It is my belief, confirmed by the research and practice of nearly twenty years, that man’s supreme inheritance of conscious guidance and control is within the grasp of any one who will take the trouble to cultivate it. That it is no esoteric doctrine or mystical cult, but a synthesis of entirely reasonable propositions that can be demonstrated in pure theory and substantiated in common practice. I will now consider at greater length a characteristic case for the elucidation of these various points of theory and practice. M. H., a youth fourteen years old, was sent to me by a well-known throat specialist. He had removed two nodules from the boy’s vocal chords, and had given him special treatment in a nursing home for a month, but without any satisfactory improvement. The mother came to me with the boy and was present during my treatment. I found that his attempts to speak resulted in a hoarse whisper accompanied by spasmodic twitchings of various parts of the body and by facial contortions, all this being brought about by erroneous conceptions, left untouched by the former teacher, as to the amount of effort needed in order to speak. In his former lessons he had been told to try and improve the utterance of simple sounds and words, without any analysis or pointing out of the wrong means which he had previously employed to this end. All his efforts to carry out his teacher’s directions were made in accordance with his original preconceptions and former experience. His muscular mechanisms were employed in the same (wrong) way and his whole consciousness and explicit and implicit self-directions were exactly the same as they had been previously. He had opened his mouth imperfectly and had been ordered by his teacher to open his mouth wider. But there had been no recognition by the pupil that he had not opened his mouth sufficiently, neither had there been any analysis by the teacher of the pupil’s failure to open the mouth (a seemingly simple thing but _ex hypothesi_ not simple to the patient), or of the concomitant contortions and automatic reaction. As well say, “You have been speaking improperly, now speak properly,” and call that a lesson, as indeed it would have been called in the early Victorian era, as, “Open your mouth wide, speak up, and don’t make nervous movements.” It is not the “end” that the teacher and pupil must work for, but the “means whereby.” And this discovery of the “means whereby,” differing in different subjects and not to be stated in a general formula, can only be the result of trained observation and careful, patient investigation and experience. In practice, the anxiety of this particular pupil to _speak_ along the lines of his old preconceived ideas, when nothing had been done to remove them, had made his many lessons fruitless, and had set in motion the old habitual train of irrelevant and hampering actions.