One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of
life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible
to me, somewhere in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts
my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to
the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes
the secret of life but it escapes my paw.
During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had it. It involved a great
deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston
garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths
followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu
hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to
slug its way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had only to lay
hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission.
The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn
it we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme of effortless
subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with ennobling
vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately
believed that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet.
Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with
a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already
protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on
heavy foods--such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of
world mastery was a diet of rice. "We all eat too much" became a fixed
conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction--we all sleep too
much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett.
Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid.
Who could not afford to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute
a day--who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the
classical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He
modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its successful
practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to
function like a superman.
Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing
turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake
I learned that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From
Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William
James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then
came Scientific Management.
The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I
discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was
doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all
astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe
properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to
walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore
pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific
management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out
that "waste motions" were the chief characteristic of our lives.
One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official
who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make
preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific
eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions
could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to
resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their
guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marksmanship is wasteful,
we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that
fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms--waste
motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub
our eyes--more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the
rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific
management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with
the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation
under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that
under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would
look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will
probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as
delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long
unbroken peel.
In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the haphazard, unscrutinized
conduct of his morn. We pick up our paper without any suspicion that we
are about to commit intellectual felony. We do not know that the news
editor is in a conspiracy to play on our minds. If men gyrate too much
physically, they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start to
look over the news. It is not so much that they begin the day with
devouring the details of a murder or lull themselves with some excuse
for not reading a British note on the blockade. It is the fact that they
are led by a ring running through their instincts to obey the particular
editors they read.
Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human
race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the
worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not
one important layman's practice that we have organized with regard to
discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying
bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one's hat and the
circumvolutions in putting links in one's cuffs? How about the impulsive
child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The
discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed,
everything could be perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at
the center of one's life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of
inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine.
Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague
longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu
and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give
up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste
motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European
thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare's
knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could
not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended
like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness
of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them,
"instinct" and "repression." The metaphysician's secret of life,
apparently, was to drop using one's so-called intelligence so
frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena
and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments
in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of "repression" gave me
no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned
my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the
latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of
any tantalizing invisible string.