We have defined will as the desire to become a certain sort of
character. We have seen that, at critical moments, when the craving
to do a certain thing threatens, like a great tidal wave, to sweep us
helpless before it, it is this desire to become a certain sort of character
which throws its weight in the scale with the other weaker desires to
balance us; it is this desire which stands like a rock to cling to until
the torrent has spent its force. It, too, may be swept away at times.
But when it is, we know that it has not been strong enough. It is a
warning that the breakwater has been too low and too weak. We
must build it higher and stronger. We must strengthen this desire to
become a certain sort of character.
The ideal that we actually form will depend upon our parents,
our religion, our associates, our reading, our thinking, the traditions
of the nation and the age in which we live. Many of these elements
are intellectual, and to the extent that these determine our ideals,
they determine part of our desires.
But even here we cannot say that the intellect creates our desires.
Rather, it transforms them. They exist congenitally in the form of raw
materials; or more strictly, they exist as a country’s “natural resources”
exist, waiting to be worked up by our environment and our
intellect (itself shaped by environment) into the finished product.
Practically all men are born with the sexual instinct. But though this
particular instinct, in its raw state, may be present in equal degrees
in three men, environment, training and intellect may so shape this
raw material that the first man may elect to marry and lead a normal
sexual life, the second may launch forth as a roué, and the third may
enter and abide by the vows of the priesthood. Similarly, the pugnacious
instinct, which makes dogs fight and men go to war, may
also, through environment and the intellect, be discharged through
the channels of football or a philosophical controversy. It is the same
with gregariousness, or any other instinct. These are the materials;
the desires the finished products.
…
The trouble with the average man is not that he neglects to
make resolutions. The trouble is that he makes far too many
resolutions. Making resolutions is sometimes his principal daily occupation.
He is forever forgetting or breaking them, and that is why
he has to make them all over again.
…
Understand me, I am not saying that it would be to your advantage
to make that resolve on the train. I do not contend that it
would be better to get up at seven and take your time than to get up
at quarter to eight and hurry. You are the judge of that. I disclaim any
moral attitude whatever. But I insist that if you do make a resolve it
should be carried out. There should be never an exception. This
point is supreme. To make a resolve and break it is demoralizing.
Though not a single other soul on earth should know it, though
God himself should not know, you would know it. You would have
to confess your failure to yourself. To break a resolve is to undermine
your self-respect. To break a resolve is to lose faith in yourself.
It shakes your confidence that you can keep any other. The next time
you become suddenly disgusted with any action or habit, and you
clench your teeth and your left fist, and are just about to drive your
left fist into the open palm of your right, and say to yourself. “The
next time I—“ you are apt to stop short and think of your previous
failure, and the bitter irony of it all may rush over you. You start at
the very beginning with an unwholesome doubt of whether you are
going to keep your resolve. And when self-respect and self-faith are
gone, nothing else is worth while. But with every resolution kept, be
it ever so small a resolution, your faith in your self grows. The keeping
of the next resolution becomes tremendously easier. Will-power
comes into its inheritance.
The moral of all this is that you should make fewer resolutions
and keep more. The foolish resolution is the resolution made in a
moment of passion and self-disgust. It is well that you should have
such moments. It is of such moments that great achievements are
born. But before you make a resolve that you seriously mean to execute,
look at it coldly and completely. Think not alone of the benefits
of keeping it, but of the disadvantages. If you have been lying in
bed until quarter to eight, you have not been doing so unless there
were some advantages to lying in bed until quarter to eight. Consider
these advantages in the moment of your resolve. Do not pass
them over in contempt. Weigh them at their full value. Measure the
sacrifice of forsaking them. Balance it against the advantages of getting
up promptly at seven. You may decide that getting up promptly
at seven is not worth its price. You may decide to compromise on half
past seven, which would allow you half an hour’s more sleep and a
little more time to dress. Upon what you decide it is not for me to
comment. But your decision should be carried out. No more demoralizing
course could be conceived than daily to resolve to arise at seven
and the next day always to wait until a quarter to eight. Such a course
comes only because, when you make your resolves, you do not fairly
face the price.
This rule is so important, and has so wide a bearing, that we cannot
forsake it here. It applies to all our resolves. Let me illustrate
with the example that has become the favorite with all writers on
will. I refer to drinking. The law-makers insist on solving this particular
will-problem for us, but the Constitutional Amendment, so
far as I am aware, puts no ban on its invaluable use as a literary example.
Moreover, I cannot be arrested for pointing out that the actual
temptations to drinking are not altogether a thing of the past.
You have a drink; then another. Perhaps you have one or two
more, though the count becomes rather confusing after a time. The
liquor “touches the spot,” as you say, and for a time it produces a
mental and emotional reaction that is highly delightful. But the next
morning your stomach is upset; your food doesn’t taste right; you
have a headache; your mental and physical movements are slow and
listless; you get little work done; the color of the universe is drab.
You are probably minus a good deal of money. You feel your self-respect
slipping. You are losing the respect of your friends. And your
resolve that morning, accompanied with the usual terrible knitting
of brow and clenching of fist and of teeth (as if that helped) is that
these occasions of getting drenched must forever cease, end, terminate.
And then what? That acute psychologist, William James, can tell
you much better than I:
how many excuses does the drunkard find when
each new temptation comes! It is a new brand of
liquor which the interests of intellectual culture in
such matters oblige him to test; moreover it is
poured out and it is sin to waste it; also others are
drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse.
Or it is but to enable him to sleep or just to get
through this job of work; or it isn’t drinking, it is
because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-day; or
it is a means of stimulating him to make a more
powerful resolution in favor of abstinence than
any he has hitherto made; or it is just this once,
and one doesn’t count, etc., etc., ad libitum—it is, in
fact, anything you like except being a drunkard. That
is the conception that will not stay before the poor
soul’s attention. But if he once gets able to pick
out that way of conceiving form all the other possible
ways of conceiving the various opportunities
which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to
it that this is being a drunkard and nothing else,
he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by
which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly
present to his mind proves to be his saving
moral act.
And how is he to get “able to pick out that way of conceiving”
and hold to it? There is only one way. Not in the moment of temptation,
but in the moment of his resolve, on “the morning after,”
that is the time for him to summon all these excuses before him, to
bring up every possible excuse, to think of every conceivable advantage
of drinking, and then to ask himself whether they are powerful
enough to offset the conception of being a drunkard, or whether
the advantages of drinking outweigh its disadvantages. He must give
an honest answer then. If he ignores these excuses, on the ground
that they are unworthy his noble resolve, he will find them dancing
before his eyes in the next moment of temptation; and not having
faced and answered them when he was in the mood to face and answer
them, he is not likely to face them in that unhappy moment.
