Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Bashfulness: Its Effect on Life and Character If a man has a tender knee-joint he favors it in his movements and takes many precautions to avoid hurting it. He minifies his walking, and keeps away from rough sidewalks. The limping lessens the pain. If the defect is permanent, or likely to be, he orders his life and selects his vocation and avocations so as to escape discomfort in it as far as possible. He shuns crowds and crushes, athletic activities and a bustling life, and looks ahead for danger of a jar upon the tender nerves of the vulnerable part. He becomes timid and self-watchful; so both his gait and his character are changed and in a measure determined by his infirmity. He is altogether a different man in his life and his place among men by reason of the one defect; a defect for which hemay be in no way responsible. His sensitiveness to pain and aversion to discomfort, as well as to danger, are what shape his gait and his life. Nobody finds any difficulty in seeing the effect on the man of the tender spot in the physical body. That a tender emotional spot will produce like results is less clearly perceived. We all understand that mental and so-called moral qualities somehow create, if they do not constitute, the character of every man; but emotions of certain sorts (moral qualities themselves) have a powerful influence in the same direction. Thus, patriotism, love of friends and of children, love of home or the opposite; hatred of certain things, people or institutions—these and many other forms of emotional ideas are potent in directing and shaping the course of the lives of men and women the world over. The emotions named are objective; they primarily reach outside their possessor to people and things, many and diverse; they effect forcibly his relations to his en...