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THE
MUJIC TIRADE
V O L . L V I I I . N o . 8 Published Every Saturday by E d w a r d Lyman Bill a t 373 Fourth Ave M N e w York, Feb. 2 1 , 1914
10 CENTS
S SINGLE
I
» s . o o COPIES,
P E R YEAR!
T IKE many others who like true drama as opposed to the decadent sex plays of our times, I
I
have been enjoying recently the presentation of Shakespearean plays in this city by that
1 j
marvelous actor Forbes-Robertson.
The more I hear, the more I read, the more I see of Shakespeare the more I am aston-
ished at the wisdom he displayed in estimating the importance of the thought sources in shaping
the affairs of life.
He saw clearly thai it was not luck that paved the way for success, but on the contrary a
career was made or marred by the dominant mental attitude of the individual.
"The fault, dear Brutus," he wrote, "is not in our siars, but in ourselves, that we are the
underlings."
He saw, too, that fear was the most dangerous factor with which the mind has to contend,
and he often expounded the truth most emphatically that if life appears as a failure to us,
we can trace the causes of our inability to succeed back to our lack of faith in ourselves, or to
our lack of initiative—the fact that "w r e are the underlings" is clearly one for which we alone are
to blame. To charge it to the stars that were in the ascendancy at the hour of our birth, or to
the lines in our hand, or to any other factor which dabbles in the occult, is simply to find a
scapegoat behind which we may hide our own weaknesses.
Shakespeare realized this fact. He may not have known precisely how dangerous an element
fear is in life, but he saw that it was often responsible for human failure.
Fear can strain every muscle in the body—fear affects the flow of the blood, likewise the
action of all the life forces; and if fear can exert so tremendous a factor upon the physical body
what must it do to the mind?
We can easily believe that it opens the way for the actualization of the very image that it sees.
To become a slave of fear oftentimes is to court failure.
Only recently a man who was bitten by a dog, which developed no signs of hydrophobia, was
constantly told by some alleged friends that he would soon have hydrophobia. It preyed so upon
his mind that he actually died of the dreaded disease, through what the doctors claim was auto-
suggestion—fear, nothing else.
A study of the human brain, and the discovery of the process by which thoughts and emotions
cut through its channels, give us a foundation upon which we may construct a logical and scien-
tific demonstration of the truth of the words that the Bard of Avon penned so many centuries ago.
If every thought we think makes so lasting an impression upon the brain structure and the cut-
ting of such a channel materially smoothes the way for similar thoughts to follow, it becomes easy
for us to realize how we may become subject to evil thoughts and injurious emotions—in fact,,
how the bad habits that handicap us so seriously are formed.
Thus it is that we can trace manv of our failures to ourselves
ami to no other cause!
'
Fear! Out with it! Have faith—hope—and the cause is half won,