cannot see principles where principle-mongers fail to see them, is a
dangerous person.
I may say, in passing, that the reason why a small wound heals, and
leaves no scar, while a larger one leaves a mark which is more or less
permanent, may be looked for in the fact that when the wound is only
small, the damaged cells are snubbed, so to speak, by the vast majority
of the unhurt cells in their own neighbourhood. When the wound is more
serious they can stick to it, and bear each other out that they were
hurt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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