point of view; when he notices that what he regarded as the kernel of
the difficulty yesterday has sunk to a triviality to-day, being replaced
by a fresh phenomenon; when he arises one morning and by means of a
new, unexpected glimpse into the recesses of the machine perceives that
hitherto he has been quite wrong and must begin again; when he wonders
how on earth he could have been so blind and so stupid as not to see
what now he sees; when the new vision is veiled by new disappointments
and narrowed by continual reservations; when he is overwhelmed by the
complexity of his undertaking--then let him unhearten himself, for he is
succeeding. The history of success in any art--and machine-tending is an
art--is a history of recommencements, of the dispersal and reforming of
doubts, of an ever-increasing conception of the extent of the territory
unconquered, and an ever-decreasing conception of the extent of the
territory conquered.
It is remarkable that, though no enterprise could possibly present more
diverse and changeful excitements than the mastering of the brain, the
second great danger which threatens its ultimate success is nothing but
a mere drying-up of enthusiasm for it! One would have thought that in an
affair which concerned him so nearly, in an affair whose results might
be in a very strict sense vital to him, in an affair upon which his
happiness and misery might certainly turn, a man would not weary from
sheer tedium. Nevertheless, it is so. Again and again I have noticed the
abandonment, temporary or permanent, of this mighty and thrilling
enterprise from simple lack of interest. And I imagine that, in
practically all cases save those in which an exceptional original force
of will renders the enterprise scarcely necessary, the interest in it
will languish unless it is regularly nourished from without. Now, the
interest in it cannot be nourished from without by means of conversation
with other brain-tamers. There are certain things which may not be
discussed by sanely organised people; and this is one. The affair is
too intimate, and it is also too moral. Even after only a few minutes'
vocalisation on this subject a deadly infection seems to creep into the
air--the infection of priggishness. (Or am I mistaken, and do I fancy
this horror? No; I cannot believe that I am mistaken.)
Hence the nourishment must be obtained by reading; a little reading
every day. I suppose there are some thousands of authors who have
written with more or less sincerity on the management of the human
machine. But the two which, for me, stand out easily above all the rest
are Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Epictetus. Not much has been
discovered since their time. 'The perfecting of life is a power residing
in the soul,' wrote Marcus Aurelius in the ninth book of _To Himself_,
over seventeen hundred years ago. Marcus Aurelius is assuredly regarded
as the greatest of writers in the human machine school, and not to read
him daily is considered by many to be a bad habit. As a confession his
work stands alone. But as a practical 'Bradshaw' of existence, I would
put the discourses of Epictetus before M. Aurelius. Epictetus is
grosser; he will call you a blockhead as soon as look at you; he is
witty, he is even humorous, and he never wanders far away from the
incidents of daily life. He is brimming over with actuality for readers
of the year 1908. He was a freed slave. M. Aurelius was an emperor, and
he had the morbidity from which all emperors must suffer. A finer soul
than Epictetus, he is not, in my view, so useful a companion. Not all of
us can breathe freely in his atmosphere. Nevertheless, he is of course
to be read, and re-read continually. When you have gone through
Epictetus--a single page or paragraph per day, well masticated and
digested, suffices--you can go through M. Aurelius, and then you can
return to Epictetus, and so on, morning by morning, or night by night,
till your life's end. And they will conserve your interest in yourself.
In the matter of concentration, I hesitate to recommend Mrs. Annie
Besant's _Thought Power_, and yet I should be possibly unjust if I did
not recommend it, having regard to its immense influence on myself. It
is not one of the best books of this astounding woman. It is addressed
to theosophists, and can only be completely understood in the light of
theosophistic doctrines. (To grasp it all I found myself obliged to
study a much larger work dealing with theosophy as a whole.) It contains
an appreciable quantity of what strikes me as feeble sentimentalism, and
also a lot of sheer dogma. But it is the least unsatisfactory manual of
the brain that I have met with. And if the profane reader ignores all
that is either Greek or twaddle to him, there will yet remain for his
advantage a vast amount of very sound information and advice. All these
three books are cheap.
XIV
A MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT
I now come to an entirely different aspect of the whole subject.
Hitherto I have dealt with the human machine as a contrivance for
adapting the man to his environment. My aim has been to show how much
depends on the machine and how little depends on the environment, and
that the essential business of the machine is to utilise, for making the
stuff of life, the particular environment in which it happens to find
itself--and no other! All this, however, does not imply that one must
accept, fatalistically and permanently and passively, any preposterous
environment into which destiny has chanced to throw us. If we carry far
enough the discipline of our brains, we can, no doubt, arrive at
surprisingly good results in no matter what environment. But it would
not be 'right reason' to expend an excessive amount of will-power on
brain-discipline when a slighter effort in a different direction would
produce consequences more felicitous. A man whom fate had pitched into a
canal might accomplish miracles in the way of rendering himself
amphibian; he might stagger the world by the spectacle of his philosophy
under amazing difficulties; people might pay sixpence a head to come and
see him; but he would be less of a nincompoop if he climbed out and
arranged to live definitely on the bank.
The advantage of an adequate study of the control of the machine, such
as I have outlined, is that it enables the student to judge, with some
certainty, whether the unsatisfactoriness of his life is caused by a
disordered machine or by an environment for which the machine is, in
its fundamental construction, unsuitable. It does help him to decide
justly whether, in the case of a grave difference between them, he, or
the rest of the universe, is in the wrong. And also, if he decides that
he is not in the wrong, it helps him to choose a new environment, or to
modify the old, upon some scientific principle. The vast majority of
people never know, with any precision, why they are dissatisfied with
their sojourn on this planet. They make long and fatiguing excursions in
search of precious materials which all the while are concealed in their
own breasts. They don't know what they want; they only know that they
want something. Or, if they contrive to settle in their own minds what
they do want, a hundred to one the obtaining of it will leave them just
as far off contentment as they were at the beginning! This is a matter
of daily observation: that people are frantically engaged in attempting
to get hold of things which, by universal experience, are hideously
disappointing to those who have obtained possession of them. And still
the struggle goes on, and probably will go on. All because brains are
lying idle! 'It is no trifle that is at stake,' said Epictetus as to the
question of control of instinct by reason. '_It means, Are you in your
senses or are you not_?' In this significance, indubitably the vast
majority of people are not in their senses; otherwise they would not
behave as they do, so vaguely, so happy-go-luckily, so blindly. But the
man whose brain is in working order emphatically _is_ in his senses.
And when a man, by means of the efficiency of his brain, has put his
reason in definite command over his instincts, he at once sees things in
a truer perspective than was before possible, and therefore he is able
to set a just value upon the various parts which go to make up his
environment. If, for instance, he lives in London, and is aware of
constant friction, he will be led to examine the claims of London as a
Mecca for intelligent persons. He may say to himself: 'There is
something wrong, and the seat of trouble is not in the machine. London
compels me to tolerate dirt, darkness, ugliness, strain, tedious daily
journeyings, and general expensiveness. What does London give me in
exchange?' And he may decide that, as London offers him nothing special
in exchange except the glamour of London and an occasional seat at a
good concert or a bad play, he may get a better return for his
expenditure of brains, nerves, and money in the provinces. He may
perceive, with a certain French novelist, that 'most people of truly
distinguished mind prefer the provinces.' And he may then actually, in
obedience to reason, quit the deceptions of London with a tranquil
heart, sure of his diagnosis. Whereas a man who had not devoted much
time to the care of his mental machinery could not screw himself up to
the step, partly from lack of resolution, and partly because he had
never examined the sources of his unhappiness. A man who, not having
full control of his machine, is consistently dissatisfied with his
existence, is like a man who is being secretly poisoned and cannot
decide with what or by whom. And so he has no middle course between
absolute starvation and a continuance of poisoning.
As with the environment of place, so with the environment of
individuals. Most friction between individuals is avoidable friction;
sometimes, however, friction springs from such deep causes that no skill
in the machine can do away with it. But how is the man whose brain is
not in command of his existence to judge whether the unpleasantness can
be cured or not, whether it arises in himself or in the other? He simply
cannot judge. Whereas a man who keeps his brain for use and not for idle
amusement will, when he sees that friction persists in spite of his
brain, be so clearly impressed by the advisability of separation as the
sole cure that he will steel himself to the effort necessary for a
separation. One of the chief advantages of an efficient brain is that an
efficient brain is capable of acting with firmness and resolution,
partly, of course, because it has been toned up, but more because its
operations are not confused by the interference of mere instincts.
Thirdly, there is the environment of one's general purpose in life,
which is, I feel convinced, far more often hopelessly wrong and futile
than either the environment of situation or the environment of
individuals. I will be bold enough to say that quite seventy per cent.
of ambition is never realised at all, and that ninety-nine per cent. of
all realised ambition is fruitless. In other words, that a gigantic
sacrifice of the present to the future is always going on. And here
again the utility of brain-discipline is most strikingly shown. A man
whose first business it is every day to concentrate his mind on the
proper performance of that particular day, must necessarily conserve his
interest in the present. It is impossible that his perspective should
become so warped that he will devote, say, fifty-five years of his
career to problematical preparations for his comfort and his glory
during the final ten years. A man whose brain is his servant, and not
his lady-help or his pet dog, will be in receipt of such daily content
and satisfaction that he will early ask himself the question: 'As for
this ambition that is eating away my hours, what will it give me that I
have not already got?' Further, the steady development of interest in
the hobby (call it!) of common-sense daily living will act as an
automatic test of any ambition. If an ambition survives and flourishes
on the top of that daily cultivation of the machine, then the owner of
the ambition may be sure that it is a genuine and an invincible
ambition, and he may pursue it in full faith; his developed care for the
present will prevent him from making his ambition an altar on which the
whole of the present is to be offered up.
I shall be told that I want to do away with ambition, and that ambition
is the great motive-power of existence, and that therefore I am an enemy
of society and the truth is not in me. But I do not want to do away with
ambition. What I say is that current ambitions usually result in
disappointment, that they usually mean the complete distortion of a
life. This is an incontestable fact, and the reason of it is that
ambitions are chosen either without knowledge of their real value or
without knowledge of what they will cost. A disciplined brain will at
once show the unnecessariness of most ambitions, and will ensure that
the remainder shall be conducted with reason. It will also convince its
possessor that the ambition to live strictly according to the highest
common sense during the next twenty-four hours is an ambition that needs
a lot of beating.
XV
L.S.D.
Anybody who really wishes to talk simple truth about money at the
present time is confronted by a very serious practical difficulty. He
must put himself in opposition to the overwhelming body of public
opinion, and resign himself to being regarded either as a _poseur_, a
crank, or a fool. The public is in search of happiness now, as it was a
million years ago. Money is not the principal factor in happiness. It
may be argued whether, as a factor in happiness, money is of
twentieth-rate importance or fiftieth-rate importance. But it cannot be
argued whether money, in point of fact, does or does not of itself bring
happiness. There can be no doubt whatever that money does not bring
happiness. Yet, in face of this incontrovertible and universal truth,
the whole public behaves exactly as if money were the sole or the
principal preliminary to happiness. The public does not reason, and it
will not listen to reason; its blood is up in the money-hunt, and the
philosopher might as well expostulate with an earthquake as try to take
that public by the button-hole and explain. If a man sacrifices his
interest under the will of some dead social tyrant in order to marry
whom he wishes, if an English minister of religion declines twenty-five
thousand dollars a year to go into exile and preach to New York
millionaires, the phenomenon is genuinely held to be so astounding that
it at once flies right round the world in the form of exclamatory
newspaper articles! In an age when such an attitude towards money is
sincere, it is positively dangerous--I doubt if it may not be
harmful--to persist with loud obstinacy that money, instead of being
the greatest, is the least thing in the world. In times of high military
excitement a man may be ostracised if not lynched for uttering opinions
which everybody will accept as truisms a couple of years later, and thus
the wise philosopher holds his tongue--lest it should be cut out. So at
the zenith of a period when the possession of money in absurd masses is
an infallible means to the general respect, I have no intention either
of preaching or of practising quite all that I privately in the matter
of riches.
It was not always thus. Though there have been previous ages as lustful
for wealth and ostentation as our own, there have also been ages when
money-getting and millionaire-envying were not the sole preoccupations
of the average man. And such an age will undoubtedly succeed to ours.
Few things would surprise me less, in social life, than the upspringing
of some anti-luxury movement, the formation of some league or guild
among the middling classes (where alone intellect is to be found in
quantity), the members of which would bind themselves to stand aloof
from all the great, silly, banal, ugly, and tedious _luxe_-activities of
the time and not to spend more than a certain sum per annum on eating,
drinking, covering their bodies, and being moved about like parcels from
one spot of the earth's surface to another. Such a movement would, and
will, help towards the formation of an opinion which would condemn
lavish expenditure on personal satisfactions as bad form. However, the
shareholders of grand hotels, restaurants, and race-courses of all
sorts, together with popular singers and barristers, etc., need feel no
immediate alarm. The movement is not yet.
As touching the effect of money on the efficient ordering of the human
machine, there is happily no necessity to inform those who have begun
to interest themselves in the conduct of their own brains that money
counts for very little in that paramount affair. Nothing that really
helps towards perfection costs more than is within the means of every
person who reads these pages. The expenses connected with daily
meditation, with the building-up of mental habits, with the practice of
self-control and of cheerfulness, with the enthronement of reason over
the rabble of primeval instincts--these expenses are really, you know,
trifling. And whether you get that well-deserved rise of a pound a week
or whether you don't, you may anyhow go ahead with the machine; it isn't
a motor-car, though I started by comparing it to one. And even when,
having to a certain extent mastered, through sensible management of the
machine, the art of achieving a daily content and dignity, you come to
the embroidery of life--even the best embroidery of life is not
absolutely ruinous. Meat may go up in price--it has done--but books
won't. Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will
remain quite low. The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along
Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of
kisses--these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and
the hysteria of stock exchanges. Travel, which after books is the finest
of all embroideries (and which is not to be valued by the mile but by
the quality), is decidedly cheaper than ever it was. All that is
required is ingenuity in one's expenditure. And much ingenuity with a
little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money
without ingenuity.
And all the while as you read this you are saying, with your impatient
sneer: 'It's all very well; it's all very fine talking, _but_ ...' In
brief, you are not convinced. You cannot deracinate that wide-rooted
dogma within your soul that more money means more joy. I regret it. But
let me put one question, and let me ask you to answer it honestly. Your
financial means are greater now than they used to be. Are you happier or
less discontented than you used to be? Taking your existence day by day,
hour by hour, judging it by the mysterious _feel_ (in the chest) of
responsibilities, worries, positive joys and satisfactions, are you
genuinely happier than you used to be?
I do not wish to be misunderstood. The financial question cannot be
ignored. If it is true that money does not bring happiness, it is no
less true that the lack of money induces a state of affairs in which
efficient living becomes doubly difficult. These two propositions,
superficially perhaps self-contradictory, are not really so. A modest
income suffices for the fullest realisation of the Ego in terms of
content and dignity; but you must live within it. You cannot righteously
ignore money. A man, for instance, who cultivates himself and instructs
a family of daughters in everything except the ability to earn their own
livelihood, and then has the impudence to die suddenly without leaving a
penny--that man is a scoundrel. Ninety--or should I say
ninety-nine?--per cent. of all those anxieties which render proper
living almost impossible are caused by the habit of walking on the edge
of one's income as one might walk on the edge of a precipice. The
majority of Englishmen have some financial worry or other continually,
everlastingly at the back of their minds. The sacrifice necessary to
abolish this condition of things is more apparent than real. All
spending is a matter of habit.
Speaking generally, a man can contrive, out of an extremely modest
income, to have all that he needs--unless he needs the esteem of snobs.
Habit may, and habit usually does, make it just as difficult to keep a
family on two thousand a year as on two hundred. I suppose that for the
majority of men the suspension of income for a single month would mean
either bankruptcy, the usurer, or acute inconvenience. Impossible, under
such circumstances, to be in full and independent possession of one's
immortal soul! Hence I should be inclined to say that the first
preliminary to a proper control of the machine is the habit of spending
decidedly less than one earns or receives. The veriest automaton of a
clerk ought to have the wherewithal of a whole year as a shield against
the caprices of his employer. It would be as reasonable to expect the
inhabitants of an unfortified city in the midst of a plain occupied by a
hostile army to apply themselves successfully to the study of
logarithms or metaphysics, as to expect a man without a year's income in
his safe to apply himself successfully to the true art of living.
And the whole secret of relative freedom from financial anxiety lies not
in income, but in expenditure. I am ashamed to utter this antique
platitude. But, like most aphorisms of unassailable wisdom, it is
completely ignored. You say, of course, that it is not easy to leave a
margin between your expenditure and your present income. I know it. I
fraternally shake your hand. Still it is, in most cases, far easier to
lessen one's expenditure than to increase one's income without
increasing one's expenditure. The alternative is before you. However you
decide, be assured that the foundation of philosophy is a margin, and
that the margin can always be had.
XVI
REASON, REASON!
In conclusion, I must insist upon several results of what I may call the
'intensive culture' of the reason. The brain will not only grow more
effectively powerful in the departments of life where the brain is
supposed specially to work, but it will also enlarge the circle of its
activities. It will assuredly interfere in everything. The student of
himself must necessarily conduct his existence more and more according
to the views of his brain. This will be most salutary and agreeable both
for himself and for the rest of the world. You object. You say it will
be a pity when mankind refers everything to reason. You talk about the
heart. You envisage an entirely reasonable existence as a harsh and
callous existence. Not so. When the reason and the heart come into
conflict the heart is invariably wrong. I do not say that the reason is
always entirely right, but I do say that it is always less wrong than
the heart. The empire of the reason is not universal, but within its
empire reason is supreme, and if other forces challenge it on its own
soil they must take the consequences. Nearly always, when the heart
opposes the brain, the heart is merely a pretty name which we give to
our idleness and our egotism.