IV. Old Bottles for the New Wine

IV

OLD BOTTLES FOR THE NEW WINE

HAVING made myself satisfactorily clear, I am now disposed to become more amiable and conciliatory. Having demolished (I hope) popular misconceptions of the will and the intellect by gunpowder charges of the truth, and having erected a new edifice in place of the old, vague, and misleading one, I am willing to add a few bricks from the old building. In short, I am prepared to make concessions. It is probably quite wise and helpful to do this, because it causes less confusion and less irritation to talk, wherever possible, in terms of established conceptions than in terms of conceptions to which the reader is unaccustomed. This is all the more to be desired when the old conception has some partial justification, and when, though loosely lumping different things under one name, it none the less, by so doing, effects an economy of thought and of language.

I have said, for instance, that there is no such thing as the will considered as an entity, that it is simply a name we give first to one desire and then to another. But by way of setting off those desires which we commonly call “the will” from those desires which “the will” opposes, I have said that the will, in general, represents desires for remote, as opposed to immediate, gratifications. Yet we may generalize still further. As long as we keep in the background of our minds that the will is really an abstraction, there is no harm in speaking of it a good part of the time as if it were an entity; and insofar as it can be said to represent a definite and permanent entity, the will may be defined as our desire to be a certain sort of character. This is still a desire, you see, and it is still an abstraction; for our desire to be a certain sort of character may mean at one moment a desire to be honest, at another moment a desire not to get drunk, and at still another moment a desire to concentrate on something.

When we commonly speak of the will and think of it as if it were a definite concrete thing, it is this desire to be a certain sort of character, I think, that we commonly have in mind. When popular language says that a man is the slave of his desires, it means that he acts upon the cravings and impulses that from time to time arise, though in retrospect he will know that such actions would never be done by the kind of character he wants to be. When popular language says that a man is the master of his own desires, that he holds them in leash and under his control, it means that this desire to be a certain kind of character is at all times vivid and powerful enough to be acted upon in preference to any other fleeting or recurrent desire that may beckon him.

And it is, on the whole, rather well that popular language has this conception imbedded in it. For actions and decisions which would otherwise seem trivial are made by it to seem large and significant. It may not seem a matter of importance whether you take this particular drink or not, or whether you cheat the car-conductor out of this particular five-cent piece. But if you look upon the non-performance of this little act as your ability to refuse to yield to a particular impulse, and if your ability to refuse to yield to this particular impulse becomes in your mind a challenge to and a test of your entire character, you have thrown into the scale a mighty force to ensure your taking the right action.

If we accept the definition of will as the desire to be a certain kind of character, then it can be seen to be a matter of the highest importance just what kind of character you desire to be. A man may have a strong will but low ideals, or he may have high ideals and a weak will. A man ought to make two demands of his ideals; first that they be high enough, and second that they be his own.

If a man really and truly desires to be a roué or pickpocket, if this be his ideal, and if his conduct conforms absolutely with his principles, there is assuredly no fault to be found with his will. He may firmly put aside all distractions and conquer every good and noble temptation, in order to be a pickpocket or a roué. But society asks something more of him than strength of will. It asks that his ideals be socially beneficial. And even more may be required. It may be asked that a man put his ideals so high that it is difficult to reach them. As Browning has expressed it, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A man with lenient and unexacting ideals may be a tolerable character; he can never be a great one.

The demand that a man’s ideals should be his own is one more difficult to comply with. It means he must not accept his moral canons and standards unquestioningly from the community. It means that he must not be afraid of “not doing what everybody else does” or of “doing what nobody else does.” It means that he must not be a mere mimic or a sheep. He must think for himself. He must examine for himself the grounds of right and wrong, and not let the principles upon which his life is conducted be laid down for him merely by other people’s opinions. He must not be afraid of criticism if he feels in his own heart that he is right. This is an exacting ideal. It requires the highest moral courage.

A man who lives up to this ideal may be a “dangerous” character. But we are not now discussing ethics, per se, but only will-power. He is the strong character, the great character. He may be a Tolstoy or a Nietzsche or a Eugene Debs; but he is a law unto himself. We may think his ethical ideas mistaken, and mistaken they may be; but we cannot but admire the strength of character which leads him to act them out in spite of social opposition. If the strength be sometimes misdirected, that is unfortunate; but the important thing, from our present standpoint, is whether it is there.

This reference to “the strong character,” recalls a pronouncement by John Stuart Mill in his essay on Liberty. “It is not,” he says, “because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”

This aphorism must first be analyzed in terms of our new conception of the will. A man’s “conscience” is simply that group of desires to act socially, usefully, morally, conventionally, to secure the good opinion of his fellow men, or not to fall in his own estimation, not to offend or to give anger or sorrow to his God, or it may represent his desire to forward any other more ultimate end, to which the gratification of the immediate impulse or desire would be opposed.

If the belief that Mill is contradicting with his dictum is a half-truth, so, too, is his own statement. It is not the “conscience” in itself, nor the “evil” desires in themselves, that ultimately count; it is the relation of the one to the other. The stronger his desires, the stronger his conscience, or counter-desires, must be; the weaker his desires, the less need he has for a strong conscience.

But we usually, and rightly, regard the man with the stronger conscience as the stronger and more admirable character. We admire far more the man who has a violent craving for drink, but nevertheless fights it down, than we do the man who refrains from drinking, but has no great liking for it anyway. Their outward action may be the same, so far as its effect on themselves or society is concerned; but our untrained and unsophisticated judgments are right in attaching the importance they do to the inward struggle. For the weak man who refrains from drinking may not refrain from other actions just as personally or socially injurious that he has a greater desire for; whereas the man with the stronger conscience, who has been able to fight this desire in this case, may be depended upon to fight lesser desires more easily.

We all know the habit that many mothers have of holding up some little mollycoddle as a model to their boy: “You never see Clarence do that!” And we sympathize with the boy’s contempt: “Ah, Him! He couldn’t be bad!” A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.

Mill recognizes this distinction, and in the passage following the sentence of his I have quoted, states powerfully the case for the man with stronger impulses:

There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way. To say that one person’s desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one. Those who have most natural feeling, are always those who cultivated feelings may be made the strongest. The same strong susceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control.

I began this chapter with one concession to the older and more habitual way of looking at things, and I shall end it with another. The first had to do with the will, and this has to do with the intellect. I have said that the intellect is a mere valet to the desires, and I have made a good many other disparaging remarks about it. But I can fancy that you were left not only unconvinced, but angry. I can fancy someone’s having said, while reading those remarks of mine: “My desires are determined by my intellect. A man’s desires are not the desires of a rabbit. I desire to read Shakespeare and Schopenhauer; I actually prefer it to spending my evenings in a poolroom or with some pretty female thing. Has not my intellect formed my desires? Has not it dictated them? What sort of flapdoodle are you trying to tell me?”

Now before such an assault I am humble, and retreat with a magnanimous gesture. It is strictly true that the desires and the intellect cannot be separated. They interact. Our desires may originally determine the direction of our intellectual interests, but once our intellectual interests have taken a certain turn, they may awaken new desires, and abandon old ones. The reading of Nietzsche may change a man’s ideals and aims in life. A desire for a life of study may suddenly turn into a desire for a life of “action.”

We have defined will as the desire to become a certain sort of character. We have seen that, at critical moments, when the craving to do a certain thing threatens, like a great tidal wave, to sweep us helpless before it, it is this desire to become a certain sort of character which throws its weight in the scale with the other weaker desires to balance us; it is this desire which stands like a rock to cling to until the torrent has spent its force. It, too, may be swept away at times. But when it is, we know that it has not been strong enough. It is a warning that the breakwater has been too low and too weak. We must build it higher and stronger. We must strengthen this desire to become a certain sort of character.

The ideal that we actually form will depend upon our parents, our religion, our associates, our reading, our thinking, the traditions of the nation and the age in which we live. Many of these elements are intellectual, and to the extent that these determine our ideals, they determine part of our desires.

But even here we cannot say that the intellect creates our desires. Rather, it transforms them. They exist congenitally in the form of raw materials; or more strictly, they exist as a country’s “natural resources” exist, waiting to be worked up by our environment and our intellect (itself shaped by environment) into the finished product. Practically all men are born with the sexual instinct. But though this particular instinct, in its raw state, may be present in equal degrees in three men, environment, training and intellect may so shape this raw material that the first man may elect to marry and lead a normal sexual life, the second may launch forth as a roué, and the third may enter and abide by the vows of the priesthood. Similarly, the pugnacious instinct, which makes dogs fight and men go to war, may also, through environment and the intellect, be discharged through the channels of football or a philosophical controversy. It is the same with gregariousness, or any other instinct. These are the materials; the desires the finished products.

But though the intellect can control the finished product, it cannot control the raw materials. One cannot lose an inborn instinct by thinking; one cannot create one by thinking. In this respect the intellect bears the same relations to the instincts as man bears to matter. He can transform it, beautify it, give it value, turn it to his purposes; but he cannot create it and he cannot destroy it.

And, if we are to consider this question in a truly philosophic, not to say a metaphysical manner, I may as well confess right here that in talking of “desires” and “the intellect” I have been doing a somewhat dubious thing. Perhaps the more philosophic view is that at times the whole man desires, and at times he thinks; but the one process is never entirely absent from the other. When I deal with this process, I deal with it rather crudely, making abstractions, treating abstractions as entities, hypostatizing them, making verbs into nouns. A man desires something, and I speak of “the desires”; he thinks something, and I speak of “the intellect.” In doing this, I am merely following common usage; and, indeed, the conceptions imbedded in our very language practically compel me to adopt this usage if I am to prevent myself from becoming utterly obscure and transcendental. As this is supposed to be a practical manual, not a philosophic treatise, there will be no harm in continuing to talk in terms of these common conceptions. But I enter this qualification to ward off irrelevant attacks. I shall try to change the common conceptions of the nature and relations of “the will” and “the intellect” only insofar as I think it needful to change them for practical purposes.

And now, having presented my apologies and concessions, we can have done with this everlasting theorizing, and come to practical cases.