The Five Great Philosophies of Life. William de Witt Hyde
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leisure, or permitting the strain of remembered or anticipated toil to mar the hours sacred to rest and recreation. Some things are bound to go wrong in every life. That is our misfortune. But there is no need of brooding over them in gratuitous grief after they have gone, or dreading them in gloomy anticipation before they come. If either in anticipation or in retrospect these evils are permitted to darken the hours when they are physically absent, that is not our misfortune; it is our folly and our fault.
We hear a great deal in these days about mind cures, and rest cures, and faith cures, and cures by hypnotism, and cures by patent medicines. If anybody needs these cures, of course he is welcome to them; though there is much to be said for the stalwart conservative who refused proffered aid of this sort with the remark that he would rather die in the hands of a skilful physician than be cured by a quack. Strict obedience to the plain, homely doctrine of Epicurus would prevent ninety-nine one hundredths of the physical and mental ailments which these various systems of healing profess to cure. In almost every such case work, or the square of work which is hurry, or the cube of work which is worry, carried beyond the sane limits which Epicurus prescribes, is at the root of trouble. Where it is not work and worry, it is their passive counterparts, grief nursed long after its occasion has gone by, or fear harboured long before its appropriate object has arrived. Cut these off and all the use you will have for either healers or physicians will be on such comparatively rare occasions as birth, death, contagious diseases, and unavoidable accident. You will not be the chronic patient of any doctor regular or irregular; or the consumer of any medicine, patented or prescribed.
Neither useless regrets for the past nor profitless forebodings for the future should ever cast their shadows over the present, which taken in itself is always endurable, and may generally be made positively happy. Memory should be purged of all its unpleasantness before its pictures are permitted to appear before the footlights of reflection; and the searchlight of expectation should always be turned toward the pleasures that are still in store for us. Past and future are mainly in our power, so far as the quality of things we remember and anticipate are concerned. And even the brief and fleeting present is mainly filled by reminiscence and anticipation, so that it too is largely what we please to make it.
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