When he tested them under normal waking conditions, their average grip was 101 pounds.
When he tested them after he had hypnotised them and told them that they were very weak, they could grip only 29 pounds -less than a third of their normal strength. (One of these men was a prize fighter; and when he was told under hypnosis that he was weak, he remarked that his arm felt “tiny, just like a baby’s”.)
When Captain Hadfield then tested these men a third time, telling them under hypnosis that they were very strong, they were able to grip an average of 142 pounds. When their minds were filled with positive thoughts of strength, they increased their actual physical powers almost five hundred per cent.
Such is the incredible power of our mental attitude.
To illustrate the magic power of thought, let me tell you one of the most astounding stories in the annals of America. I could write a book about it; but let’s be brief. On a frosty October night, shortly after the close of the Civil War, a homeless, destitute woman, who was little more than a wanderer on the face of the earth, knocked at the door of “Mother” Webster, the wife of a retired sea captain, living in Amesbury, Massachusetts.
Opening the door, “Mother” Webster saw a frail little creature, “scarcely more than a hundred pounds of frightened skin and bones”. The stranger, a Mrs. Glover, explained she was seeking a home where she could think and work out a great problem that absorbed her day and night.
“Why not stay here?” Mrs. Webster replied. “I’m all alone in this big house.”
Mrs. Glover might have remained indefinitely with “Mother” Webster, if the latter’s son-in-law, Bill Ellis, hadn’t come up from New York for a vacation. When he discovered Mrs. Glover’s presence, he shouted: “I’ll have no vagabonds in this house”; and he shoved this homeless woman out of the door. A driving rain was falling. She stood shivering in the rain for a few minutes, and then started down the road, looking for shelter.
Here is the astonishing part of the story. That “vagabond” whom Bill Ellis put out of the house was destined to have as much influence on the thinking of the world as any other woman who ever walked this earth. She is now known to millions of devoted followers as Mary Baker Eddy-the founder of Christian Science.
Yet, until this time, she had known little in life except sickness, sorrow, and tragedy. Her first husband had died shortly after their marriage. Her second husband had deserted her and eloped with a married woman. He later died in a poor-house. She had only one child, a son; and she was forced, because of poverty, illness, and jealousy, to give him up when he was four years old. She lost all track of him and never saw him again for thirty-one years.
Because of her own ill health, Mrs. Eddy had been interested for years in what she called “the science of mind healing”. But the dramatic turning point in her life occurred in Lynn, Massachusetts. Walking downtown one cold day, she slipped and fell on the icy pavement-and was knocked unconscious. Her spine was so injured that she was convulsed with spasms. Even the doctor expected her to die. If by some miracle she lived, he declared that she would never walk again.
Lying on what was supposed to be her deathbed, Mary Baker Eddy opened her Bible, and was led, she declared, by divine guidance to read these words from Saint Matthew: “And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus … said unto the sick of the palsy: Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. … Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose, and departed to his house.”
These words of Jesus, she declared, produced within her such a strength, such a faith, such a surge of healing power, that she “immediately got out of bed and walked”.
“That experience,” Mrs. Eddy declared, “was the falling apple that led me to the discovery of how to be well myself, and how to make others so. … I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.”
Such was the way in which Mary Baker Eddy became the founder and high priestess of a new religion: Christian Science -the only great religious faith ever established by a woman- a religion that has encircled the globe.
You are probably saying to yourself by now: “This man Carnegie is proselytising for Christian Science.” No. You are wrong. I am not a Christian Scientist. But the longer I live, the more deeply I am convinced of the tremendous power of thought. As a result of thirty-five years spent in teaching adults, I know men and women can banish worry, fear, and various kind of illness, and can transform their lives by changing their thoughts. I know! I know! ! I know! ! ! I have seen such incredible transformations performed hundreds of times. I have seen them so often that I no longer wonder at them.
For example, one of these transformations happened to one of my students, Frank J. Whaley, of 1469 West Idaho Street, Saint Paul, Minnesota. He had a nervous breakdown. What brought it on? Worry. Frank Whaley tells me: “I worried about everything: I worried because I was too thin; because I thought I was losing my hair; because I feared I would never make enough money to get married; because I felt I would never make a good father; because I feared I was losing the girl I wanted to marry; because I felt I was not living a good life. I worried about the impression I was making on other people. I worried because I thought I had stomach ulcers. I could no longer work; I gave up my job. I built up tension inside me until I was like a boiler without a safety valve. The pressure got so unbearable that something had to give-and it did. If you have never had a nervous breakdown, pray God that you never do, for no pain of the body can exceed the excruciating pain of an agonised mind.
“My breakdown was so severe that I couldn’t talk even to my own family. I had no control over my thoughts. I was filled with fear. I would jump at the slightest noise. I avoided everybody. I would break out crying for no apparent reason at all.
“Every day was one of agony. I felt that I was deserted by everybody-even God. I was tempted to jump into the river and end it all.
“I decided instead to take a trip to Florida, hoping that a change of scene would help me. As I stepped on the train, my father handed me a letter and told me not to open it until I reached Florida. I landed in Florida during the height of the tourist season. Since I couldn’t get in a hotel, I rented a sleeping room in a garage. I tried to get a job on a tramp freighter out of Miami, but had no luck. So I spent my time at the beach. I was more wretched in Florida than I had been at home; so I opened the envelope to see what Dad had written. His note said: ‘Son, you are 1,500 miles from home, and you don’t feel any different, do you? I knew you wouldn’t, because you took with you the one thing that is the cause of all your trouble, that is, yourself. There is nothing wrong with either your body or your mind. It is not the situations you have met that have thrown you; it is what you think of these situations. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” When you realise that, son, come home, for you will be cured.’
“Dad’s letter made me angry. I was looking for sympathy, not instruction. I was so mad that I decided then and there that I would never go home. That night as I was walking down one of the side streets of Miami, I came to a church where services were going on. Having no place to go, I drifted in and listened to a sermon on the text: ‘He who conquers his spirit is mightier than he who taketh a city.’ Sitting in the sanctity of the house of God and hearing the same thoughts that my Dad had written in his letter-all this swept the accumulated litter out of my brain. I was able to think clearly and sensibly for the first time in my life. I realised what a fool I had been. I was shocked to see myself in my true light: here I was, wanting to change the whole world and everyone in it- when the only thing that needed changing was the focus of the lens of the camera which was my mind.
“The next morning I packed and started home. A week later I was back on the job. Four months later I married the girl I had been afraid of losing. We now have a happy family of five children. God has been good to me both materially and mentally. At the time of the breakdown I was a night foreman of a small department handling eighteen people. I am now superintendent of carton manufacture in charge of over four hundred and fifty people. Life is much fuller and friendlier. I believe I appreciate the true values of life now. When moments of uneasiness try to creep in (as they will in everyone’s life) I tell myself to get that camera back in focus, and everything is O.K.
“I can honestly say that I am glad I had the breakdown, because I found out the hard way what power our thoughts can have over our mind and our body. Now I can make my thoughts work for me instead of against me. I can see now that Dad was right when he said it wasn’t outward situations that had caused all my suffering, but what I thought of those situations. And as soon as I realised that, I was cured-and stayed cured.” Such was the experience of Frank J. Whaley.
I am deeply convinced that our peace of mind and the joy we get out of living depends not on where we are, or what we have, or who we are, but solely upon our mental attitude. Outward conditions have very little to do with it. For example, let’s take the case of old John Brown, who was hanged for seizing the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry and trying to incite the slaves to rebellion. He rode away to the gallows, sitting on his coffin. The jailer who rode beside him was nervous and worried. But old John Brown was calm and cool. Looking up at the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, he exclaimed: “What a beautiful country! I never had an opportunity to really see it before.”
Or take the case of Robert Falcon Scott and his companions- the first Englishman ever to reach the South Pole. Their return trip was probably the cruelest journey ever undertaken by man. Their food was gone-and so was their fuel. They could no longer march because a howling blizzard roared down over the rim of the earth for eleven days and nights-a wind so fierce and sharp that it cut ridges in the polar ice. Scott and his companions knew they were going to die; and they had brought a quantity of opium along for just such an emergency. A big dose of opium, and they could all lie down to pleasant dreams, never to wake again. But they ignored the drug, and died “singing ringing songs of cheer”. We know they did because of a farewell letter found with their frozen bodies by a searching party, eight months later.
Yes, if we cherish creative thoughts of courage and calmness, we can enjoy the scenery while sitting on our coffin, riding to the gallows; or we can fill our tents with “ringing songs of cheer”, while starving and freezing to death.
Milton in his blindness discovered that same truth three hundred years ago:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
Napoleon and Helen Keller are perfect illustrations of Milton’s statement: Napoleon had everything men usually crave-glory, power, riches-yet he said at St. Helena: “I have never known six happy days in my life”; while Helen Keller- blind, deaf, dumb-declared: “I have found life so beautiful.”
If half a century of living has taught me anything at all, it has taught me that “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
I am merely trying to repeat what Emerson said so well in the closing words of his essay on “Self-Reliance” : “A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher, warned that we ought to be more concerned about removing wrong thoughts from the mind than about removing “tumours and abscesses from the body.”