WILL. 565 



have been more generous, nor made a world whose other 

 parts were as immediately subject to our will ! 



On page 531, in describing the ' reasonable type ' of de- 

 cision, it was said that it usually came when the right con- 

 ception of the case was found. Where, however, the right 

 conception is an anti-inpulsive one, the whole intellectual 

 ingenuit}^ of the man usually goes to work to crowd it out 

 of sight, and to find names for the emergency, by the help 

 of which the dispositions of the moment may sound sancti- 

 fied, and sloth or passion ma}- reign uncliecked. How many 

 excuses does the drunkard find when each new temptation 

 comes ! It is a new brand of liquor which the interests of 

 intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test ; 

 moreover it is poured out and it is sin to waste it ; or others 

 are drinking and it Avould be churlishness to refuse ; or it is 

 but to enable him to sleep, or just to get through this job of 

 work ; or it isn't drinking, it is because he feels so cold ; 

 or it is Christmas-day ; or it is a means of stimulating him 

 to make a more powerful resolution in favor of abstiuence 

 than any he has hitherto made ; or it is just this once, and 

 once doesn't count, etc., etc., ad libitum — it is, in fact, any- 

 thing you like except being a drunkard. That is the concep- 

 tion that will not stay before the poor soul's attention. But 

 if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from 

 all the other possible ways of conceiving the various ojj- 

 portunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds 

 to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he 

 is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he 

 succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present 

 to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.* 



Everywhere then the function of the eftbrt is the same: 

 to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to 

 itself, would slip away. It may be cold and flat when the 

 spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great 

 and arduous when the spontaneous drift is towards repose. 

 In the one case the efibrt has to inhibit an explosive, in the 



* Cf. Aristotle's Nicbomaclisean Ethics, vii. 3 ; also a discussion of the 

 doctrine of ' The Practical Syllogism ' in Sir A. Grant's edition of this 

 work, 3d ed. vol. i. p. 213 ff. 



