The youth begins, and for a few months he does the exercises every morning. But they begin to get irksome.
He is tired, he has a slight cold, he wants to read or write. He neglects the exercises. Then he remembers that he cannot get strong unless he perseveres and does the work regularly, and he goes on again. Or he neglects his training for awhile, until he meets another youth who has improved himself. Then he goes back to the dumb-bells.
Is not this, to our own knowledge, the kind of thing that happens to us all, in all kinds of self-training, whether it be muscular, mental, or moral?
What causes the fluctuations? Let the reader examine his own conduct, and he will find a continual shifting and conflict of motives. And he will never find a motive that cannot be traced to his temperament or training, to his heredity or environment.
A man wants to learn French, or shorthand. Let him ask himself why he wants to learn, and he will find the motive springs from temperament or training. He begins to learn. He finds the work difficult and irksome. He has to spur himself on by all kinds of expedients. Finally he learns, or he gives up trying to learn; and he will find that his action has been settled by a contest between his desire to be able to write shorthand, or to speak French, and his dislike to the drudgery of learning; or that his action has been settled by a conflict between his desire to know shorthand, or French, and his desire to do something else. He does the thing he most desires to do. And all desire comes from heredity or from environment.
Every member of his body, every faculty, every impulse is fixed for him by heredity; every kind of knowledge, every kind of encouragement or discouragement comes of environment.
I hope we have made that quite clear, and now we may ask to what it leads us.
And we shall find that it leads us to the conclusion that everything a man does is, at the instant when he does it, the only thing he can do: the only thing he can do, then.
"What! do you mean to say-?" Yes. It is startling. But let us keep our heads cool and our eyes wide open, and we shall find that it is quite true, and that it is not difficult to understand.