Health Through Will Power. James Joseph Walsh

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СКАЧАТЬ the direct physical effects of none of these substances shorten life to a marked degree unless they are indulged in to very great excess, but the moral hazards which they produce, accidents, injuries of various kinds, exposure to disease, all these shorten life. Men know this very well, and yet persist in the formation of these habits.

      Any habit, no matter how strong, can be broken if the individual really wishes to break it, provided the subject of it is not actually insane or on the way to the insane asylum. He need only get a motive strong enough to rouse his will, secure a consciousness of his own power, and then the habit can be broken. After all, it must never be forgotten that the only thing necessary in order to break a habit effectively is to refuse to perform a single act of it, the next time one is tempted. That breaks the habit and makes refusal easier and one need only continue the refusal until the temptation ceases.

      Men who have not drawn a sober breath for years have sometimes come to the realization of the fools that they were making of themselves, the injury they were doing their relatives, or perhaps have been touched by a child's words or some religious motive, and after that they have never touched liquor again. Father Theobald Mathew's wonderful work in this regard among the Irish in the first half of the nineteenth century has been repeated by many temperance or total abstinence advocates in more recent generations. I have known a confirmed drunkard reason himself into a state of mind from which he was able to overcome his habit very successfully, though his reasoning consisted of nothing more than the recognition of the fact that suggestion was the root of his craving for alcohol. His father had been a drunkard and he had received so many warnings from all his older relatives and had himself so come to dwell on the possible danger of his own formation of the habit that he had suggested himself into the frame of mind in which he took to drink. I have known a physician on whom some half a dozen different morphine cures had been tried—always followed by a relapse—cure himself by an act of his own will and stay cured ever since because of an incident that stirred him deeply enough to arouse his will properly to activity. One day his little boy of about four was in his office when father prepared to give himself one of his usual injections of morphine. The little boy gave very close attention to all his father's manipulations, and as the doctor was hurrying to keep an appointment, he did not notice the intent eye witness of the proceedings. Just as the needle was pushed home and the piston shot down in the barrel, the little boy rushed over to his father and said, "Oh, Daddy, do that to me." Apparently this close childish observer had noted something of the look of satisfaction that came over his father's face as he felt the fluid sink into his tissues. It is almost needless to say that the shock the father received was enough to break his morphine habit for good and all. It simply released his will and then he found that if he really wanted to, he could accomplish what the various cures for the morphine habit only lead up to—and in his case unsuccessfully—the exercise of his own will power.

      The word "habit" suggests nearly always, unfortunately, the thought of bad habits, just as the word "passion" implies, with many people, evil tendencies. But it must not be forgotten that there are good passions and good habits that are as helpful for the accomplishment of what is best in life as bad passions and bad habits are harmful. A repetition of acts is needed for the formation of good habits just as for the establishment of customs of evil. Usually, however, and this must not be forgotten, the beginning of a good habit is easier than the beginning of a bad habit. Once formed, the good habits are even more beneficial than the bad habits are harmful. It is almost as hard to break a good habit as a bad one, provided that it has been continued for a sufficient length of time to make that groove in the nervous system which underlies all habit. We cannot avoid forming habits and the question is, shall we form good or bad habits? Good habits preserve health, make life easier and happier; bad habits have the opposite effect, though there is some countervailing personal element that tempts to their formation and persistence.

      Every failure to do what we should has its unfortunate effect upon us. We get into a state in which it is extremely difficult for us to do the right things. We have to overcome not only the original inertia of nature, but also a contrary habit. If we do not follow our good impulses, the worse ones get the upper hand. As Professor James said, for we must always recur to him when we want to have the clear expression of many of these ideas:

      "Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain processes at all and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law."

      It must not be forgotten that we mold not alone what we call character, but that we manifestly produce effects upon our tissues that are lasting. Indeed it is these that count the most, for health at least. It is the physical basis of will and intellect that is grooved by what we call habit. As Doctor Carpenter says:

      "Our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterwards into the same identical fold."

      Permitting exceptions to occur when we are forming a habit is almost necessarily disturbing. The classical figure is that it is like letting fall a ball of string which we have been winding. It undoes in a moment all that we have accomplished in a long while. As Professor Bain has said it so much better than I could, I prefer to quote him:

      "The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition under any circumstances."

      This means training the will by a series of difficult acts, accomplished in spite of the effort they require, but which gradually become easier from repeated performance until habit replaces nature and dominates the situation.

      Serious thinkers who faced humanity's problems squarely and devoted themselves to finding solutions for them had worked out this formula of the need of will training long ago, and it was indeed a principal characteristic of medieval education. The old monastic schools were founded on the idea that training of the will and the formation of good habits was ever so much more important than the accumulation of information. They frankly called the human will the highest faculty of mankind and felt that to neglect it would be a serious defect in education. The will can only be trained by the accomplishment of difficult things day after day until its energies are aroused and the man becomes conscious of his own powers and the ability to use them whenever he really wishes. There was a time not so long since, and there are still voices raised to that purport, when it was the custom to scoff at the will training of the older time and above all the old-fashioned suggestion that mortifications of various kinds—that is, the doing of unpleasant things just for the sake of doing them—should be practiced because of the added will power thus acquired. The failure of our modern education which neglected this special attention to the will is now so patent as to make everyone feel that there must be a recurrence to old time ideas once more.

      The formation of proper habits should, then, be the main occupation of the early years. This will assure health as well as happiness, barring the accidents that may come to any human being. Good habits make proper living easy and after a time even pleasant, though there may have been considerable difficulty in the performance of the acts associated with them at the beginning. Indeed, the organism becomes so accustomed to their performance after a time that it becomes actually something of a trial to omit them, and they are missed.

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