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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 to himself, 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.
in the matter of concentration, i hesitate to recommend mrs. annie besant's thought power, 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.
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