finds it almost impossible to read it at all. The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind‐cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group.(45) It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind‐curers’ ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who _can_ be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.(46) To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered _frowardness_ to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind‐curers say that the mark of the beast in it is _fear_; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion. “Fear,” to quote a writer of the school, “has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word _fearthought_ to stand for the unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word ‘worry’ as _fearthought in contradistinction to forethought_. I have also defined fearthought as _the self‐imposed or self‐ permitted suggestion of inferiority_, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable things.”(47)