Worry: the disease of the age.

  • Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams), 1878-1940.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Worry: the disease of the age. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    constant, commonplace fact, influencing body and mind, in greater or less degree, throughout the lives of the ordinary people with ordinary affairs, who constitute the overwhelming bulk of humanity. I have therefore deliberately avoided the more obvious of the two logical arrangements which my chapters might display. I propose to deal not first of all with the causes of worry and then with its consequences and cure, but first of all with its consequences, incidentally with its causes, thereafter with its cure. This order, however, may be logically defended; it corresponds to the defining of your subject before you expatiate upon it. First of all, we must know what worry is and what it signifies to human life ; then, since its curable- ness is a matter of history, we must observe the modes in which men have cured it, and consider how their experience may serve our own need. Also, we shall consider the more abstract problem—a problem in pure psychology —of the causation of worry. From some points of view this is the most interesting question of all, but it is interesting only because we know how much worry signifies, and so our discussion of it need not come first. In seeking the fundamental, though not the only cure for worry, our guide, I believe, will be the closing lines, which I have quoted, of the sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture. Mind and body, as we shall see, are inextricably one, and yet are not identical. Primarily, worry is a mental fact, and is to be dealt with by mental,