The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it—the question of how other people—a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation—these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it.
The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reëducating and recoördinating their bodies.
I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in the Atlantic, Mr. Alexander's quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world.
I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principle Alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation.
What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what I have said about our having a new profession in America—the profession of being a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do. He makes it his business to change people's minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics—to a single first relation in which a man's mind needs to be changed—the relation of a man's mind to his body.
If a man's mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man's mind should be changed about usually is his body.
This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in London, proceeds.
When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in Alexander's office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room—whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands—his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins—quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably.
Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you—just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look—through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
Then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas—ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. As it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, Alexander's first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind—your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty—a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind—and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before.