Part 7 (2/2)
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THE ENERGIES OF MEN[1]
Everyone knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, feeling stale--or _oold_, as an Adirondack guide once put it to me. And everybody knows what it is to ”warm up” to his job. The process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as ”second wind.” On usual occasions we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer (so to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked ”enough,” so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward a surprising thing occurs.
The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it pa.s.ses away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth ”wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own,--sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pa.s.s those early critical points.
For many years I have mused on the phenomenon of second wind, trying to find a physiological theory. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, but that may be called upon: deeper and deeper strata of combustible or explosible material, discontinuously arranged, but ready for use by anyone who probes so deep, and repairing themselves by rest as well as do the superficial strata. Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface. Our energy-budget is like our nutritive budget.
Physiologists say that a man is in ”nutritive equilibrium” when day after day he neither gains nor loses weight. But the odd thing is that this condition may obtain on astonis.h.i.+ngly different amounts of food.
Take a man in nutritive equilibrium, and systematically increase or lessen his rations. In the first case he will begin to gain weight, in the second case to lose it. The change will be greatest on the first day, less on the second, less still on the third; and so on, till he has gained all that he will gain, or lost all that he will lose, on that altered diet. He is now in nutritive equilibrium again, but with a new weight; and this neither lessens nor increases because his various combustion-processes have adjusted themselves to the changed dietary. He gets rid, in one way or another, of just as much N, C, H, etc., as he takes in _per diem_.
Just so one can be in what I might call ”efficiency-equilibrium”
(neither gaining nor losing power when once the equilibrium is reached) on astonis.h.i.+ngly different quant.i.ties of work, no matter in what direction the work may be measured. It may be physical work, intellectual work, moral work, or spiritual work.
Of course there are limits: the trees don't grow into the sky. But the plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.
But the very same individual, pus.h.i.+ng his energies to their extreme, may in a vast number of cases keep the pace up day after day, and find no ”reaction” of a bad sort, so long as decent hygienic conditions are preserved. His more active rate of energizing does not wreck him; for the organism adapts itself, and as the rate of waste augments, augments correspondingly the rate of repair.
I say the _rate_ and not the _time_ of repair. The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler. Some years ago Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, kept three young men awake for four days and nights. When his observations on them were finished, the subjects were permitted to sleep themselves out. All awoke from this sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his long vigil only slept one-third more time than was regular with him.
If my reader will put together these two conceptions, first, that few men live at their maximum of energy, and second, that anyone may be in vital equilibrium at very different rates of energizing, he will find, I think, that a very pretty practical problem of national economy, as well as of individual ethics, opens upon his view. In rough terms, we may say that a man who energizes below his normal maximum fails by just so much to profit by his chance at life; and that a nation filled with such men is inferior to a nation run at higher pressure. The problem is, then, how can men be trained up to their most useful pitch of energy? And how can nations make such training most accessible to all their sons and daughters. This, after all, is only the general problem of education, formulated in slightly different terms.
”Rough” terms, I said just now, because the words ”energy” and ”maximum” may easily suggest only _quant.i.ty_ to the reader's mind, whereas in measuring the human energies of which I speak, qualities as well as quant.i.ties have to be taken into account. Everyone feels that his total _power_ rises when he pa.s.ses to a higher _qualitative_ level of life.
Writing is higher than walking, thinking is higher than writing, deciding higher than thinking, deciding ”no” higher than deciding ”yes”--at least the man who pa.s.ses from one of these activities to another will usually say that each later one involves a greater element of _inner work_ than the earlier ones, even though the total heat given out or the foot-pounds expended by the organism, may be less. Just how to conceive this inner work physiologically is as yet impossible, but psychologically we all know what the word means. We need a particular spur or effort to start us upon inner work; it tires us to sustain it; and when long sustained, we know how easily we lapse. When I speak of ”energizing,” and its rates and levels and sources, I mean therefore our inner as well as our outer work.
Let no one think, then, that our problem of individual and national economy is solely that of the maximum of pounds raisable against gravity, the maximum of locomotion, or of agitation of any sort, that human beings can accomplish. That might signify little more than hurrying and jumping about in inco-ordinated ways; whereas inner work, though it so often reinforces outer work, quite as often means its arrest. To relax, to say to ourselves (with the ”new thoughters”) ”Peace! be still!” is sometimes a great achievement of inner work.
When I speak of human energizing in general, the reader must therefore understand that sum-total of activities, some outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional, some moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing and waning in himself he is at all times so well aware. How to keep it at an appreciable maximum? How not to let the level lapse?
That is the great problem. But the work of men and women is of innumerable kinds, each kind being, as we say, carried on by a particular faculty; so the great problem splits into two sub-problems, thus:
(1). What are the limits of human faculty in various directions?
(2). By what diversity of means, in the differing types of human beings, may the faculties be stimulated to their best results?
Read in one way, these two questions sound both trivial and familiar: there is a sense in which we have all asked them ever since we were born. Yet _as a methodical programme of scientific inquiry_, I doubt whether they have ever been seriously taken up. If answered fully; almost the whole of mental science and of the science of conduct would find a place under them. I propose, in what follows, to press them on the reader's attention in an informal way.
The first point to agree upon in this enterprise is that _as a rule men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they actually possess and which they might use under appropriate conditions_.
Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.
Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his _maximum_, and he behaves below his _optimum_. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of _inhibition_ and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject--but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us it is only an inveterate _habit_--the habit of inferiority to our full self--that is bad.
Admit so much, then, and admit also that the charge of being inferior to their full self is far truer of some men than of others; then the practical question ensues: _to what do the better men owe their escape?
and, in the fluctuations which all men feel in their own degree of energizing, to what are the improvements due, when they occur_?
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