Entire novelties are within the reach of few, and come of themselves but seldom. Fortunately, their agreeable effect can be closely imitated by influences quite within our own control; that is, by the remission and alternation of the pleasures already our own. This alone will maintain the efficacy of any pleasure, for it is a sad fact that in impressions on the nervous system, persistence can never become permanence. Remission and reaction in all sensations are demanded by that eternal and infinite law of Periodicity, or Rhythmical Recurrence, which is the last and highest in the Universe of mind or matter. This in turn enforces on us the importance of aiming for a multiplicity of sources of pleasure, so that we may heighten their impressions by frequent variety.
Here again we come into conflict with that cherished delusion which makes contentment and tranquillity the chief elements of happiness. With political economists, it often arises from a confusion of the spheres of the State and the Individual. The State properly aims at peace, established order, routine, and material ends; but the Individual should seek variety and activity, he should try untrodden paths and risk unknown crises. This alone will make him a many-sided, strong character, responsive up to the full measure of his powers to all impressions of natural enjoyment.
The foe he has to guard against in this joyous quest is Habit. This is the tyrant whose iron scepter enslaves most men. The promptings of pleasure and pain are far from being the only incentives; probably they are by no means the most numerous or potent. The “ruling motives” of most persons are simply the associations, customs, ideas, and aims with which they have been longest in contact. A given mental tendency soon becomes predominant, its easy yoke becomes adjusted to the neck, and the man pursues his way in life without more resistance than the ox to the wain. Vain the attempt to break his fetters and sever the bonds of his habits. He is satisfied to reply, as the Arab to the visitor, who would teach him a better agriculture--“Thus did my father before me and thus my mother taught me; and in this manner shall I continue.”
All attempts to make men happier on a large scale have been shattered against the rock of this stubborn conservatism. Only at rare intervals has it been riven by the shock of some mighty emotion which has swept, tornado-like, over the soul of a nation, uprooting the tangled growths of bigotry and routine. The only hope is that here and there an individual will arise and say to himself, “I shall believe nothing merely because those around me believe it; I shall do nothing merely because I am accustomed to do it; I shall render to myself a reason for my every decision and act.”
If some one asks, Why this invective against Habit, easy Habit, soft as a padded chair, comfortable as an old shoe? the answer must come from an analysis of mind. I have before shown that all true motives of the Will are directed toward the avoidance of pain or the attainment of pleasure. These alone are clearly conscious motives, distinguishing between Self and Object, and therefore heightening to the sense of individual life. Whatever we do “by habit,” on the other hand, we do, in a greater or less degree, by what physiologists call “unconscious cerebration,” and through the involuntary action of our nervous and muscular systems. This automatic action of our organism is constantly encroaching on our consciousness, submerging it, like the tide the shore; darkening it, like the night the landscape; swallowing it inch by inch, like the boa his prey. The struggle against Habit, therefore, and all that Habit means, prejudice, bias, bigotry, authority, is a struggle for life, and the nation, the society, the individual, who succumbs in the contest is, by the very fact, bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness.
IV. The establishment of a proper proportion between desire and pleasure.
Through the mouth of Hamlet Shakespeare makes the philosophical reflection—“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;” in other words, the value of anything reckoned in the currency of enjoyment, lies not in the thing itself but in the strength of our wish for it. Most of the aims of effort are like curios, whose price is gauged entirely by the anxiety of the amateur to obtain them, and not by any intrinsic quality.
In life there is no more useful faculty than to be able to put the right price on pleasures. The best of prudential maxims is “Count the cost.” The outlay of effort should be in a just relation to the return which can be reasonably reckoned upon. A given pleasure should be sought with an energy strictly in proportion to the gratification which it can actually yield—not in proportion to a false ideal of that gratification as portrayed by the exaggerations of passion or morbid desire. When infatuation or fascination or an over-heated imagination leads the chase, horse and rider will be soon landed in the ditch. Pain and disappointment ever follow an end sought in excess of its real value. Again to quote the great dramatist, the “expense of passion” is sure to be succeeded by “a waste of shame.”
The precept of education which is thus enforced is the regulation of desire by reflection and deliberation. Proceed to an appraisement, as in business affairs. Ask yourself the grounds of your desire. Is it from experience, or merely on hearsay, and from a groundless imagining of what the object might yield if attained? If it is from experience, and the tasted sweet whets anew the appetite, recall the reaction and the consequences, and if they were unpleasant, present them fully before the bar of your judgment. If imagination alone influences you, remember that you are playing the children’s game of “swapping in the dark,” and are liable to exchange solid value for dross. “Depraved affections,” observes Lord Bacon, “are false valuations.”
V. The last of the five principles stated is the crown of all of them—Make all pleasures a part of happiness.
I have already explained the difference between mere pleasurable sensation and happiness in the true sense of the term. While the former belongs to man’s animal nature, the latter is intimately associated with the consciousness of Self. The power of discriminating one’s Self from the rest of the universe, and making one’s Self the subject of one’s own observation is a faculty peculiar to man alone. There is nothing which lends him more potent aid to accomplish this than his pleasurable sensations. This alone imparts to them any real value in the history of the individual or the race, and through this their value becomes inestimable.
This has always been recognized as true of some of them; but the error of most teachers has been that they have refused to acknowledge the value of all pleasure to this end, the excellence of all enjoyment, when it is brought into relation to the full nature of man. Some have claimed that the charms derived from the esthetic and benevolent emotions are enough to fill our lives; others advocate intellectual joys; many preach that the religious sentiment offers all that man needs; while counselors of an opposite tendency cry, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die.”
All are wrong. The spirit of sound culture will recognize the whole nature of man and the solidarity of all his parts, and will insist on respecting that unity, if his true development is to be accomplished. For this reason it will strive to render the pleasures of the senses and emotions as intellectual as possible; and with not less earnestness will aim to keep the pleasures of the intellect in touch with the emotions and the senses. Its principle will be that the more intimately the gratifications of sense are infused with emotion and thought, the more they will be both purified and strengthened; and the closer the web into which we can weave the austere joys of the reason along with the emotions and the feelings, the more sympathetic, wide-reaching, and ennobling will those joys become. As the ancient mason mingled water from the sky with clay from the earth to make the bricks wherewith to build the temple, so the permanent structure of human progress can be erected only by combining in due proportion the extremes of man’s delights.
A real though mysterious bond unites sense with that which is above and beyond sense. Toward this Unknown it is ever striving, though blindly and unconsciously. In lower forms of life this has led to that marvelous series of transformations which, at last, have reached their culmination in man. In him the struggle no longer expends itself in physical changes, but frames the ideals which float before his mind, constantly