It is an open secret, which few seem willing to utter, that ardent spirits often make too much effort, exhausting and disheartening themselves by attempting the impossible. I know a man of eager temperament and rather slender physique who, on asking himself what was the most serious and pervading mistake of his early life, finds the answer to be “I tried too hard.” The prevalence of the idea of unconditional freedom works to the advantage of phlegmatic people, who cannot be harmed by it, and to the prejudice of the more impressible.
The author of an article on The Handicapped, by One of Them, says: “It was my own fate to be just strong enough to play about with the other boys, and attempt all their games and ‘stunts,’ without being strong enough actually to succeed in any of them. It never used to occur to me that my failure and lack of skill were due to circumstances beyond my control, but I would always impute them, in consequence of my rigid Calvinistic bringing-up, I suppose, to some moral weakness of my own. I never resigned myself to the inevitable, but over-exerted myself constantly in a grim determination to succeed.... I simply tantalized myself, and grew up with a deepening sense of failure.”[[38]]
The strongest men, I should say, usually understand that their strength is limited, and husband it accordingly, taking care to keep a reserve force, the mere appearance and consciousness of which win most of their victories.
It is a fact of observation that social experience may be such as to break down strength of will. A large part of it is confidence, and this comes from the habit of success. A healthy will, if it tries and fails, will try again, perhaps try harder. No one can say how many trials will be made, but it is certain that one cannot go on indefinitely putting forth his full strength in the face of uniform failure. A man may try a dozen times to scramble over an eight-foot board fence; but if it proves too much for him he will presently cease his efforts and avoid such fences in the future. The process known as “losing your grip” is primarily a loss of self-respect and self-confidence due to a series of failures. Imagined loss of the respect of others enters largely into it, and it is hastened by the inability to dress well and to keep clean, also by poor food, anxiety, loss of sleep, and physical deterioration. Sensual excitement is sought as a relief, and often completes the ruin. Any candid man must, I think, admit that it is easy to imagine a course of experience which would leave him as completely “down and out” as any tramp. The habit of accomplishment and that alone gives self-respect, hope, and courage to face the eyes of men. The disheartened man is no man, and if kept disheartened for a long enough time he is matter for the scrap-heap. The healthy growth of the will requires difficulty, to be sure, and even failure, but only such failure and difficulty as can be and are overcome in a sufficient proportion of cases to keep confidence alive. The power to resist a given temptation is no more absolute than the power to swim a mile; one can do it if his previous life has been such as to train his strength to the requisite point; otherwise not. It is as certain in the one case as in the other that many simply cannot do it.
Each of us, I suppose, knows that he has weaknesses that his will has been unable to overcome, that he has had times of defeat when the assailing forces, if persistent, would have crushed his character, that he has had friends, no worse than himself, whose characters have been crushed. We had better, then, say nothing of the unlimited power of the human will, but ascribe our escape to a preponderance of favoring conditions.
It seems strange, when you think of it, that we have pity and hospitals for the sick in body, but for sick spirits—often a more deadly illness—we have no hospitals (except for the insane), few skilled physicians, and very little understanding. I suppose it is because this kind of trouble is not tangible enough to impress itself upon us, and also because we shun the effort of the imagination that would be required to understand it. Here, certainly, is a field for “social work.”
One often encounters the doctrine that reforms are useless and even harmful, because temptation alone can strengthen the will, as when Sir Thomas Browne says that “They that endeavor to abolish Vice destroy also Virtue; for contraries, although they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.” The argument is constantly used against the restriction of prostitution and the liquor traffic.
Now, it is true that the will grows by exercise. Life is ever a struggle, a struggle, moreover, in which there must always, probably, be more or less failure. We may agree with Milton when he says, advocating the knowledge of evil: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”[[39]] But what is commonly overlooked is that, since this is an onward world, the struggle ought to keep rising to higher levels, and that unnecessary struggle is mere waste and dissipation. We do not need to preserve evil, as the English preserve foxes, for the exercise of hunting it. And yet poverty, disease and vice are frequently upheld on this ground.
There is no danger that struggle will disappear, so long as human energy remains: if it is no longer against drink or licentiousness or war, it can go on to something higher. Every temptation is a conflict, and if it is not a necessary conflict it is a waste of strength: to contend over and over again with the same temptation is a sign of arrested development. Solicitation merely defiles the mind, and a community which tolerates preventable vice wrongs itself in the same way as a man who reads a salacious book.
There is, no doubt, this much in the argument for undergoing temptation, that if the general conditions are such that one is almost sure to be exposed to it sooner or later, it is well to be armed against it by previous knowledge and discipline. Thus the best preventives of licentiousness are probably a wholesome social intercourse between boys and girls from childhood, and a knowledge of and respect for the higher functions of sex. But even here “sex-teaching” may easily be pernicious.