berg urges the prime significance of the will. attitudes. We cannot ignore this if we care to count at all. We must will, not merely think or feel. Even the "ills of life," Martineau reminds us, "are not here on their own account, but are as a divine challenge and God-like wrestling in the night with our too reluctant wills." Life fails of its purpose for us, if it does not call out the heroic will.

The training of will becomes, thus, the most vital of all problems. "But the education of the will," Lecky believes,-"the power of breasting the current of the desires, and doing for long periods what is distasteful and painful—is much less cultivated than in some periods of the past." If Lecky's judgment is correct here, the fact is, nevertheless, quite inconsistent with the present psychological emphasis, and most unfortunate as well; for, as Lecky himself says, "nothing which is learned in youth is so really valuable as the power and the habit of self-restraint, of selfsacrifice, of energetic, continuous and concentrated effort."1

And strength of will bears not only upon character, but upon happiness and influence 1 Op. cit., pp. 246, 251.

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as well. Will-weakening indulgences, therefore, sap the worth of life at all points. That strength of will bears upon character, needs no argument. Character lies preeminently in the sphere of the will; he who would achieve much in the moral life must be capable of mighty purposes and mighty endeavors. The place of will in influence is hardly less obvious. Only he who can set his goal and steadily and firmly pursue it can hope to greatly with others.

to count

A large part, even of our own happiness, is to be found in just this vigorous exercise of our wills. Practically all our sports and games, it is worth noting, are simply devices for setting up obstacles for the fun of getting over them. "Play is the child of work," Wundt says. We are made for action, and we cannot be even happy in constant inactivity. It is an interesting testimony that Walter Wellman bears concerning his journey toward the north pole, with the thermometer from forty to forty-eight degrees below zero: "It was glorious thus to feel one's strength, to fear nothing in the way of hardship or exertion, to carry a consciousness of superiority to all the obstacles which nature has 1 Cf. Paulsen, System of Ethics, pp. 258 ff.

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placed in our path. I was never happier than in these hard days."

Lotze shows, in a thoughtful passage, how surely this powerful putting forth of the will in struggle and wide endeavor contributes to the highest happiness: "By the opposition which the natural course of things offers to a too easy satisfaction of natural impulses ; by the labor to which man is compelled, and in the prosecution of which he acquires knowledge of, and power over, things in the most various relations; finally, by misfortune itself and the manifold painful efforts which he has to make under the pressure of the gradually multiplying relations of life: by all this there is both opened before him a wider horizon of varied enjoyment, and also there becomes clear to him, for the first time, the inexhaustible significance of moral Ideas which seem to receive an accession of intrinsic worth with every new relation to which their regulating and organizing influence is extended." Wundt distinctly contrasts man with the animals in two respects, both of which mean strong emphasis on action. "In the case of man, on the other hand, there are two principal factors at work to make

1 The Microcosmus, Vol. II, p. 78.

both individual and social life immeasurably richer and more complex. The one is to be found in the free exercise of will; the other in that comprehensive prevision, that consideration of past and future in their bearings upon the present, of which man alone is

capable."

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II. THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTER OF

SELF-CONTROL

This emphasis on will and action means, moreover, emphasis on self-control as a prime condition of character and of happiness and of influence. If will has, in truth, anything like the place our discussion has indicated, if self-control is the chief differentiation of the human and sane life from the animal and insane life, and a root-principle of all virtues, then the positive conditions of self-control are at the same time primary elements in the right, the happy, and the influential life.

Self-control Fundamental to a Moral and Religious Character.-That self-control is fundamental to character, few probably would deny. It may not be without value, however, to point out that the same condition holds

1Op. cit., p. 131.

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for the religious life. The hysterical everywhere-most of all, we may be sure, in the religious life—is fundamentally at fault, though, curiously enough, it is here often not only excused but even urged as a particularly high attainment. We may be sure such reasoning is seriously astray, though the mistake arises naturally enough. It substitutes heathen idea of inspiration for the Christian-a being swept away out of our faculties for that high and complete surrender of ourselves to God in which, in truth, self-control is highest and most completely positive. No attitude is ethical, and therefore religious, into which the will does not positively enter, in which the man does not have himself in hand; and this remains true however religious a man may believe his ecstacy to be. Many sad blots in the history of religion would have been impossible, if men had kept this principle clearly in mind. In this sense, President Jordan's protest against "revivals in which men lose their reason and self-control," was wholly justified. A genuine revival of religion is a revival of the highest reason and the most strenuous self-control (though with strong emotion), and that not merely as restraints but as positive motives.