 Chapter 7 of Mental Efficiency Candid Remarks There are times when the whole free and enlightened press of the United Kingdom seems to become strangely interested in the subject of success—of getting on in life. We are passing through such a period now. It would be difficult to name the prominent journalists who have not lately written, in some form or another, about success. Most singular phenomenon of all, Dr. Emil Reich has left Plato, Duchesses and Claridge's in order to instruct the million readers of a morning paper in the principles of success. What the million readers thought of the doctors' stirring and strenuous sentences I will not imagine, but I know what I thought as a plain man. After taking due cognizance of his airy play with the constants and variables of success, after watching him treat energetics, his wonderful new name for the science of success, as though, because he had made it end in X, it resembled mathematics, I thought that the sublime and venerable art of mystification could no further go. If my fellow pilgrim, through this veil of woe, the average young man who arrives at Waterloo at 9.40 every morning with a cigarette in his mouth, and a second-class season over his heart, and vague aspirations in his soul, was half as mystified as I was, he has probably ere this, decided that the science of success has all the disadvantages of algebra without any of the advantages of cricket, and that he may as well leave it alone lest evil should befall him. On the off chance that he has come as yet to know decision about the science of success, I am determined to deal with the subject in a disturbingly candid manner. I feel that it is as dangerous to tell the truth about success as it is to tell the truth about the United States, but, being thoroughly accustomed to the whistle of bullets round my head, I will nevertheless try. Most writers on success are, through sheer goodness of heart, wickedly disingenuous. For the basis of their argument is that nearly any one who gives his mind to it can achieve success. This is, to put it briefly, untrue. The very central idea of success is separation from the multitude of plain men. It is perhaps the only idea common to all the various sorts of success — differentiation from the crowd. To address the population at large, and tell it how to separate itself from itself is merely silly. I am now, of course, using the word success in its ordinary sense. If human nature were more perfect than it is, success in life would mean an intimate knowledge of oneself, and the achievement of a philosophic inward calm, and such a goal might well be reached by the majority of mortals. But to us success signifies something else. It may be divided into four branches. One, distinction in pure or applied science. This is the least gross of all forms of success as we regard it, for it frequently implies poverty, and it does not by any means always imply fame. Two, distinction in the arts. Fame and adulation are usually implied in this, though they do not commonly bring riches with them. Three, direct influence and power over the material lives of other men, that is to say distinction in politics, national or local. Four, success in amassing money. This last is the commonest and easiest. Most forms of success will fall under one of these heads. Are they possible to that renowned and much flattered person, the man in the street? They are not, and well you know it, all you professors of the science of success. Only a small minority of us can even become rich. Happily, while it is true that success in its common acceptation is, by its very essence, impossible to the majority, there is an accompanying truth which adjusts the balance, to which the majority do not desire success. This may seem a bold saying, but it is in accordance with the facts. Conceive the man in the street suddenly by some miracle invested with political power, and of course under the obligation to use it. He would be so upset, worried, wearied and exasperated at the end of a week, that he would be ready to give the eyes out of his head in order to get rid of it. As for success in science or in art, the average person's interest in such matters is so slight, compared with that of the man of science or the artist, that he cannot be said to have an interest in them. And supposing that distinction in them were thrust upon him, he would rapidly lose that distinction by simple indifference and neglect. The average person certainly wants some money, and the average person does not usually rest until he has got as much as is needed for the satisfaction of his instinctive needs. He will move the heaven and earth of his environment to earn sufficient money for marriage in the station to which he has been accustomed, and precisely at that point his genuine desire for money will cease to be active. The average man has this in common with the most exceptional genius, that his career in its main contours is governed by his instincts. The average man flourishes and finds his ease in an atmosphere of peaceful routine. Men destined for success flourish and find their ease in an atmosphere of collision and disturbance. The two temperaments are diverse. Naturally the average man dreams vaguely upon occasion. He dreams how nice it would be to be famous and rich. We all dream vaguely upon such things. But to dream vaguely is not to desire. I often tell myself that I would give anything to be the equal of Cinque Vallée, the juggler, or to be the captain of the largest Atlantic liner. But the reflective part of me tells me that my yearning to emulate these astonishing personages is not a genuine desire, and that its realisation would not increase my happiness. To obtain a passably true notion of what happens to the mass of mankind in its progress from the cradle to the grave, one must not attempt to survey a whole nation, nor even a great metropolis, nor even a very big city like Manchester or Liverpool. These panoramas are so immense and confusing that they defeat the observing eye. It is better to take a small town of say twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, such a town as most of us know more or less intimately. The extremely few individuals whose instincts mark them out to take part in the struggle for success can be identified at once, for the first thing they do is to leave the town. The air of the town is not bracing enough for them. Their nostrils dilate for something keener. Those who are left form a microcosm which is representative enough of the world at large. Between the ages of thirty and forty they begin to sort themselves out. In their own sphere they take their places. A dozen or so politicians form the town council and rule the town. Half a dozen businessmen stand for the town's commercial activity and its wealth. A few others teach science and art or are locally known as botanists, geologists, amateurs of music or amateurs of some other art. These are the distinguished and it will be perceived that they cannot be more numerous than they are. What of the rest? Have they struggled for success and been beaten? Not they. Do they, as they grow old, resemble disappointed men? Not they. They have fulfilled themselves modestly. They have got what they genuinely tried to get. They have never even gone near the outskirts of the battle for success. But they have not failed. The number of failures is surprisingly small. You see a shabby, disappointed, aging man flit down the main street and someone replies to your inquiry that so and so one of life's failures, poor fellow. And the very tone in which the words are uttered proves the excessive rarity of the real failure. It goes without saying that the case of the handful who have left the town in search of the success with the capital S has a tremendous interest of curiosity for the mass who remain. I will consider it. The successful and the unsuccessful. Having boldly stated that success is not and cannot be within grasp of the majority, I now proceed to state, as regards the minority, that they do not achieve it in the manner in which they are commonly supposed to achieve it. And I may add an expression of my thankfulness that they do not. The popular delusion is that success is attained by what I may call the Benjamin Franklin method. Franklin was a very great man. He united in his character a set of splendid qualities as various in their different ways as those possessed by Leonardo da Vinci. I have an immense admiration for him. But his autobiography does make me angry. His autobiography is understood to be a classic, and if you say a word against it in the United States, you are apt to get killed. I do not, however, contemplate an immediate visit to the United States, and I shall venture to assert that Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a detestable book and a misleading book. I can recall only two other volumes which I would more willingly revile. One is Samuel Budget, the successful merchant, and the other is from Log Cabin to White House, being the history of President Garfield. Such books may impose on boys, and it is conceivable that they do not harm boys. Franklin, by the way, began his autobiography in the form of a letter to his son. But the grown man who can support them without nausea ought to go and see a doctor, for there is something wrong with him. I began now, blandly remarks Franklin, to have some acquaintance among the young people of the town that were lovers of reading, with whom I spent my evenings very pleasantly. In italics, and gained money by my industry and frugality, end of italics. Or again, quote, It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I ruled each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination, to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day. End quote. Shade of Franklin, where ere thou art, this is really a little bit stiff. A man may be excused even such infamies of priggishness, but truly he ought not to go and write them down, especially to his son. And why the detail about red ink? If Franklin's son was not driven to evil courses by the perusal of that monstrous autobiography, he must have been a man almost as astounding as his father. Now, Franklin could only have written his immortal classic from one of three motives. One, sheer conceit. He was a prig, but he was not conceited. Two, a desire that others should profit by his mistakes. He never made any mistakes. Now and again he emphasises some trifling error, but that is only his thumb. Three, a desire that others should profit by the recycle of his virtuous sagacity to reach a similar success. The last was undoubtedly his principal motive. Honest fellow who happened to be a genius. But the point is that his success was in no way the result of his virtuous sagacity. I would go further and say that his dreadful virtuous sagacity often hindered his success. No one is a worse guide to success than your typical successful man. He seldom understands the reasons of his own success, and when he is asked by a popular magazine to give his experiences for the benefit of the use of a whole nation, it is impossible for him to be natural and sincere. He knows the kind of thing that is expected from him, and if he didn't come to London with half a crown in his pocket, he probably did something equally silly, and he puts that down, and the note of the article or interview is struck, and good-bye to genuine truth. There recently appeared in a daily paper an autobiographic, didactic article by one of the world's richest men, which was the most inadequate article of the sort that I have ever come across. Successful men forget so much of their lives. Moreover, nothing is easier than to explain an accomplished fact in a nice, agreeable, conventional way. The entire business of success is a gigantic tacit conspiracy on the part of the minority to deceive the majority. Are successful men more industrious, frugal, and intelligent than men who are not successful? I maintain that they are not, and I have studied successful men at close quarters. One of the communist characteristics of the successful man is his idleness, his immense capacity for wasting time. I stoutly assert that as a rule successful men are by habit comparatively idle. As for frugality, it is practically unknown among the successful classes. This statement applies with particular force to financiers. As for intelligence, I have over and over again been startled by the lack of intelligence in successful men. They are indeed capable of stupidities that would be the ruin of a plain clerk. And much of the talk in those circles which surround the successful man is devoted to the enumeration of instances of his lack of intelligence. Another point. Successful men seldom succeed as the result of an ordered arrangement of their lives. They are the least methodical of creatures. Naturally, when they have arrived, they amuse themselves and impress the majority by being convinced that right from the start, with a steady eye on the goal, they had carefully planned every foot of the route. No! Great success never depends on the practice of the humbler virtues, though it may occasionally depend on the practice of the prouder vices. Use industry, frugality, and common sense by all means, but do not expect that they will help you to success, because they will not. I shall no doubt be told that what I have just written has an immoral tendency, and is a direct encouragement to sloths, thriftlessness, etc. One of our chief national faults is our hypocritical desire to suppress the truth on the pretext that to admit it would encourage sin, whereas the real explanation is that we are afraid of the truth. I will not be guilty of that fault. I do like to look a fact in the face without blinking. I am fully persuaded that per head there is more of the virtues in the unsuccessful majority than in the successful minority. In London alone are they not hundreds of miles of streets crammed with industry, frugality, and prudence. Some of the most brilliant men I have known have been failures, and not through lack of character, either. And some of the least gifted have been marvellously successful. It is impossible to point to a single branch of human activity in which success can be explained by the conventional principles that find general acceptance. I hear you, O reader, murmuring to yourself, this is all very well, but he is simply being paradoxical for his own diversion. I would that I could persuade you of my intense seriousness. I have endeavoured to show what does not make success. I will next endeavour to show what does make it, but my hope is forlorn. The inwardness of success. Of course one can no more explain success than one can explain Beethoven's C minor symphony. One may state what key it is written in, and make expert reflections upon its form, and catalogue its themes, and relate it to symphonies that preceded it, and symphonies that followed it. But in the end one is reduced to saying that the C minor symphony is beautiful, because it is. In the same manner one is reduced to saying that the sole real difference between success and failure is that success succeeds. This being frankly admitted at the outset I will allow myself to assert that there are three sorts of success. Success A is the accidental sort. It is due to the thing we call chance and to nothing else. We are all of us still very superstitious, and the caprices of chance have a singular effect upon us. Suppose that I go to Monte Carlo, and announce to a friend my firm conviction that red will turn up next time, and I back red for the maximum, and red does turn up. My friend in spite of his intellect will vaguely attribute to me a mysterious power, yet chance alone would be responsible. If I did that six times running all the players at the table would be interested in me. If I did it a dozen times all the players in the casino would regard me with awe, yet chance alone would be responsible. If I did it 18 times my name would be in every newspaper in Europe, yet chance alone would be responsible. I should be in that department of human activity an extremely successful man, and the vast majority of people would instinctively credit me with gifts that I do not possess. If such phenomena of superstition can occur in an affair where the agency of chance is open and avowed, how much more probable is it that people should refuse to be satisfied with the explanation of sheer accident in affairs where it is to the interest of the principal actors to conceal the role played by chance? Nevertheless there can be no doubt in the minds of persons who have viewed success at close quarters that a proportion of it is due solely and utterly to chance. Successful men flourish today and have flourished in the past who have no quality whatever to differentiate them from the multitude. Red has turned up for them a sufficient number of times, and the universal superstitious instinct not to believe in chance has accordingly surrounded them with a halo. It is merely ridiculous to say, as some do say, that success is never due to chance alone, because nearly everybody is personally acquainted with reasonable proof on a great or a small scale, to the contrary. The second sort of success, be, is that made by men who, while not gifted with first class talents, have beyond doubt the talent to succeed. I should describe these men by saying that, though they deserve something, they do not deserve the dazzling reward known as success. They strike us as overpaid. We meet them in all professions and trades and we do not really respect them. They excite our curiosity and perhaps our envy. They may rise very high indeed, but they must always be unpleasantly conscious of a serious reservation in our attitude towards them. And if they could read their obituary notices, they would assuredly discern therein a certain chilliness, however kindly we acted up to our great national motto of De Mortuis Nylnist Bunkham. It is this class of success which puzzles the social student. How comes it that men without any other talent possess a mysterious and indefinable talent to succeed? Well, it seems to me that such men always display certain characteristics. And the chief of these characteristics is the continual insatiable wish to succeed. They are preoccupied with the idea of succeeding. We others are not so preoccupied. We dream of success at intervals, but we have not the passion for success. We don't lie awake at nights pondering upon it. The second characteristic of these men springs naturally from the first. They are always on the lookout. This does not mean that they are industrious. I stated in a previous article, my belief, that as a rule successful men are not particularly industrious. A man on a raft with his shirt for a signal cannot be termed industrious, but he will keep his eyes open for a sale on the horizon. If he simply lies down and goes to sleep, he may miss the chance of his life in a very special sense. The man with the talent to succeed is the man on the raft who never goes to sleep. His indefinable orb sweeps the mane from sunset to sunset. Having sighted a sale, he gets up on his hind legs and waves that shirt in so determined a manner that the ship is bound to see him and take him off. Occasionally he plunges into the sea, risking sharks and other perils. If he doesn't get there, we hear nothing of him. If he does, some person will ultimately multiply by ten the number of sharks that he braved. That person is called a biographer. Let me drop the metaphor. Another characteristic of these men is that they seem to have the exact contrary of what is known as common sense. They will become enamoured of some enterprise which infallibly impresses the average common sense person as a mad and hopeless enterprise. The average common sense person will demolish the hopes of that enterprise by incontrovertible argument. He will point out that it is foolish on the face of it, that it has never been attempted before, and that it responds to no need of humanity. He will say to himself, this fellow with his precious enterprise has a twist in his brain. He can't reply to my arguments, and yet he obstinately persists in going on. And the man destined to success does go on. Perhaps the enterprise fails. It often fails. And then the average common sense person expends much breath in eye told you so's. But the man continues to be on the lookout. His thirst is unassuaged. His taste for enterprises foredoomed to failure is incurable. And one day some enterprise foredoomed to failure develops into a success. We all hear of it. We all open our mouths and gape. Of the failures we have heard nothing. Once the man has achieved success the thing becomes a habit with him. The difference between a success and a failure is often so slight that a reputation for succeeding will ensure a success, and a reputation for failing will ensure failure. Chance plays an important part in such careers but not a paramount part. One can only say that it is more useful to have luck at the beginning than later on. These men of success generally have pliable temperaments. They are not frequently un-moral, but they regard a conscience as a good servant and a bad master. They live in an atmosphere of compromise. There remains Class C of success, the class of sheer high merit. I am not a pessimist, nor am I an optimist. I try to arrive at the truth, and I should say that in putting success C at ten percent of the sum total of all successes I am being generous to Class C. Not that I believe that vast quantities of merit go unappreciated. My reason for giving to Class C only a modest share is the fact that there is so little sheer high merit and does it not stand to reason that high merit must be very exceptional? This sort of success needs no explanation, no accounting for. It is the justification of our singular belief in the principle of the triumph of justice, and it is among natural phenomena perhaps the only justification that can be advanced for that belief. And certainly when we behold the spectacle of genuine, distinguished merit gaining without undue delay and without the sacrifice of dignity or of conscience, the applause of the kind-hearted, but obtuse and insensible majority of the human race, we have fair reason to hug ourselves. Mental Efficiency and Other Hints to Men and Women by Arnold Bennett Chapter 8 The Petty Artificialities The phrase Petty Artificialities, employed by one of the correspondents in the Great Simple Life Argument, has stuck in my mind, although I gave it a plain intimation that it was no longer wanted there. Perhaps it sheds more light than I had at first imagined on the mental state of the persons who use it when they wish to arraign the conditions of modern life. A vituperative epithet is capable of making a big show. Artificialities is a sufficiently scornful word, but when you add Petty you somehow give the quietest to the pretensions of modern life. Modern life had better hide its diminished head after that. Modern life is settled and done for in the opinion of those who have thrown the dart. Only it isn't done for really, you know. Petty, after all, means nothing in that connection. Are there, then, artificialities to not Petty, which are noble, large and grand? Petty means merely that the users of the word are just a little cross and out of temper. What they think they object to is artificialities of any kind, and so to get rid of their spleen they refer to petty artificialities. The device is a common one and as brilliant as it is futile. Rude adjectives are like blank cartridge. They impress evane people, including the birds of the air, but they do no execution. At the same time let me admit that I deeply sympathise with the irritated users of the impolite phrase Petty artificialities, for it does at any rate show a divine discontent. It does prove a high dissatisfaction with conditions which at best are not the final expression of the eternal purpose. It does make for a sort of crude and churlish righteousness. I well know that feeling which induces one to spit out savagely the phrase Petty artificialities of modern life. One has it usually either on getting up or on going to bed. What a Petty artificial business it is getting up, even for a male. Shaving, why shave? And then going to a draw and choosing a necktie. Fancy an immortal soul, fancy a fragment of the eternal and indestructible energy which exists from everlasting to everlasting deliberately expending its activity on the choice of a necktie. Why a necktie? Then one goes downstairs and exchanges banal phrases with other immortals. And one can't start breakfast immediately because some sleepy mortal is late. Why babble? Why wait? Why not say straight out go to their deuce all of you? Here it's nearly ten o'clock and me anxious to begin living the higher life at once instead of fiddling around in petty artificialities. Shut up every one of you. Give me my bacon instantly and let me gobble it down quick and be off. I'm sick of your ceremonies. This would at any rate not be artificial. It would save time. And if a similar policy were strictly applied through the day one could retire to a well-earned repose in the full assurance that the day had been simplified. The time for living the higher life, the time for pushing forward those vast schemes of self-improvement which we all cherish, what decidedly have been increased? One would not have that maddening feeling which one so frequently does have when the shades of night are falling fast that the day had been frittered away. And yet, and yet, I gravely doubt whether this wholesale massacre of those poor petty artificialities would bring us appreciably nearer the millennium. For there is one thing and a thing of fundamental importance which the revolutionists against petty artificialities always fail to appreciate. And that is the necessity and the value of convention. I cannot in a paragraph deal effectively with this most difficult and complex question. I can only point the reader to analogous phenomena in the arts. All the arts are a conventionalization and ordering of nature. Even in a garden you put the plants in rows and you subordinate the well-being of one to the general well-being. The sole difference between a garden and the wild woods is a petty artificiality. In writing a sonnet you actually cramped the profoundest emotional conceptions into a length and number of lines and a jingling of like sounds arbitrarily fixed beforehand. Wordsworth's the world is too much with us is a solid horrid mass of petty artificiality. Why couldn't the fellow say what he meant and have done with it instead of making powers rhyme with ours and worrying himself to use exactly a hundred and forty syllables? As for music the amount of time that must have been devoted to petty artificiality in the construction of an affair like Bach's Chacon is simply staggering. Then look at pictures absurdly confined in frames with their ingenious contrasts of light and shade and mass against mass. Nothing but petty artificiality. In other words nothing but form, form which is the basis of all beauty whether material or otherwise. Now what form is in art, conventions, petty artificialities are in life. Just as you can have too much form in art so you can have too much convention in life, but no art that is not planned in form is worth consideration and no life that is not planned in convention can ever be satisfactory. Convention is not the essence of life but it is the protecting garment and preservative of life and it is also one very valuable means by which life can express itself. It is largely symbolic and symbols while being expressive are also great time savers. The despisers of petty artificialities should think of this. Take the striking instance of that pettiest artificiality leaving cards. Well, searchers after the real, what would you substitute for it? If you dropped it and substituted nothing the result would tend towards a loosening of the bonds of society and it would tend towards the diminution of the number of your friends. And if you dropped it and tried to substitute something less artificial and more real you would accomplish no more than you accomplish with cards. You would inconvenience everybody and waste a good deal of your own time. I cannot too strongly insist that the basis of convention is a symbolism primarily meant to display a regard for the feelings of other people. If you do not display a regard for the feelings of other people you may as well go and live on herbs in the desert. And if you are to display such a regard you cannot do it more expeditiously at a smaller outlay of time and brains than by adopting the code of convention now generally practised. It comes to this, that you cannot have all the advantages of living in the desert while you are living in a society. It would be delightful for you if you could but you can't. There are two further reasons for the continuance of conventionality and one is the mysterious but indisputable fact that the full beauty of an activity is never brought out until it is subjected to discipline and strict ordering and nice balancing. A life without petty artificiality would be the life of a tiger in the forest, a beautiful life perhaps, a life of burning bright but not reaching the highest ideal of beauty. Laws and rules, forms and ceremonies are good in themselves from a merely aesthetic point of view apart from their social value and necessity. And the other reason is that one cannot always be at the full strain of self-improvement and evolutionary progress and generally beating the big drum. Human nature will not stand it. There is, if we will only be patient, ample time for the artificial as well as for the real. Those people who think that there isn't ought to return to school and learn arithmetic. Supposing that all petty artificialities were suddenly swept away and we were able to show our regard and consideration for our fellow-creatures by the swift processes of thought alone, we should find ourselves with a terrible lot of time hanging heavy on our hands. We can no more spend all our waking hours unconsciously striving towards higher things than we can dine exclusively off jam. What frightful prigs we should become if we had nothing to do but cultivate our noblest faculties. I beg the despisers of artificiality to reflect upon these observations, however incomplete these observations may be, and to consider whether they would be quite content if they got what they are crying out for. CHAPTER IX THE SECRET OF CONTENT I have said lightly apropos of the conclusion arrived at by several correspondence and by myself that the cry for the simple life was merely a new form of the old cry for happiness, that I would explain what it was that made life worth living for me. The word has gone forth and I must endeavour to redeem my promise. But I do so with qualms and with diffidence. First, there is the natural instinct against speaking of that which is in the core of one's mind. Second, there is the fear, nearly amounting to certainty, of being misunderstood or not comprehended at all. And third, there is the absurd insufficiency of space. How ever. For me, spiritual content, I will not use the word happiness which implies too much, springs essentially from no mental or physical facts. It springs from the spiritual fact that there is something higher in man than the mind, and that that something can control the mind. Call that something the soul or what you will. My sense of security amid the collisions of existence lies in the firm consciousness that just as my body is the servant of my mind, so is my mind the servant of me. An unruly servant, but a servant, and possibly getting less unruly every day. Often have I said to that restive brain, now, oh mind, soul means of communication between the divine me and all external phenomena, you are not a free agent, you are a subordinate, you are nothing but a piece of machinery, and the beamy you shall. The mind can only be conquered by regular meditation, by deciding beforehand what direction its activity ought to take, and insisting that its activity takes that direction. Also, by never leaving it idle, undirected, masterless, to play at random like a child in the streets after dark. This is extremely difficult, but it can be done, and it is marvelously well worth doing. The fault of the epoch is the absence of meditativeness. A sagacious man will strive to correct in himself the faults of his epoch. In some deep ways the 12th century had advantages over the 20th. It practised meditation. The 20th does sando exercises. Meditation, I speak only for myself, is the least dispensable of the day's doings. What do I force my mind to meditate upon? Upon various things, but chiefly upon one. Namely, that force, energy, life, the incomprehensible has many names, is indestructible, and that in the last analysis there is only one single unique force, energy, life. Science is gradually reducing all elements to one element. Science is making it increasingly difficult to conceive matter apart from spirit. Everything lives, even my razor gets tired. And the fatigue of my razor is no more nor less explicable than my fatigue after a passage of arms with my mind. The force in it, and in me, has been transformed, not lost. All force is the same force. Science just now has a tendency to call it electricity, but I am indifferent to such baptisms. The same force pervades my razor, my cow in my field, and the central me, which dominates my mind. The same force in different stages of evolution. And that force persists forever. In such paths do I compel my mind to walk daily. Daily it has to recognise that the mysterious ego controlling it is a part of that divine force which exists from everlasting to everlasting, and which in its ultimate atoms nothing can harm. By such a course of training, even the mind, the coarse practical mind, at last perceives that worldly accidents don't count. But, you will exclaim, this is nothing but the immortality of the soul over again. Well, in a slightly more abstract form it is. I never said I had discovered anything new. I do not permit myself to do anything else. I do not permit myself to be dogmatic about the persistence of personality or even of individuality after death. But in basing my physical and mental life on the assumption that there is something in me which is indestructible and essentially changeless, I go no further than science points. Yes, if it gives you pleasure, let us call it the immortality of the soul. If I miss my train or my tailor disgraces himself, or I lose that earthly manifestation of force that happens to be dearest to me, I say to my mind, mind, concentrate your powers upon the full realisation of the fact that I, your master, am immortal and beyond the reach of accidents. And my mind, knowing by this time that I am a hard master, obediently does so. Am I a portion of the infinite force that existed billions of years ago, and which will exist billions of years hence, going to allow myself to be worried by any terrestrial physical or mental event? I am not. As for the vicissitudes of my body, that servant of my servant, it had better keep its place and not make too much fuss. Not that any fuss occurring in either of these outward envelopes of the eternal me could really disturb me. The eternal is calm. It has the best reason for being so. So you say to yourselves, here is a man in a penny-weekly paper advocating daily meditation upon the immortality of the soul as a cure for discontent and unhappiness. A strange phenomenon. That it should be strange is an indictment of the epoch. My only reply to you is this. Try it. Of course I freely grant that such meditation, while it casts out fear, slowly kills desire and makes for a certain high indifference, and that the extinguishing of desire with an accompanying indifference be it high or low, is bad for use. But I am not a use, and today I am writing for those who have tasted disillusion, which use has not. Yet I would not have you believe that I scorn the brief joys of this world. My attitude towards them would feign be that of Socrates, as stated by the incomparable Marcus Aurelius. He knew how to lack and how to enjoy those things in the lack whereof most men show themselves weak and in the fruition in temperate. Besides commanding my mind to dwell upon the indestructibly and final omnipotence of the force which is me, I command it to dwell upon the logical consequence of that unity of force which science is now beginning to teach. The same essential force that is me is also you. Says the Indian proverb, I met a hundred men on the road to Delhi and they were all my brothers. Yes, and they were all my twin brothers, if I may so express it, and a thousand times closer to me even than the common conception of twin brothers. We are all of us the same in essence. What separates us is merely differences in our respective stages of evolution. Constant reflection upon this fact must produce that universal sympathy which alone can produce a positive content. It must do away with such ridiculous feelings as blame, irritation, anger, resentment. It must establish in the mind an all-embracing tolerance until a man can look upon the drunkard in his drunkenness and upon the wife-beater in his brutality with pure and calm compassion, until his heart goes out instinctively to every other manifestation of the unique force, until he is surcharged with an eager and unconquerable benevolence towards everything that lives, until he has utterly abandoned the presumptuous practice of judging and condemning, he will never attain real content. Ah, you exclaim again, he has nothing newer to tell us than that the greatest of these is charity. I have not. It is it may strike you as excessively funny, but I have discovered nothing newer than that. I merely remind you of it. Thus it is, twins on the road to Delhi, by continual meditation upon the indestructibility of force that I try to cultivate calm, and by continual meditation upon the oneness of force that I try to cultivate charity, being fully convinced that in calmness and in charity lies the secret of a placid, if not ecstatic, happiness. It is often said that no thinking person can be happy in this world. My view is that the more a man thinks, the more happy he is likely to be. I have spoken. I am overwhelmingly aware that I have spoken crudely, abruptly, inadequately, confusedly, end of Chapter 9 and end of mental efficiency and other hints to men and women by Arnold Bennett. Recording by Ruiz Golding.