II. The Intellect as a Valet

II

THE INTELLECT AS A VALET

HAVING given some hint of what the will is not, it is now my pleasant duty to tell what it is. This may best be done by illustration.

You resolve to abolish late nights. Two nights out a week will be your limit. No night out later than midnight. It doesn’t pay. A man loses sleep. He hurts his health. He isn’t as fresh as he ought to be for work. He is just frittering his time away, and getting nowhere, and not improving himself evenings, and it’s expensive,—

So you resolve to cut it out. With a free conscience you make your two engagements for the coming week. About Monday noon Jones drops around at the office. There is a little game of poker toward some night that week when they can get the crowd together. Now poker is marvelously fascinating. You haven’t seen the boys for a long time. And you hate to lie to Jones, and tell him all your nights are occupied, for such a little reason. And you are ashamed to tell him the truth. That you have resolved to go out only two nights a week, come what may, might strike Jones as deliciously funny. He might tell the boys, who also have a sense of humor. And there is the possibility that Jones might be offended. So you look straight before you, undecided for a minute or two, or you make feeble excuses (not your real ones) which are easily overridden by Jones, and you end by thinking to yourself that you will not count this week, or that you will make up for it the week after.... And your dishonor is complete.

Let us analyze this degrading incident. Man is a bundle of desires. He desires this, and that, and something else again. And the world is so constituted that, in nearly every instance, one desire cannot be attained save at the sacrifice of some other. This provoking state of affairs was long ago crystallized in the phrase that you cannot eat your cake and have it too. More broadly, it may be expressed in the phrase that everything we desire has its price. The price of a cake is a dollar; the price of keeping your dollar is the loss of a cake.

This illuminating truth does not stop at the grossly material things, at the things whose prices can be measured in money. It extends throughout the spiritual universe. The price of earning $2 extra a day may be working an extra hour a day; which may be conceived either as a pain of extra hour’s work or as the loss of an hour’s leisure. Conversely, the price of an hour’s extra leisure a day is $2 a day.

We are now coming to grips with our actual case. The price of staying out late at night is sleep, health, efficiency at business, money, and self-improvement. That is, these are the things that the man must pay, lose, sacrifice, in order that he may stay out late at night. Conversely, the price of sleep, health, efficiency at business, money, self-improvement, is the pleasure of staying out late at night that one gives up.

We have taken a devious course to arrive at our conclusion, yet we must deviate a little further before we come back. We must consider the Intellect. For centuries we have glorified the intellect; we have put wreaths upon its head and sung its praises. Which is quite absurd. For a man’s intellect is a helpless, powerless sort of thing, a mere instrument, a tool, a subordinate, which the desires boss around. It does the bidding of the desire that shouts the loudest. You my call this a libel on the intellect. You perhaps maintain the traditional view that the intellect directs the desires.

But reflect. You engage daily in more or less unpleasant tasks for eight hours; you work. It is your desire for bread and soup and café parfait, for an overcoat, an apartment, and theatres and golf, that drives you there. You may protest that you enjoy your work. I shall not gainsay you. In either case, it is your desires that are dictating your action. The intellect merely obeys. If it is a good intellect, its owner may count himself fortunate. It will be better able to carry out the orders of its bosses, the desires; it will satisfy them more, and it will satisfy more of them. The intellect may, and often does, pick the road to a given place; the desires always dictate the designation. To multiply figures, the intellect is the steering gear, the desires are the engine; the intellect is the pilot, the desires are the breeze.

We are now ready to return to our immediate subject. When a man is engaged in what we call making a decision, the intellect may be thought to occupy a place of greater dignity. It may be imaged as acting as a judge between conflicting desires. But the position of the intellect is in reality one of profound humiliation. In deciding between desires, it is actually trying to make up its mind which desire is the stronger. It feels their muscles, so to speak. And it obeys the desire with the hardest biceps.

Now every decision is not merely a selection from among desires. One desire may be so overpowering that all others cringe before it; they are merely brushed out of the way. The function of the intellect, then, in making a decision, is to select from alternative courses the one which most promises to fulfill this supreme desire.

I can fancy your rebelling at this point, if in fact, you have not done so long ago. “What you say may be all very true about some people,” I can hear you saying, “but suppose I refuse to allow my intellect to be bullied around in this shameless manner? Suppose I choose to have my intellect snap its fingers at all my desires, and say ‘Hereafter I will be master?’ What becomes of all your fine analysis then?”

This question, my dear sir, is not so formidable as it looks. What it would amount to, if you succeeded in carrying out your magnificent defiance, or rather, if you succeeded in thinking you had, would be that your desire (note the word), your desire to have your intellect master would overcome other desires or impulses, recognized by your intellect as such, which arose transiently from moment to moment. You would act only on the desires which your intellect happened to approve of; but that is merely another way of saying that your desire to act on the principles of common sense had overcome all other desires.

For mark. There is nothing immoral in desires per se. There are good desires as well as evil. There are spiritual desires as well as material. There are desires to help others, to spread cheerfulness, to protect one’s health, to live in moderation, to feel satisfied with one’s lot, to “succeed” in life, to go to Heaven, to feel the happiness that virtue gives. And these desires may be just as powerful as selfish desires, or as a craving for transient sensual pleasures. Bernard Shaw says somewhere that real goodness is nothing but the self-indulgence of a good man.

Unfortunately, the word “desire” taken by itself, has come into popular usage to have a restricted, a sensual, an evil meaning. Popular usage has perverted it just as it has perverted the word “pleasure,” which arouses such endless confusion of thought in ethical argument. I verily believe that could a man be brought to think of the word “desire” always in its true and broadest meaning, his aversion to the truth that the desires over-lord the intellect would be completely removed.

For as a fact, I have greatly understated the pre-dominance of the desires as compared with the intellect. The very existence of the intellect depends upon the desires. Unless a man have desires, he will have no intellect. Or rather, he will never develop it and never use it, which is much the same thing. Thinking is problem solving. It arises from thwarted purposes. If we have no desires, we can have no purposes, and hence nothing to thwart. Thinking may arise as an attempt to solve something bearing on our immediate personal welfare, or on the welfare of our family or our city, or on the welfare of mankind; it may arise from the love of prestige and applause or from sheer intellectual curiosity. In any case, desire of some kind is the motivating force.

A great difficulty yet remains. You may admit that the intellect is a servant and not a master. But not that it is the servant of your desires. “It is the servant of Me,” you say. “It is the servant of My Will.” These are two distinct perhaps contradictory, assertions. Let us consider the first.

Now let me ask. What are you? You are nothing but a total. Take away your body, take away your physical brain, take away your intellect, your desires, your memory, your imagination, take away, I say, all the parts and attributes of you, and there is nothing left. That should be obvious, so obvious that I almost blush to state it. Whenever you speak of Me, or I, or You, you are speaking now of one part or attribute of yourself, now of another. You say, “I intend to do so-and-so”—meaning that a certain desire within you is going to make the rest of you do so-and-so. You say, “I am running,”—meaning that your legs are running, carrying the rest of your body and your brain along with them. You say, “I am thinking,”—meaning that your intellect is thinking. Your knees aren’t thinking; your feet aren’t thinking; your teeth aren’t thinking. Only your intellect. In any case, when you refer to I, you are referring now to one part of yourself, now to another; now to another; and yet, such is the confusion of thought, that because you give the same name now to one part and now to another, you fancy that the word “I” refers to something distinct from any of these, something in addition, something separable from the parts that compose it.

But when you are talking of “I,” in the foregoing sense, you are usually referring to your Will, and it is this conception that we must now consider. The brain, as previously intimated, is a receptacle full of conflicting desires. (All desires are not ever-present, but that is not a point we need consider now.) For certain periods—it may be only for a moment, perhaps for a day, possibly for half a lifetime—a certain desire will predominate. That desire, for just as long as it predominates, will determine action. For as long as it predominates and determines action, that desire constitutes your will. It is what you desire to do, what you want to do, what you will to do.

But one desire may predominate for one hour, and another the next. Just now you may wish to sit home for the evening and improve your mind. That is your will. After reading this a few minutes you may become bored (I am not blaming you), and may decide to call up your friends and play bridge for the evening. That is also your will.

And here we come to the great confusion. These desires, which are constantly gaining individual supremacy and losing it, which are constantly overthrowing and dethroning each other like presidents in a South American republic, are each of them mere temporary holders of power. Yet we give a permanent name to them. We call one desire the will, and we call the next desire the will. And so we think that the will is something in addition to these separate desires. If we were to say that Warren G. Harding kissed Mrs. Harding, and then were to add that the President of the United States also kissed Mrs. Harding, the confusion between words and things would be obvious. The President of the Unite States we know to be only another name for Harding. It is merely a permanent name for the different temporary holders of that powerful office, all of different natures. So with the mind. The will is merely a name for the desire that happens to hold temporary power. Take away all desires, and there remains no will.