The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

after the moods that produced those attitudes have diffused away. It is the afterthoughts that are thrust back into the anima.

“Tf I had not meant to do this, I should not have done it,” they say. ‘“‘ This is precisely what I have always intended to do.”

Or they make rash vows to fix the impulses of some quite exceptional emotional storm. “Never more will I—do so and so. Never will I forgive. Never will I speak to him.”

This is a condition of things that will change very rapidly with the diffusion of newer and clearer psychological ideas.

It is not only that these ideas will dispose us to be more wary of holding our persona to a rigid consistency and make us more discriminating in our definition of our own purposes, but they will also do much to mitigate the harshness of our judgments upon other people. We shall discover a new charity towards those about us when we realize how often their acts, attitudes, and failures may be the result of transitory and explicable irritations, fatigues and passing obsessions. We shall become more critical of ourselves and more tolerant of - others. We shall define our fundamental ends with a greater clearness and ‘pursue them with all the more effectiveness because we shall not allow our incidental aberrations to turn us permanently aside, and we shall encounter the resistances and opposition of others without bitterness or condemnation. The hates, the revenges, the scoldings, false accusations, campaigns of spite, sudden acts of violence that now embitter the lives of the great mass of human beings may be very largely eliminated as our realization of the mischief of our own moodiness and our comprehension of the inconsistencies of our fellows increase. Life may change. It is still for most people much more of a screaming, grabbing, quarrelling, lying, resentful, blindly impulsive and incoherently wasteful affair than it need be. But there exist now nearly three centuries of novels and descriptions of manners and behaviour, and nobody who studies these can doubt that in that space of time common everyday life has become more dignified, kindlier and more generous. After his primary duties to himself, the first duty of Mr. Everyman to others is to learn about himself, to acquire poise and make his persona as much of a cultivated gentleman as he can. He has to be considerate. He has to be trustworthy. It is in our most intimate relations, in the relations between husband and wife, between

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

GHAPTER 8

parent and offspring, between directors and subordinates, between employers and employed, for example, that the erratic impulses of the mood work their worst and need most to be anticipated, averted, and when they break loose allowed and atoned for. Steadfastness is a strain and should be realized as a strain. Repressions accumulate below any line of conduct continually followed. Life is change; when change ceases life ceases, and many of these close and important relationships tend to become habitual in their manifestations and lose their stimulating quality. In spite of their great intrinsic value to us they cease to interest ; they begin to bore and the anima gathers vigour. One of the commonest experiences in the lives of saints is the discovery that all the opening ecstasies of faith have faded, that the wonderful life of holiness has lost its light, that God has hidden himself away. Lovers can have the same dismaying experience. Then the way is open to irrelevant impulses and many sorts of self-contradiction.

Such lapses are psychologically inevitable and two-thirds of their harmfulness vanishes if this is recognized. The harm comes in when they are rationalized as permanent changes of direction, when the saint finds out he is damned, the lover that he never loved, or the three collaborators find each other “impossible.” The sane modern man takes holiday and returns refreshed, and is not too greatly perturbed if his anima suddenly thrusts a needed holiday upon him. And what is perhaps a degree more difficult, he must realize the same necessity in others. He cannot exact from others a perpetual persistence he does not practise. The real value of conduct lies.in its main tenor and in the vigorous resumption of that tenor after interruption, and not in its perfect coherence and inflexibility.

85 Candour

The conception of the conscious individual that is built up by modern biological science and introspective psychology differs in many respects from the older idea of a human self. The older idea was more compact and definite and altogether unified. John Everyman was just plain John Everyman and evermore should be so. In those unanalytical days people no more questioned that than they questioned that Old England was Old England or that people were either good or