"The feeling of the responsibilities will be roused in them, and they will understand how difficult it is to escape the consequences of impulsive acts."
Would one not say that these lines had been written yesterday?
More than ever our age of unrest makes us the prey of impulses, and to the majority of our contemporaries, the robe, half green and half yellow (by recalling to them the worship of common sense), will become a fetish, more precious than all the amulets with which superstition loves to adorn logic, or to incorporate fantastic outline in the classic setting of beautiful jewels.
LESSON V
THE DANGERS OF SENTIMENTALITY
The Shogun says: "There are sentimentalities of many kinds, some present less dangers than others, but from every point of view they are prejudicial to the acquisition and exercise of common sense. To cultivate sentiment over which the Will has no control is always to be regretted.
"Sentimentality is multiform.
"It presents itself, at times, under the aspect of an obscure appeal to sensuality and brings with it a passing desire of the heart and of the senses, which produces an artificial appreciation of the emotion felt.
"In this first case sentimentality is an unconscious manifestation of egotism, because, outside of that which provokes this outward manifestation, everything is alienated and becomes indistinct.
"The incidents of existence lose their true proportion, since everything becomes relative to the object because of our preoccupation.