Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves.

  • Ernest R. Groves
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    market for his products if he hopes to farm with profit. The composition of his soil is as stubborn a fact as is our heredity. If he understands what he has and how to handle it for his advantage, his success is great. Swamp land, for example, through drainage may become extraordinarily adapted to truck farming. So it is with our inheritance. It cannot be eliminated but it makes a vast difference how we handle it. The available market for the farmer’s harvest is another rigorous fact that cannot be side-stepped. The same is true of the social situation in which each of us finds himself. We all wish to make the most of ourselves, and realize in our thoughtful moments that this is the only way to happiness, but we shy away from the self-knowledge that the best use of our hereditary and social opportunities re¬ quires. It is easy enough to realize that we can get satisfac¬ tion from our automobile only as we know how to handle it. Although the same principle operates in human be¬ havior, for reasons that this book will make clear we are not as ready to do the one thing needful for making the most of ourselves. It will help us to understand our problems to consider the working of that part of the human self that we desig¬ nate as the body. No instrument known to man is more complicated. No product of man’s is so self-regulating, with its millions of parts working together in complex cooperation. The mere mechanics of the body as now known to science are so specialized, so intricate, and so [18]