<SPAN name="XIII"></SPAN>
<h2>XIII</h2>
<h2>SUCCESS AND FAILURE</h2>
<br/>
<p>I am sadly aware that these brief chapters
will be apt to convey, especially to the
trustful and enthusiastic reader, a false
impression; the impression of simplicity;
and that when experience has roughly
corrected this impression, the said reader,
unless he is most solemnly warned, may
abandon the entire enterprise in a fit of
disgust, and for ever afterwards maintain
a cynical and impolite attitude towards
all theories of controlling the human
machine. Now, the enterprise is not a
simple one. It is based on one simple
principle—the conscious discipline of the
brain by selected habits of thought—but
it is just about as complicated as anything
well could be. Advanced golf is child's
play compared to it. The man who
briefly says to himself: 'I will get up at
8, and from 8.30 to 9 I will examine and
control my brain, and so my life will at
once be instantly improved out of recognition'—that
man is destined to unpleasant
surprises. Progress will be slow.
Progress may appear to be quite rapid at
first, and then a period of futility may set
in, and the would-be vanquisher of his
brain may suffer a series of the most
deadly defeats. And in his pessimism
he may imagine that all his pains have
gone for nothing, and that the unserious
loungers in exhibition gardens and
readers of novels in parlours are in the
right of it after all. He may even feel
rather ashamed of himself for having
been, as he thinks, taken in by specious
promises, like the purchaser of a quack
medicine.</p>
<p>The conviction that great effort has
been made and no progress achieved is
the chief of the dangers that affront the
beginner in machine-tending. It is, I
will assert positively, in every case a
conviction unjustified by the facts, and
usually it is the mere result of reaction
after fatigue, encouraged by the instinct
for laziness. I do not think it will survive
an impartial examination; but I know
that a man, in order to find an excuse for
abandoning further effort, is capable of
convincing himself that past effort has
yielded no fruit at all. So curious is the
human machine. I beg every student of
himself to consider this remark with all
the intellectual honesty at his disposal.
It is a grave warning.</p>
<p>When the machine-tender observes that
he is frequently changing his point of
view; when he notices that what he
regarded as the kernel of the difficulty
yesterday has sunk to a triviality to-day,
being replaced by a fresh phenomenon;
when he arises one morning and by means
of a new, unexpected glimpse into the
recesses of the machine perceives that
hitherto he has been quite wrong and
must begin again; when he wonders how
on earth he could have been so blind
and so stupid as not to see what now he
sees; when the new vision is veiled by
new disappointments and narrowed by
continual reservations; when he is overwhelmed
by the complexity of his undertaking—then
let him unhearten himself,
for he is succeeding. The history of
success in any art—and machine-tending
is an art—is a history of recommencements,
of the dispersal and reforming of
doubts, of an ever-increasing conception
of the extent of the territory unconquered,
and an ever-decreasing conception of the
extent of the territory conquered.</p>
<p>It is remarkable that, though no enterprise
could possibly present more diverse
and changeful excitements than the
mastering of the brain, the second great
danger which threatens its ultimate
success is nothing but a mere drying-up
of enthusiasm for it! One would have
thought that in an affair which concerned
him so nearly, in an affair whose results
might be in a very strict sense vital to
him, in an affair upon which his happiness
and misery might certainly turn, a
man would not weary from sheer tedium.
Nevertheless, it is so. Again and again I
have noticed the abandonment, temporary
or permanent, of this mighty and thrilling
enterprise from simple lack of interest.
And I imagine that, in practically all cases
save those in which an exceptional original
force of will renders the enterprise scarcely
necessary, the interest in it will languish
unless it is regularly nourished from
without. Now, the interest in it cannot
be nourished from without by means of
conversation with other brain-tamers.
There are certain things which may not
be discussed by sanely organised people;
and this is one. The affair is too intimate,
and it is also too moral. Even after only
a few minutes' vocalisation on this subject
a deadly infection seems to creep into
the air—the infection of priggishness. (Or
am I mistaken, and do I fancy this
horror? No; I cannot believe that I
am mistaken.)</p>
<p>Hence the nourishment must be obtained
by reading; a little reading every day.
I suppose there are some thousands of
authors who have written with more or
less sincerity on the management of the
human machine. But the two which, for
me, stand out easily above all the rest
are Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and
Epictetus. Not much has been discovered
since their time. 'The perfecting
of life is a power residing in
the soul,' wrote Marcus Aurelius in the
ninth book of <i>To Himself</i>, over seventeen
hundred years ago. Marcus Aurelius
is assuredly regarded as the greatest of
writers in the human machine school, and
not to read him daily is considered by
many to be a bad habit. As a confession
his work stands alone. But as a practical
'Bradshaw' of existence, I would put the
discourses of Epictetus before M. Aurelius.
Epictetus is grosser; he will call you a
blockhead as soon as look at you; he
is witty, he is even humorous, and he
never wanders far away from the incidents
of daily life. He is brimming over with
actuality for readers of the year 1908.
He was a freed slave. M. Aurelius was
an emperor, and he had the morbidity
from which all emperors must suffer. A
finer soul than Epictetus, he is not, in my
view, so useful a companion. Not all of
us can breathe freely in his atmosphere.
Nevertheless, he is of course to be read,
and re-read continually. When you have
gone through Epictetus—a single page or
paragraph per day, well masticated and
digested, suffices—you can go through
M. Aurelius, and then you can return to
Epictetus, and so on, morning by morning,
or night by night, till your life's end.
And they will conserve your interest in
yourself.</p>
<p>In the matter of concentration, I hesitate
to recommend Mrs. Annie Besant's
<i>Thought Power</i>, and yet I should be
possibly unjust if I did not recommend
it, having regard to its immense influence
on myself. It is not one of the best
books of this astounding woman. It is
addressed to theosophists, and can only
be completely understood in the light of
theosophistic doctrines. (To grasp it all
I found myself obliged to study a much
larger work dealing with theosophy as a
whole.) It contains an appreciable
quantity of what strikes me as feeble
sentimentalism, and also a lot of sheer
dogma. But it is the least unsatisfactory
manual of the brain that I have
met with. And if the profane reader
ignores all that is either Greek or twaddle
to him, there will yet remain for his
advantage a vast amount of very sound
information and advice. All these three
books are cheap.</p>
<hr style="height: 2px; width: 45%;" />
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
1 of 2
2 of 2
Previous
Next
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.