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Page 44
You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as
teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of
ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it
that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the
pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. Psychology can state
your problem in these terms, but you see how impotent she is to furnish
the elements of its practical solution. When all is said and done, and
your best efforts are made, it will probably remain true that the
result will depend more on a certain native tone or temper in the
pupil's psychological constitution than on anything else. Some persons
appear to have a naturally poor focalization of the field of
consciousness; and in such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions
seem to exert peculiarly easy sway.
But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the
education of the will. Your task is to build up a _character_ in your
pupils; and a character, as I have so often said, consists in an
organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what do such habits of
reaction themselves consist? They consist of tendencies to act
characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain
characteristically when possessed by other ideas.
Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is
which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several
ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it when an
alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what
you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. And in
what does your deliberation consist? It consists in trying to
apperceive the ease successively by a number of different ideas, which
seem to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one which seems to
fit it exactly. If that be an idea which is a customary forerunner of
action in you, which enters into one of your maxims of positive
behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act immediately. If, on the
other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result,
if it ally itself with _prohibition_, then you unhesitatingly refrain.
The problem is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the
case. This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.
I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is found.
Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is otherwise, we
find ourselves at the very centre of a moral situation, into which I
should now like you to look with me a little nearer.
The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be hard to
attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no settled habits
of action. Or, again, the action to which it would prompt may be
dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear deadly cold and
negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In either of these latter
cases it is hard to hold the right idea steadily enough before the
attention to let it exert its adequate effects. Whether it be
stimulative or inhibitive, it is _too reasonable_ for us; and the more
instinctive passional propensity then tends to extrude it from our
consideration. We shy away from the thought of it. It twinkles and goes
out the moment it appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we
need a resolute effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus
of the field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and
motor effects to be exerted. Every one knows only too well how the mind
flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the reigning mood of
feeling.
Once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of
consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these
effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our consciousness
and our nervous system provide for the action then taking place. Our
moral effort, properly so called, terminates in our holding fast to the
appropriate idea.
If, then, you are asked, "_In what does a moral act consist_ when
reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?" you can make only
one reply. You can say that _it consists in the effort of attention by
which we hold fast to an idea_ which but for that effort of attention
would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies
that are there. _To think_, in short, is the secret of will, just as it
is the secret of memory.
This comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most
frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the
sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. "I never
_thought_," they say. "I never _thought_ how mean the action was, I
never _thought_ of these abominable consequences." And what do we retort
when they say this? We say: "Why _didn't_ you think? What were you there
for but to think?" And we read them a moral lecture on their
irreflectiveness.
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