Altruists may be patient or impatient, and so may be the selfish.
Like most of the qualities, patience is to be judged by the company it keeps.
Nevertheless, the impatient are very often those of small purposes and are rarely those of great achievement. For all great purposes have to be spread over time, have to overcome obstacles, and these must be met with courage and patience. Impatience is fussiness, fretfulness and a prime breeder of neurasthenia.
Patience is realistic, and though it may seek perfection it puts up with imperfection as a part of human life. But here I am drifting into an error against which I warned the reader,--of making an entity of a conception. People are patient or impatient, but not necessarily throughout. There are men and women who fuss and fume over trifles who never falter or fret when their larger purposes are blocked or deferred. Some cannot stand detail who plan wisely and with patience. Vice versa, there are meticulous folk, little people, whose petty obstacles are met with patience and cheerfulness, who revel in minute detail, but who want returns soon and cannot wait a long time. We are not to ask of any man whether he is patient but rather what does he stand or do patiently? What renders him impatient?
A form of impatience of enormous social importance is that which manifests itself in cure-alls. A man finds that his will overcomes some obstacles. Eager to apply this, he announces that will cures all ills. Impatient of evil, men seek to annihilate it by denying its existence or by loudly chanting that good thoughts will destroy it. These are typical impatient solutions in the sphere of religion; in the sphere of economics men urge nationalization, free trade, socialism or laissez faire, or some law or other to change social structure and human nature. War itself is the most impatient and consequently most socially destructive method of the methods of the treatment of evil.
While patience is a virtue, it may also be a vice. One may bear wrongs too patiently or defer satisfaction too long. One meets every day men and women who help injustice and iniquity by their patience. We are too patient, at least with the wrongs of others; perhaps we really do not feel this intensely or for any length of time. In fact, the difficulty with most of the preaching of life is its essential insincerity, for it counsels patience for that which it feels but little. We bear the troubles of others, on the whole, very well. Nevertheless, there are Griseldas everywhere whom one would respect far more if they rebelled against their tyrants and taskmasters. Organized wrong and oppression owe their existence mainly to the habitual patience of the oppressed. To be meek and mild and long-suffering in a world containing plenty of egoists and cannibalistic types is to give them supremacy.[1] We admire patience only when it is part of a plan of action, not when it is the mark of a passive nature.
[1] Here the ideals of East and West clash. The East, bearing a huge burden of misery and essentially pessimistic, exhorts patience. The West, eager and full of hope, is impatient.
4. Because man foresees he wishes. Rather than the reasoning animal, we might speak of the human being as the wishing animal.
An automatically working instinct would produce no wish. The image of something which has been experienced arouses an excitement akin to the secretion of saliva at the thought of food. The wish which accompanies the excitement is a dissatisfaction, a tingling, an incomplete pleasurable emotional state which presses to action. Sensuous pleasure, power, conformity to the ideal, whatever direction the wish takes, are sought because of the wish. Right education is to train towards right wishing.
Because the wish is the prelude to action, it became all powerful in mythology and superstition. Certain things would help you get your wishes, others would obstruct them. Wishes became animate and had power,--power to destroy an enemy, power to help a friend, power to bring good to yourself. But certain ceremonies had to be observed, and certain people, magicians and priests had to be utilized in order to give the wish its power. Wisdom and magic were mainly the ways of obtaining wishes. Childhood still holds to this, and prayer is a faith that your wish, if placed before the All-Mighty, will be fulfilled.
Since wishing brings a pleasurable excitement, it has its dangers, in the daydream where wishes are fulfilled without effort. Power, glory, beauty and admiration are obtained; the ugly Duckling becomes the Swan, Cinderella becomes the Princess, Jack kills the Giant and is honored by all men; the girl becomes the beauty and heroine of romance; the boy becomes the Hero, taking over power, wealth and beauty as his due. The world of romance is largely the wish-world, as is the most of the stage.
The happy ending is our wish-fulfillment, and only the sophisticated and highly cultured object to it. Moulding the world to the heart's desire has been the principal business of stage, novel and song.
