Memories and Studies

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Colonel Baird-Smith, needing to draw on altogether extraordinary stores
of energy, found that brandy and opium were ways of throwing them into
gear.

Such cases are humanly typical. We are all to some degree oppressed,
unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at
it. The threshold must be made to shift. Then many of us find that an
eccentric activity--a "spree," say--relieves. There is no doubt that
to some men sprees and excesses of almost any kind are medicinal,
temporarily at any rate, in spite of what the moralists and doctors say.

But when the normal tasks and stimulations of life don't put a man's
deeper levels of energy on tap, and he requires distinctly deleterious
excitements, his constitution verges on the abnormal. The normal
opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will. The
difficulty is to use it, to make the effort which the word volition
implies. But if we do make it (or if a god, though he were only the
god Chance, makes it through us), it will act dynamogenically on us for
a month. It is notorious that a single successful effort of moral
volition, such as saying "no" to some habitual temptation, or
performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of
energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power. "In the
act of uncorking the whiskey bottle which I had brought home to get
drunk upon," said a man to me, "I suddenly found myself running out
into the garden, where I smashed it on the ground. I felt so happy and
uplifted after this act, that for two months I was n't tempted to touch
a drop."

The emotions and excitements due to usual situations are the usual
inciters of the will. But these act discontinuously; and in the
intervals the shallower levels of life tend to close in and shut us
off. Accordingly the best practical knowers of the human soul have
invented the thing known as methodical ascetic discipline to keep the
deeper levels constantly in reach. Beginning with easy tasks, passing
to harder ones, and exercising day by day, it is, I believe, admitted
that disciples of asceticism can reach very high levels of freedom and
power of will.

Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises must have produced this result in
innumerable devotees. But the most venerable ascetic system, and the
one whose results have the most voluminous experimental corroboration
is undoubtedly the Yoga system in Hindustan.

From time immemorial, by Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, or whatever
code of practice it might be, Hindu aspirants to perfection have
trained themselves, month in and out, for years. The result claimed,
and certainly in many cases accorded by impartial judges, is strength
of character, personal power, unshakability of soul. In an article in
the _Philosophical Review_,[2] from which I am largely copying here, I
have quoted at great length the experience with "Hatha Yoga" of a very
gifted European friend of mine who, by persistently carrying out for
several months its methods of fasting from food and sleep, its
exercises in breathing and thought-concentration, and its fantastic
posture-gymnastics, seems to have succeeded in waking up deeper and
deeper levels of will and moral and intellectual power in himself, and
to have escaped from a decidedly menacing brain-condition of the
"circular" type, from which he had suffered for years.

Judging by my friend's letters, of which the last I have is written
fourteen months after the Yoga training began, there can be no doubt of
his relative regeneration. He has undergone material trials with
indifference, travelled third-class on Mediterranean steamers, and
fourth-class on African trains, living with the poorest Arabs and
sharing their unaccustomed food, all with equanimity. His devotion to
certain interests has been put to heavy strain, and nothing is more
remarkable to me than the changed moral tone with which he reports the
situation. A profound modification has unquestionably occurred in the
running of his mental machinery. The gearing has changed, and his will
is available otherwise than it was.

My friend is a man of very peculiar temperament. Few of us would have
had the will to start upon the Yoga training, which, once started,
seemed to conjure the further willpower needed out of itself. And not
all of those who could launch themselves would have reached the same
results. The Hindus themselves admit that in some men the results
may come without call or bell. My friend writes to me: "You
are quite right in thinking that religious crises, love-crises,
indignation-crises may awaken in a very short time powers similar to
those reached by years of patient Yoga-practice."

Probably most medical men would treat this individual's case as one of
what it is fashionable now to call by the name of "self-suggestion," or
"expectant attention"--as if those phrases were explanatory, or meant
more than the fact that certain men can be influenced, while others
cannot be influenced, by certain sorts of _ideas_. This leads me to
say a word about ideas considered as dynamogenic agents, or stimuli for
unlocking what would otherwise be unused reservoirs of individual power.

One thing that ideas do is to contradict other ideas and keep us from
believing them. An idea that thus negates a first idea may itself in
turn be negated by a third idea, and the first idea may thus regain its
natural influence over our belief and determine our behavior. Our
philosophic and religious development proceeds thus by credulities,
negations, and the negating of negations.

But whether for arousing or for stopping belief, ideas may fail to be
efficacious, just as a wire, at one time alive with electricity, may at
another time be dead. Here our insight into causes fails us, and we
can only note results in general terms. In general, whether a given
idea shall be a live idea depends more on the person into whose mind it
is injected than on the idea itself. Which is the suggestive idea for
this person, and which for that one? Mr. Fletcher's disciples
regenerate themselves by the idea (and the fact) that they are chewing,
and re-chewing, and super-chewing their food. Dr. Dewey's pupils
regenerate themselves by going without their breakfast--a fact, but
also an ascetic idea. Not every one can use _these_ ideas with the
same success.

But apart from such individually varying susceptibilities, there are
common lines along which men simply as men tend to be inflammable by
ideas. As certain objects naturally awaken love, anger, or cupidity,
so certain ideas naturally awaken the energies of loyalty, courage,
endurance, or devotion. When these ideas are effective in an
individual's life, their effect is often very great indeed. They may
transfigure it, unlocking innumerable powers which, but for the idea,
would never have come into play. "Fatherland," "the Flag," "the
Union," "Holy Church," "the Monroe Doctrine," "Truth," "Science,"
"Liberty," Garibaldi's phrase, "Rome or Death," etc., are so many
examples of energy-releasing ideas. The social nature of such phrases
is an essential factor of their dynamic power. They are forces of
detent in situations in which no other force produces equivalent
effects, and each is a force of detent only in a specific group of men.

The memory that an oath or vow has been made will nerve one to
abstinences and efforts otherwise impossible; witness the "pledge" in
the history of the temperance movement. A mere promise to his
sweetheart will clean up a youth's life all over--at any rate for time.
For such effects an educated susceptibility is required. The idea of
one's "honor," for example, unlocks energy only in those of us who have
had the education of a "gentleman," so called.

That delightful being, Prince Pueckler-Muskau, writes to his wife from
England that he has invented "a sort of artificial resolution
respecting things that are difficult of performance. My device," he
continues, "is this: _I give my word of honor most solemnly to myself_
to do or to leave undone this or that. I am of course extremely
cautious in the use of this expedient, but when once the word is given,
even though I afterwards think I have been precipitate or mistaken, I
hold it to be perfectly irrevocable, whatever inconveniences I foresee
likely to result. If I were capable of breaking my word after such
mature consideration, I should lose all respect for myself,--and what
man of sense would not prefer death to such an alternative? . . . When
the mysterious formula is pronounced, no alteration in my own view,
nothing short of physical impossibilities, must, for the welfare of my
soul, alter my will. . . . I find something very satisfactory in the
thought that man has the power of framing such props and weapons out of
the most trivial materials, indeed out of nothing, merely by the force
of his will, which thereby truly deserves the name of omnipotent." [3]

_Conversions_, whether they be political, scientific, philosophic, or
religious, form another way in which bound energies are let loose.
They unify us, and put a stop to ancient mental interferences. The
result is freedom, and often a great enlargement of power. A belief
that thus settles upon an individual always acts as a challenge to his
will. But, for the particular challenge to operate, he must be the
right challeng_ee_. In religious conversions we have so fine an
adjustment that the idea may be in the mind of the challengee for years
before it exerts effects; and why it should do so then is often so far
from obvious that the event is taken for a miracle of grace, and not a
natural occurrence. Whatever it is, it may be a highwater mark of
energy, in which "noes," once impossible, are easy, and in which a new
range of "yeses" gains the right of way.

We are just now witnessing a very copious unlocking of energies by
ideas in the persons of those converts to "New Thought," "Christian
Science," "Metaphysical Healing," or other forms of spiritual
philosophy, who are so numerous among us to-day. The ideas here are
healthy-minded and optimistic; and it is quite obvious that a wave of
religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early
Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American
world. The common feature of these optimistic faiths is that they all
tend to the suppression of what Mr. Horace Fletcher calls
"fearthought." Fearthought he defines as the "self-suggestion of
inferiority"; so that one may say that these systems all operate by the
suggestion of power. And the power, small or great, comes in various
shapes to the individual,--power, as he will tell you, not to "mind"
things that used to vex him, power to concentrate his mind, good cheer,
good temper--in short, to put it mildly, a firmer, more elastic moral
tone.

The most genuinely saintly person I have ever known is a friend of mine
now suffering from cancer of the breast--I hope that she may pardon my
citing her here as an example of what ideas can do. Her ideas have
kept her a practically well woman for months after she should have
given up and gone to bed. They have annulled all pain and weakness and
given her a cheerful active life, unusually beneficent to others to
whom she has afforded help. Her doctors, acquiescing in results they
could not understand, have had the good sense to let her go her own way.

How far the mind-cure movement is destined to extend its influence, or
what intellectual modifications it may yet undergo, no one can
foretell. It is essentially a religious movement, and to academically
nurtured minds its utterances are tasteless and often grotesque enough.
It also incurs the natural enmity of medical politicians, and of the
whole trades-union wing of that profession. But no unprejudiced
observer can fail to recognize its importance as a social phenomenon
to-day, and the higher medical minds are already trying to interpret it
fairly, and make its power available for their own therapeutic ends.

Dr. Thomas Hyslop, of the great West Riding Asylum in England, said
last year to the British Medical Association that the best
sleep-producing agent which his practice had revealed to him, was
_prayer_. I say this, he added (I am sorry here that I must quote from
memory), purely as a medical man. The exercise of prayer, in those who
habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most
adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the
nerves.

But in few of us are functions not tied up by the exercise of other
functions. Relatively few medical men and scientific men, I fancy, can
pray. Few can carry on any living commerce with "God." Yet many of us
are well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be, were
such important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical
atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in every one
potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use.
Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labor can thus be easily
explained. One part of our mind dams up--even _damns_ up!--the other
parts.

Conscience makes cowards of us all. Social conventions prevent us from
telling the truth after the fashion of the heroes and heroines of
Bernard Shaw. We all know persons who are models of excellence, but
who belong to the extreme philistine type of mind. So deadly is their
intellectual respectability that we can't converse about certain
subjects at all, can't let our minds play over them, can't even mention
them in their presence. I have numbered among my dearest friends
persons thus inhibited intellectually, with whom I would gladly have
been able to talk freely about certain interests of mine, certain
authors, say, as Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G.
Wells, but it would n't do, it made them too uncomfortable, they would
n't play, I had to be silent. An intellect thus tied down by
literality and decorum makes on one the same sort of an impression that
an able-bodied man would who should habituate himself to do his work
with only one of his fingers, locking up the rest of his organism and
leaving it unused.

I trust that by this time I have said enough to convince the reader
both of the truth and of the importance of my thesis. The two
questions, first, that of the possible extent of our powers; and,
second, that of the various avenues of approach to them, the various
keys for unlocking them in diverse individuals, dominate the whole
problem of individual and national education. We need a topography of
the limits of human power, similar to the chart which oculists use of
the field of human vision. We need also a study of the various types
of human being with reference to the different ways in which their
energy-reserves may be appealed to and set loose. Biographies and
individual experiences of every kind may be drawn upon for evidence
here.[4]

[1] This was the title originally given to the Presidential Address
delivered before the American Philosophical Association at Columbia
University, December 28, 1906, and published as there delivered in the
_Philosophical Review_ for January, 1907. The address was later
published, after slight alteration, in the _American Magazine_ for
October, 1907, under the title "The Powers of Men." The more popular
form is here reprinted under the title which the author himself
preferred.

[2] "The Energies of Men." _Philosophical Review_, vol. xvi, No. 1,
January, 1907. [Cf. Note on p. 229.]

[3] "Tour in England, Ireland, and France," Philadelphia, 1833, p. 435.

[4] "This would be an absolutely concrete study . . . The limits of
power must be limits that have been realized in actual persons, and the
various ways of unlocking the reserves of power must have been
exemplified in individual lives . . . So here is a program of concrete
individual psychology . . . It is replete with interesting facts, and
points to practical issues superior in importance to anything we know."
_From the address as originally delivered before the Philosophical
Association_; See xvi. _Philosophical Review_, 1, 19.

XI

THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR[1]

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping
party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their
place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the
glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the
ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is
something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask
all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were
such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from
history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time
substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a
handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts,
those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own
together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood
poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in
cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar
possession, and not one man or women would vote for the proposition.
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged
solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one,
only when an enemy's injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now
thought permissible.

It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men,
and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and
possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most
exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected,
and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to
mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to
plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the
love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror
is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is
the _strong_ life; it is life _in extremis_; war-taxes are the only
ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how
Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector _killed_. No detail of the
wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story.
Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism--war for war's
sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading, because
of the irrationality of it all--save for the purpose of making
"history"--and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization
in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen.

Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves,
excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war for
example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where
the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their
lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in
full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied
Matthew Arnold. "The powerful exact what they can," said the
Athenians, "and the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say
that sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians
reply: "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of
their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made
by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but
inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong
as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you
why we expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you." Well,
the Meleans still refused, and their town was taken. "The Athenians,"
Thucydides quietly says, "thereupon put to death all who were of
military age and made slaves of the women and children. They then
colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers of their
own."

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of
power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There
was no rational principle in it, and the moment he died his generals
and governors attacked one another. The cruelty of those times is
incredible. When Rome finally conquered Greece, Paulus Aemilius, was
told by the Roman Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil by
"giving" them the old kingdom of Epirus. They sacked seventy cities
and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves.
How many they killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the
senators, five hundred and fifty in number. Brutus was "the noblest
Roman of them all," but to reanimate his soldiers on the eve of
Philippi he similarly promises to give them the cities of Sparta and
Thessalonica to ravage, if they win the fight.

Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. We
inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism
that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.
Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than
this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity
into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed
it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of
wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no
ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with
bluff but could n't stay there, the military tension was too much for
them. In 1898 our people had read the word "war" in letters three
inches high for three months in every newspaper. The pliant politician
McKinley was swept away by their eagerness, and our squalid war with
Spain became a necessity.

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The
military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but are confronted
by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom.
Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military
service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable
motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the
enemy. England and we, our army and navy authorities repeat without
ceasing, arm solely for "peace," Germany and Japan it is who are bent
on loot and glory. "Peace" in military mouths to-day is a synonym for
"war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no
government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed
in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace"
and "war" mean the same thing, now _in posse_, now _in actu_. It may
even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive
_preparation_ for war by the nations _is the real war_, permanent,
unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification
of the mastery gained during the "peace"-interval.

It is plain that on this subject civilized man has developed a sort of
double personality. If we take European nations, no legitimate
interest of any one of them would seem to justify the tremendous
destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It
would seem as though common sense and reason ought to find a way to
reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think
it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as
possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to
bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that
the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of
pacificism which set the militarist imagination strongly, and to a
certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both
sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia
against another, and everything one says must be abstract and
hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to
characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and
point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best Utopian
hypothesis, the most promising line of conciliation.

In my remarks, pacificist though I am, I will refuse to speak of the
bestial side of the war-_regime_ (already done justice to by many
writers) and consider only the higher aspects of militaristic
sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one
deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are
the soul of every patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the
soul of all romance. The militarily patriotic and romantic-minded
everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to
admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social
evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they
say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life?
If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view,
to redeem life from flat degeneration.

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