AVOIDANCE OF CONSCIOUS USE OF THE WILL
"Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners."
_Othello_.
Doctor Austin O'Malley, in his little volume, "Keystones of Thought",
says: "When you are conscious of your stomach or your will you are
ill." We all appreciate thoroughly, as the result of modern progress
in the knowledge of the influences of the mind on the body, how true
is the first part of this saying, but comparatively few people realize
the truth of the second part. The latter portion of this maxim is most
important for our consideration. It should always be in the minds of
those who want to use their own wills either for the purpose of making
themselves well, or keeping themselves healthy, but above all, should
never be forgotten by those who want to help others get over various
ills that are manifestly due in whole or in part to the failure to use
the vital energies in the body as they should be employed.
{81}
Conscious use of the will, except at the beginning of a series of
activities, is always a mistake. It is extremely wasteful of internal
energy. It adds greatly to the difficulty of accomplishing whatever is
undertaken. It includes, above all, watching ourselves do things,
constantly calculating how much we are accomplishing and whether we
are doing all that we should be doing, and thus makes useless demands
on power partly by diversion of attention, partly by impairment of
concentration, but above all by adding to the friction because of the
inspection that is at work.
The old kitchen saw is "a watched kettle never boils." The real
significance of the expression is of course that it seems to take so
long for the water to boil that we become impatient while watching and
it looks to us as though the boiling process would really never occur.
This is still more strikingly evident when we are engaged in watching
our own activities and wondering whether they are as efficient as they
should be. The lengthening of time under these circumstances is an
extremely important factor in bringing about tiredness. Ask any human
being unaccustomed to note the passage of time to tell you when two
minutes have elapsed; {82} inevitably he will suggest at the end of
thirty to forty seconds that the two minutes must be up. Only by
counting his pulse or by going through some regular mechanical process
will he be enabled to appreciate the passage of time in anything like
its proper course. When watched thus, time seems to pass ever so much
more slowly than it would otherwise.
It is extremely important then that people should not acquire the
impression that they must be consciously using their will to bring
themselves into good health and keep themselves there, for that will
surely defeat their purpose. What is needed is a training of the will
to do things by a succession of harder and harder tasks until the
ordinary acts of life seem comparatively easy. Intellectual persuasion
as to the efficiency of the will in this matter means very little. The
ordinary feeling that reasoning means much in such matters is a
fallacy. Much thinking about them is only disturbing of action as a
rule and Hamlet's expression that the "native hue of resolution is
sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" is a striking bit of
psychology.
Shakespeare had no illusions with regard to the place of the will in
life and more than any English author has emphasized it. I have {83}
ventured to illustrate this by quotations from him under each chapter
heading, but there are many more quite as applicable that might
readily be found. He knew above all how easy it was for human beings
to lessen the power of their wills and has told us of "the cloy'd will
that satiateth unsatisfied desire" and "the bridles of our wills", and
has given us such adjectives as "benumbed" and "neutral" and "doting",
which demonstrates his recognition of how men weaken their wills by
over-deliberation.
The mode of training in the army is of course founded on this mode of
thinking. The young men in the United States Army want to accomplish
every iota of their duty and are not only willing but anxious to do
everything that is expected of them. There were some mighty difficult
tasks ahead of them over in Europe and our method of preparing the men
was not by emphasizing their duty and dinning into their ears and
minds how great the difficulty would be and how they must nerve
themselves for the task. Such a mode of preparation would probably
have been discouraging rather than helpful. But they were trained in
exercises of various kinds in an absolutely regular life under plain
living in the {84} midst of hard work until their wills responded to
the word of command quite unconsciously and immediately without any
need of further prompting. Their bodies were trained until every
available source of energy was at command, so that when they _wanted_
to do things they set about them without more ado, and as they were
used to being fatigued they were not constantly engaged in dreading
lest they should hurt themselves, or fostering fears that they might
exhaust their energies or that their tiredness, even when apparently
excessive, would mean anything more than a passing state that rest
would repair completely.
If at every emergency of their life at war soldiers had to go through
a series of conscious persuasions to wake up their will and set their
energies at work, and if they had to occupy themselves every time in
presenting motives why this activity should not be delayed, then
military discipline, at least in so far as it involves prompt
obedience, would almost inevitably be considerable of a joke. What is
needed is unthinking, immediate obedience, and this can be secured
only by the formation of deeply graven habits which enable a man to
set about the next thing that duty calls for at once.
{85}
Every action that we perform is the result of an act of the will, but
we do not have to advert to that as a rule; whenever any one gets into
a state of mind where it is necessary to be constantly adverting to
it, then, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, there is
something the matter with the will. The faculty is being hampered in
its action by consciousness, and such hampering leads to a great waste
of energy.
The will is the great, unconscious faculty in us. By far the greater
part of what has come unfortunately to be called the unconscious and
the subconscious and that has occupied so much of the attention of
modern writers on psychological subjects is really the will at work.
It attains its results we know not how, and it is prompted to their
accomplishment in ways that are often very difficult for us to
understand. Its effects are often spoken of as due to the submerged
self or the subliminal self or the other self, but it is only in rare
and pathological cases as a rule that such expressions are justified
once the place of the will is properly recognized.
It is often said, for instance, that the power some people have of
waking after a certain {86} period of sleep at night or after a short
nap during the daytime, a power that a great many more people would
possess if only they deliberately practised it, is due to the
subconsciousness or the subliminal personality of the individual which
wakes him up at the determined time. Why those terms should be used
when other things are accomplished by the human will just as
mysteriously is rather difficult to understand. It is well recognized
that if an individual in the ordinary waking state wants to do
something after the lapse of an hour or so he will do it, provided his
will is really awake to the necessity of accomplishing it. It is true
that he may become so absorbed in his current occupation as to miss
the time, but such abstraction usually means that he was not
sufficiently interested in the duty that was to be performed as to
keep the engagement with himself, or else that he is an individual in
whom the intellectual over-shadows the voluntary life. We speak of him
as an impractical man.
We all know the danger there is in putting off calling some one by
telephone on being told that "the line is busy", for not infrequently
it will happen that several hours will elapse before we think of the
matter again {87} and then perhaps it may be too late. If we set a
definite time limit with ourselves, however, then our will will prompt
us quite as effectively, though quite as inexplicably, at the
expiration of that time as it awakes those who have resolved to be
aroused at a predetermined moment. We may miss our telephone
engagement with ourselves, but we practically never miss an important
train, because having deeply impressed upon ourselves the necessity
for not missing this, our will arouses us to activity in good time.
There is not the slightest necessity, however, for appealing to the
unconscious or the subconscious in this. It is true that there is a
wonderful sentinel within us that awakes us from daydreams or disturbs
the ordinary course of some occupation to turn our attention to the
next important duty that we should perform. We know that this sentinel
is quite apart from our consciousness; but the power we have of
setting ourselves to doing anything is exemplified in very much the
same way. When I want a book, I do not know what it is that sets my
muscles in motion and brings me to a shelf and then directs my
attention to choosing the one I shall take down and consult. It is an
unconscious activity, but not the activity of {88} unconsciousness,
which is only a contradiction in terms. [Footnote 4]
[Footnote 4: It is true that there is a particular phase of our
intellectual effort included under the modern terms unconscious or
subconscious that is mysterious enough to deserve a special name,
but we already have an excellent term for this quality which is not
vague but thoroughly descriptive of its activity. This is
intuition,--a word that has been in use for nearly a thousand years
now and signifies the immediate perception of a truth,--by a flash
as it were. We may know nothing about a subject and may have only
begun to think about it, when there flashes on us a truth that has
perhaps never occurred to any one else and certainly has never been
in our minds before. It has been suggested in recent years that such
flashes of intelligence are due to the secondary personality or the
subliminal self or the other self, and it is often added that it is
the development of our knowledge of these phases of psychology that
represents modern progress in the science of mind. Only the term for
it is new, however, for intuition has been the subject of special
intensive study for a long while. Indeed, the reason why the
old-time poet appealed to the muses for aid and the modern poet
suggests inspiration as the source of his poetic thought, is because
both of them knew that their best thoughts flash on them, not as the
result of long and hard thinking, but by some process in which with
the greatest facility come perceptions that even they themselves are
surprised to learn that they have. To say that such things come from
the unconscious is simply to ignore this wonderful power of original
thought, that is, primary perception. Emerson suggested that
intuition represented all the knowledge that came without tuition,
as if this were the etymology, and the hint is excellent for the
meaning, though the real derivation of the word has no relation to
tuition. To attribute these original thoughts to the unconscious or
any partly conscious faculty in us is to ignore a great deal of
careful study of psychology before our time. It is besides to
entangle oneself in the absurdity of discussing an unconscious
consciousness.]
While many people are inclined to feel almost helpless in the presence
of the idea that it is their unconscious selves that enable them {89}
to do things or initiate modes of activity, the feeling is quite
different when we substitute for that the word "will." All of us
recognize that our wills can be trained to do things, and while at
first it may require a conscious effort, we can by the formation of
habits not only make them easy, but often delightful and sometimes
quite indispensable to our sense of well being. Walking is extremely
difficult at the beginning, when its movements are consciously
performed, but it becomes a very satisfying sort of exercise after a
while and then almost literally a facile, nearly indispensable
activity of daily life, so that we feel the need for it, if we are
deprived of it.
This has to be done with regard to the activities that make for
health. We have to form habits that render them easy, pleasant, and
even necessary for our good feelings. This can be done, as has been
suggested in the chapter on habits, but we have to avoid any such
habit as that of consciously using the will. That is a bad habit that
some people let themselves drop into but it should be corrected.
Having set our activities to work we must, as far as possible, forget
about them and let them go on for themselves. It is not only possible
but even easy and above all almost {90} necessary that we should do
this. Hence at the beginning people must not expect that they will
find the use of their will easy in suppressing pain, lessening
tiredness, and facilitating accomplishment, but they must look forward
to the time quite confidently when it will be so. In the meantime the
less attention paid to the process of training, the better and more
easily will the needed habits be formed.
Failure to secure results is almost inevitable when conscious use of
the will comes into the problem. As a rule a direct appeal should not
be made to people to use their wills, but they should be aroused and
stimulated in various ways and particularly by the force of example.
What has made it so comparatively easy for our young soldiers to use
their wills and train their bodies and get into a condition where they
are capable of accomplishing what they would have thought quite
impossible before, has been above all the influence of example. A lot
of other young men of their own age are standing these things
exemplarily. They are seen performing what is expected of them without
complaint, or at least without refusal, and so every effort is put
forth to do likewise without any time spent on reflection as to how
{91} difficult it all is or how hard to bear or how much they are to
be pitied. It is not long before what was hard at first becomes under
repetition even easy and a source of fine satisfaction. Getting up at
five in the morning and working for sixteen hours with only
comparatively brief intervals for relaxation now and then, and often
being burdened with additional duties of various kinds which must be
worked in somehow or other, seems a very difficult matter until one
has done it for a while. Then one finds everything gets done almost
without conscious effort. Will power flows through the body and lends
hitherto unexpected energy, but of this there is no consciousness;
indeed, conscious reflection on it would hamper action. No wonder that
as a result of the facility acquired, one comes to readily credit the
assumption that the will is a spiritual power and that some source of
energy apart from the material is supplying the initiative and the
resources of vitality that have made accomplishment so much easier
than would have been imagined beforehand. This is quite literally what
training of the will means: training ourselves to use all our powers
to the best advantage, not putting obstacles in their way nor brakes
on their exertion, but {92} also not thinking very much about them or
making resolutions. The way to do things is to do them, not think
about them.
Professor James is, as always, particularly happy in his mode of
expressing this great truth. He insists that the way to keep the will
active is not by constantly thinking about it and supplying new
motives and furbishing up old motives for its activity, but by
cultivating the faculty of effort. His paragraph in this regard is of
course well known, and yet it deserves to be repeated here because it
represents the essence of what is needed to make the will ready to do
its best work. He says:
"As a fine practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we
may, then, offer something like this: _Keep the faculty of effort
alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day_. That is, be
systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do
every day or two something for no other reason than that you would
rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it
may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on
his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time and {93}
possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire _does_ come,
his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man
who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention,
energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will
stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his
softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."
To do things on one's will without very special interest is an
extremely difficult matter. It can be done more readily when one is
young and when certain secondary aims are in view besides the mere
training of the will, but to do things merely for will training
becomes so hard eventually that some excuse is found and the task is
almost inevitably given up. Exercising for instance in a gymnasium
just for the sake of taking exercise or keeping in condition becomes
so deadly dull after a while that unless there is a trainer to keep a
man up to the mark, his exercise dwindles from day to day until it
amounts to very little. Men who are growing stout about middle life
will take up the practice of a cold bath after ten minutes or more of
morning exercises with a good deal of enthusiasm, but they will not
keep it up long, or if they do continue for several months, any {94}
change in the daily routine will provide an excuse to drop it.
Companionship and above all competition in any way greatly helps, but
it takes too much energy of the will to make the effort alone.
Besides, when the novelty has worn off and routine has replaced
whatever interest existed in the beginning in watching the effect of
exercise on the muscles, the lack of interest makes the exercise of
much less value than before. If there is not a glow of satisfaction
with it, the circulation, especially to the periphery to the body, is
not properly stimulated and some of the best effect of the exercise is
lost. Athletes often say of solitary exercise that it leaves them
cold, which is quite a literal description of the effect produced on
them. The circulation of the surface is not stimulated as it is when
there is interest in what is being done and so the same warmth is not
produced at the surface of the body.
It is comparatively easy to persuade men who need outdoor exercise to
walk home from their offices in the afternoon when the distance is not
too far, but it is difficult to get them to keep it up. The walk
becomes so monotonous a routine after a time that all sorts of excuses
serve to interrupt the habit, and then it is not long before it is
done so irregularly as to lose {95} most of its value. Here as in all
exercise, companionship which removes conscious attention from
advertence to the will greatly aids. On the other hand, as has been so
clearly demonstrated in recent years, it is very easy to induce men to
go out and follow a little ball over the hills in the country, an
ideal form of exercise, merely because they are interested in their
score or in beating an opponent. Any kind of a game that involves
competition makes people easily capable of taking all sorts of
trouble. Instead of being tired by their occupation in this way and
not wanting to repeat it, they become more and more interested and
spend more and more time at it. The difference between gymnastics and
sport in this regard is very marked.
In sport the extraneous interest adds to the value of the exercise and
makes it ever so much easier to continue; when it sets every nerve
tingling with the excitement of the game, it is doing all the more
good. Gymnastics grow harder unless in some way associated with
competition, or with the effort to outdo oneself, while indulgence in
sport becomes ever easier. Many a young man would find it an
intolerable bore and an increasingly difficult task if asked to give
as much time and energy {96} to some form of hard work as he does to
some sport. He feels tired after sport, but not exhausted, and becomes
gradually able to stand more and more before he need give up, thus
showing that he is constantly increasing his muscular capacity.
Conscious training of the will is then practically always a mistake.
It is an extremely difficult thing to do, and the amount of inhibition
which accumulates to oppose it serves after a time to neutralize the
benefit to be derived. Good habits should be formed, but not merely
for the sake of forming them. There should be some ulterior purpose
and if possible some motive that lifts men up to the performance of
duty, no matter how difficult it is.
Our young men who went to the camps demonstrated how much can be
accomplished in this manner. They were asked to get up early in the
morning, to work hard for many hours in the day, or take long walks,
sometimes carrying heavy burdens, and were so occupied that they had
but very little time to themselves. They were encouraged to take
frequent cold baths, which implied further waste of heat energy, and
then were very plainly fed, though of course with a good, rounded
diet, {97} well-balanced, but without any frills and with very little
in it that would tempt any appetite except that of a hungry man. They
learned the precious lesson that hunger is the best sauce for food.
Most of these men were pushed so hard that only an army officer
perfectly confident of what he was doing and well aware that all of
his men had been thoroughly examined by a physician and had nothing
organically wrong with them would have dared to do it. A good many of
us had the chance to see how university men took the military regime.
Long hours of drilling and of hard work in the open made them so tired
that in the late afternoon they could just lie down anywhere and go to
sleep. I have seen young fellows asleep on porches or in the late
spring on the grass and once saw a number of them who found excellent
protection from the sun in what to them seemed nice soft beds--at
least they slept well in them--inside a series of large earthen-ware
pipes that were about to be put down for a sewer. Some of them were
pushed so hard, considering how little physical exercise they had
taken before, that they fainted while on drill. Quite a few of them
were in such a state of nervous tension that they fainted on {98}
being vaccinated. Almost needless to say, had they been at home, any
such effect would have been a signal for the prompt cessation of such
work as they were doing, for the home people would have been quite
sure that serious injury would be done to their boys. These young
fellows themselves did not think so. Their physicians were confident
that with no organic lesion present the faint was a neurotic
derangement and not at all a symptom of exhaustion. The young soldiers
would have felt ashamed if there had been any question of their
stopping training. They felt that they could make good as well as
their fellows. They would have resented sympathy and much more pity.
They went on with their work because they were devoted to a great
cause. After a time, it became comparatively easy for them to
accomplish things that would hitherto have been quite impossible and
for which they themselves had no idea that they possessed the energy.
It was this high purpose that inspired them to let more and more of
their internal energy loose without putting a brake on, until finally
the habit of living up to this new maximum of accomplishment became
second nature and therefore natural and easy of accomplishment.
{99}
Here is the defect in systems which promise to help people to train
their wills by talking much about it, and by persuading them that it
can be done, that all they have to do is to set about it. Unless one
has some fine satisfying purpose in doing things, their doing is
difficult and fails to accomplish as much good for the doer as would
otherwise be the case. Conscious will activity requires, to use
old-fashioned psychological terms, the exercise of two faculties at
the same time, the consciousness and the will. This adds to the
difficulty of willing. What is needed is a bait of interest held up
before the will, constantly tempting it to further effort but without
any continuing consciousness on the part of the individual that he
must will it and keep on willing it. That must ever be a hampering
factor in the case. Human nature does not like imperatives and writhes
and wastes energy under them. On the contrary, optatives are pleasant
and give encouragement without producing a contrary reaction; and it
is this state of mind and will that is by far the best for the
individual.
Above all, it is important that the person forming new habits should
feel that there is nothing else to be done except the hard things
{100} that have been outlined. If there is any mode of escape from the
fulfillment of hard tasks, human nature will surely find it. If our
young soldiers had felt that they did not have to perform their
military duties and that there was some way to avoid them, the taking
of the training would have proved extremely difficult. They just _had_
to take it; there was no way out, so they pushed themselves through
the difficulties and then after a time they found that they were
tapping unsuspected sources of energy in themselves. For when people
_have_ to do things, they find that they can do ever so much more than
they thought they could, and in the doing, instead of exhausting
themselves, they actually find it easier to accomplish more and more
with ever less difficulty. The will must by habit be made so prompt to
obey that obedience will anticipate thought in the matter and
sometimes contravene what reason would dictate if it had a chance to
act. The humorous story of the soldier who, carrying his dinner on a
plate preparatory to eating it, was greeted by a wag with the word
"Attention!" in martial tones, and dropped his dinner to assume the
accustomed attitude, is well known. Similar practical jokes are said
to have been played, on a certain number {101} of occasions in this
war, with the thoroughly trained young soldier.
The help of the will to the highest degree is obtained not by a series
of resolutions but by doing whatever one wishes to do a number of
times until it becomes easy and the effort to accomplish it is quite
unconscious. Reason does not help conduct much, but a trained will is
of the greatest possible service. It can only be secured, however, by
will action. The will is very like the muscles. There is little use in
showing people how to accomplish muscle feats; they must do them for
themselves. The less consciousness there is involved in this, the
better.
{102}