You may have one in the world to whom you may dare show with the fullness of absolute confidence and perfect faith any thought, any hope, any sorrow,—but you dare not trust them to the world. Do not show the world through your Bluebeard chamber; keep your trials and sorrows as close to you as you can till you have mastered them. Don’t weaken others by thus—syndicating your miseries.
IX
The Revelations of Reserve Power
very individual is a marvel of unknown and unrealized possibilities. Nine-tenths of an iceberg is always below water. Nine-tenths of the possibilities of good and evil of the individual is ever hidden from his sight.
Burns’ prayer,—that we might “see oursels as ithers see us,”—was weak. The answer could minister only to man’s vanity,—it would show him only what others think him to be, not what he is. We should pray to see ourselves as we are. But no man could face the radiant revelation of the latent powers and forces within him, underlying the weak, narrow life he is living. He would fall blinded and prostrate as did Moses before the burning bush. Man is not a mechanical music-box wound up by the Creator and set to play a fixed number of prescribed tunes. He is a human harp, with infinite possibilities of unawakened music.
The untold revelations of Nature are in her Reserve Power. Reserve Power is Nature’s method of meeting emergencies. Nature is wise and economic. Nature saves energy and effort, and gives only what is absolutely necessary for life and development under any given condition, and when new needs arise Nature always meets them by her Reserve Power.
In animal life Nature reveals this in a million phases. Animals placed in the darkness of the Mammoth Cave gradually have the sense of sight weakened and the senses of smell, touch and hearing intensified. Nature watches over all animals, making their color harmonize with the general tone of their surroundings to protect them from their enemies. Those arctic animals which in the summer inhabit regions free from snow, turn white when winter comes. In the desert, the lion, the camel and all the desert antelopes have more or less the color of the sand and rocks among which they live. In tropical forests parrots are usually green; turacous, barbets and bee-eaters have a preponderance of green in their plumage. The colors change as the habits of the animals change from generation to generation. Nature, by her Reserve Power, always meets the new needs of animals with new strength,—new harmony with new conditions.
About forty-five years ago three pairs of enterprising rabbits were introduced into Australia. To-day, the increase of these six immigrants may be counted by millions. They became a pest to the country. Fortunes have been spent to exterminate them. Wire fences many feet high and thousands of miles long have been built to keep out the invaders. The rabbits had to fight awful odds to live, but they have now outwitted man. They have developed a new nail,—a long nail by which they can retain their hold on the fence while climbing. With this same nail they can burrow six or eight inches under the netting, and thus enter the fields that mean food and life to them. They are now laughing at man. Reserve Power has vitalized for these rabbits latent possibilities because they did not tamely accept their condition, but in their struggle to live learned how to live.
In plant life, Nature is constantly revealing Reserve Power. The possibilities of almost infinite color are present in every green plant, even in roots and stems. Proper conditions only are needed to reveal them. By obeying Nature’s laws man could make leaves as beautifully colored as flowers. The wild rose has only a single corolla; but, when cultivated in rich soil, the numerous yellow stamens change into the brilliant red leaves of the full-grown cabbage-rose. This is but one of Nature’s miracles of Reserve Power. Once the banana was a tropical lily; the peach was at one time a bitter almond. To tell the full story of Reserve Power in Nature would mean to write the history of the universe, in a thousand volumes.
Nature is a great believer in “double engines.” Man is equipped with nearly every organ in duplicate—eyes, ears, lungs, arms and legs, so that if one be weakened, its mate, through Reserve Power, is stimulated to do enough for both. Even where the organ itself is not duplicated, as in the nose, there is a division of parts so there is constant reserve. Nature, for still further protection, has for every part of the body an understudy in training, to be ready in a crisis,—as the sense of touch for the blind.