These sex and work situations we must take up in detail in separate chapters. What is important is that as life goes on, necessity, the social organization and gradual concentration of energy canalize the purposes, reduce the power of the irrelevant and temporary desires. Habit and custom bring a person into definite relationship with society; the man becomes husband, father, worker in some definite field of industry; ambition becomes narrowed down to the possibilities or is entirely discarded as hopeless. The character becomes a collection of habits, with some controlling purpose and some characteristic relaxations. This at least is true of the majority of men. Here and there are those who have not been able to form a unification even along such simple lines; they are without steady habits, derelicts morally, financially and socially, or if with means independent of personal effort they are wastrels and idlers. And again there are the doers and thinkers of the world, the fortunate, whose lives are associated with successful purposes, whose ambitions grow and grow until they reach the power of which they dreamed. There are the reformers living in a fever heat of purpose, disdaining rest and relaxation, dangerously near fanaticism and not far from mental unbalance, but achieving through that unbalance things the balanced never have the will to attempt. He who works merely to get rich or powerful or to provide food for his family cannot understand the zealots who see the world as a place where SOMETHING MUST happen,--where slavery MUST be abolished, women MUST have votes, children MUST go to school until sixteen, prostitution MUST disappear, alcohol MUST be prohibited, etc. Such people miss the pretty, pleasant relaxing joys of life, but they gain in intensity of life what they lose in diffuseness.
This war of the permanent unified purposes versus the temporary scattering desires--the power of inhibition --is involved in the health and vigor of the person. Disease, fatigue and often enough old age show themselves in lowered purpose, in the failure of the will (in the sense of the energy of purpose), in a scattering of activity. Indeed, in the senile states one too often sees the disappearance of moral control where one least expected it. And one of the greatest tragedies of our times occurred when an elderly statesman, on the brink of arterial disease of the brain, lost the strength and firmness of purpose that hitherto had characterized him. One of the worst features of the government of nations is the predominance of old men in the governing bodies.
For not only are they apt to have over-intellectualized life, not only have they become specialists in purpose and therefore narrow, but the atrophy of the passions and desires of youth and middle life has rendered them unfit to legislate for the bulk of the race, who are the young and middle-aged. It is no true democracy where old age governs the rest of the periods of life.
Unification of purpose often goes too far. Men lose sight of the duties they owe to wife and family in their pursuit of wealth or fame; they forget that relaxation and pleasure-seeking are normal and legitimate aims. They deify a purpose; they attach it to themselves so that it becomes more essentially themselves than their religion or their family. They speak of their work as if every letter were capitalized and lose sympathy and interest in the rest of the wide striving world. Men grow hard, even if philanthropists, in too excessive a devotion to a purpose, and soon it is their master, and they are its slaves. Happy is he who can follow his purpose efficiently and earnestly, but who can find interest in many things, pleasure in the wide range of joys the world offers and a youthful curiosity and zest in the new.
Every human being, no matter how civilized and unified, how modern and social in his conduct, has within him a core of uncivilized, disintegrating, ancient and egoistic desires and purposes. "I feel two natures struggling within me" is the epitome of every man's life. This is what has been called conflict by the psychoanalysts, and my own disagreement with them is that I believe it to be distinctly conscious in the main. A man knows that the pretty young girls he meets tempt him from his allegiance to his wife and his desires to be good; a woman knows that the prosaic husband no longer pleases, and why he does not please,--only if you ask either of them bluntly and directly they will deny their difficulties. The organic activities of the body, basic in desire of all kinds, are crude and give rise to crude forbidden wishes, but the struggle that goes on is repressed, rebelled against and gives rise to trains of secondary symptoms,--fatigue, headache, indigestion, weariness of life and many other complaints. It is perfectly proper to complain of headache, but it is a humiliation to say that you have chosen wrongly in marriage, or that you are essentially polygamous, or that an eight-hour day of work at clerking or bookkeeping disgusts and bores you. People complain of that which is proper and allows them to maintain self-respect, but they hide that which may lower them in the eyes of others. Gain their confidence, show that you see deeper than their words and you get revelations that need no psychoanalytic technique to elicit and which are distinctly conscious.
