But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way of _waking up deeper levels of will-power than are habitually used_, and thereby increasing the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They _make use_ of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the "psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the underlying _sentiment d'incomplétude_, as he calls it, or _sentiment de l'irréel_ with which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals, religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.? What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately made popular by Horace Fletcher--I dare say you have heard of them. You see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate it _ad oculos_, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the old-fashioned _Guru_ was becoming quite a rarity.