CHAPTER III--CERTAIN FUNDAMENTAL SELF-CONTROL The 1. Love of the pleasures of eating and drinking. desire for luxuries. The love of comfort. The desire for money. The love of power. The desire to be first. The desire for self-display in all its forms. The dislike for drudgery. The dislike for work of any kind. Impatience. The impulse to complain or cry out in physical or mental suffering. The impulse to communicate our knowledge to others. The fear of pain, loss, or death, i. e. cowardice, "physical" and "moral." Envy and anger. Selfishness. These, with the appetite for drugs, are merely a few of the more important impulses that must be subjected to strict control if we are not to wreck or seriously injure our own lives or infringe upon the rights of others. The list makes no pretensions-not merely to completeness, but also to logical arrangement. It is simply intended to show that the range of self-control is as broad as life itself. 2. (a) A glance at the preceding list will show that self-control cannot mean the destruction of these impulses. For life would be not merely barren but impossible without them. There are no impulses in human nature that are bad in themselves, except the love of inflicting suffering merely for the sake of doing it. And even certain forms of this, as anger, are at times very useful and indeed practically indispensable in the present imperfect stage of civilization. The love of eating needs to be controlled only when it conflicts with something more important, as health; the love of wealth is innocent except as the indulgence of it leads us to starve elements of our nature which are better worth while, or to wrong other people. Self-control, accordingly, involves not the destruction but rather the restraint of the impulses-the keeping of them in their proper place so that they may not be indulged at the expense of others which are more valuable. (b) Self-control is not to be confused with self-conquest. The latter is the act of obtaining control over rebellious impulses. Where the conquest has been repeated again and again the conquered impulse gets into the habit of yielding. It gradually grows weaker and weaker, till finally it surrenders, and the war is over. Self-control is not complete until this situation has been reached; just as, in the state, the government is not in complete control till the rebellion has been entirely crushed. There are persons in whom some, at least, of the impulses fall into their proper place without previous struggle. These persons are by the original structure of their nature temperate, or brave, or good-tempered, or active, or unselfish, or whatever it may be. Self-control in these matters may be as complete in them as is the authority of the government in a state which has never known rebellion. Thus self-conquest is but the road to the goal of complete selfcontrol. We all have to travel it more or less, but some favored persons are exempted from the necessity of toiling through certain portions of it. (c) Self-control is not necessarily identical with rightdoing. A man may control his appetite for drink in order that he may be a more effective gambler or crook. Napoleon used his marvelous powers of self-mastery to enable himself the more completely to trample into the dust the rights of millions, in order that he might become "the arbiter of Europe." (d) Self-control means doing what you really want to do, i. e., being guided by your deepest and most permanent desires. The evidence that you have followed the more superfical desire is found in the regret or sorrow which follows the indulgence. Complete self-control means the establishment of a system of habits of acting or refraining from action in accordance with one's deepest desires. Or it may be defined as the harmonizing of our desires so that they shall give way to each other, without friction, in the order in which we wish them to do so in our periods of calm reflection. "Know what you want and see that you get it," this piece of advice points straight to the nature of self-control. To see to it that one's own impulses do not prevent him from getting what he has resolved to seek is often far from But the knowledge of what one really wants, of what will afford the deepest satisfaction, is apparently so difficult to obtain that it is one of the rarest things in the world. It is what is called wisdom. The reasons why it is so uncommon are that our prejudices and still more our passions blind us; that even in our cooler moments, and even apart from the prejudices created by fashion and public opinion, we seldom really know the order of the relative importance of our desires, or what desires that are weak, though valuable, might by an effort be made strong, to the great enrichment of our life, or what similar desires may be entirely latent, so that we are completely unconscious of their existence. We need a plan of life, and almost no one has it. Even when the necessity of obtaining one, and of reflecting upon life is pointed out, many persons will not take the trouble to do so. A certain Eighteenth Century English philosopher taught that in every act a man performs he considers what would be the effect of each alternative before him upon his own welfare to the end of his life, and that he chooses always that which promises to yield the larger amount of happiness. This is so far from true that few persons will make serious sacrifices of any kind today-even sacrifices of energy and thought-in order to care for the interests of their own future if this is removed to a few years distance in time. It may be further stated, as against this writer, that precisely those people with broad enough interests to do this are apt to be those who are most regardful of the interests of others also. (e) While self-control is thus not identical with rightdoing it is nevertheless of the very greatest importance in life for two reasons. In the first place it is the indispensable condition of personal success. This latter is certainly a good thing if not purchased at the expense of the rights of others. In the second place, it is an equally indispensable condition of a proper regard for the rights of others, since the impulses which we may have at times to conquer for our own good, we may at other times have to suppress for the sake of the interests of other people. The question whether he who has discovered what is for his own highest and most permanent good and who possesses a sufficient amount of self-control to seek it, will not also be led to seek in an equal degree the good of others is a question well worth considering, which must be left, however, for later examination. 3. We may feel certain that there has never been a human being who has not had to fight at one place or another in order to gain control of himself. The reason for this fact is the richness of man's nature. In even the highest animals there is little conflict because there are few impulses to get into each other's way. Animals are often in want and sometimes suffer pain due to disease or accident or climate. But it is seldom that they are called upon to choose between the satisfaction of two instincts. Birds who have two broods in a single season sometimes exhibit a conflict between the maternal instinct and the instinct of migration. But such cases are rare. Man, on the other hand, has a bewildering multitude of impulses and the higher he stands in the intellectual scale, the more he has. It is impossible that they should not get into each other's way more or less frequently. Nor can we expect that they will spontaneously give way to each other in just that order in which, on calm reflection, we approve of their doing. Struggle, accordingly, is not some exceptional piece of "hard luck." Everybody has to do more or less of it. It is the common lot. And the higher the civilization the more there will be of it. The necessity of self-control is thus rooted in the very nature of civilized life; struggle is the price of civilization (nothing for nothing, is the law of life). All that is good in civilization depends for its existence upon self-control. For example, the kind of life you and I live requires a foresight of consequences, consequences which, in some cases, would not come upon us, at all events in their completeness, for weeks, or months, or even years (as the consequences of neglecting our education). But the savage lives mainly in the present. He pays for this degradation of mind a hundred times over in the barrenness of his life, in his lavery to cruel superstitions, in the want and suffering to which his impotence in the presence of the forces of nature condemns him, but he escapes many a weary conflict. 4. Without self-control a man is a ship without a rudder, tossed about by every current and bound to drift whither they will rather than whither he wills. There is no human ship that is totally without a rudder, except perhaps among the imbecile or the insane. But in proportion as the rudder is small or weak, just in that proportion grows the probability of shipwreck. Self-control, like all conquest, has its own joys. A man who makes his own money values it more than does he into whose lap it has been poured through inheritance. The latter not merely realizes its value less, he misses entirely the satisfaction of having obtained it by his own efforts. Sport consists merely in setting up obstacles in order to have the satisfaction of surmounting them. It is the same everywhere in life. Among its greatest satisfactions is the satisfaction of trying to do something difficult and succeeding. It is for this reason that those who have overcome are glad of their past struggles. In Up from Slavery Mr. |