THE AMERICAN MIND IN ACTION (CLASSIC REPRINT)

Excerpt from The American Mind in ActionThe Puritan, in fact, was attempting what we now know to be practically impossible. The conscious mind can easily control instinctive action, it cannot wholly control instinctive thought. It can control the action the more easily if it allows the thought into the conscious mind, where it appears to drain Off the energy somewhat and relieve the tension. The Puri tan could not permit himself the safety valve Of this drainage. When his instinctive thoughts came into consciousness, they filled him with a fear of eternal punishment, a feeling of guilt, a conviction of base ness, a ceaseless anxiety from which he rarely Obtained any secure escape. This is the key to the Puritan char acter and to the code Of social conduct which he set. At his worst, he had a bad case Of floating anxiety, as physicians now call it, his repressions, in various disguises, leaked into his mind poisonously, and he blew up under the strain in an appalling way. At his best, he was likely to be a worried, sour faced, self persecuted, joyless hypochondriac.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works._,