s
brain, be so clearly impressed by the advisability of separation as the
sole cure that he will steel himself to the effort necessary for a
separation. One of the chief advantages of an efficient brain is that an
efficient brain is capable of acting with firmness and resolution,
partly, of course, because it has been toned up, but more because its
operations are not confused by the interference of mere instincts.

Thirdly, there is the environment of one's general purpose in life,
which is, I feel convinced, far more often hopelessly wrong and futile
than either the environment of situation or the environment of
individuals. I will be bold enough to say that quite seventy per cent.
of ambition is never realised at all, and that ninety-nine per cent. of
all realised ambition is fruitless. In other words, that a gigantic
sacrifice of the present to the future is always going on. And here
again the utility of brain-discipline is most strikingly shown. A man
whose first business it is every day to concentrate his mind on the
proper performance of that particular day, must necessarily conserve his
interest in the present. It is impossible that his perspective should
become so warped that he will devote, say, fifty-five years of his
career to problematical preparations for his comfort and his glory
during the final ten years. A man whose brain is his servant, and not
his lady-help or his pet dog, will be in receipt of such daily content
and satisfaction that he will early ask himself the question: 'As for
this ambition that is eating away my hours, what will it give me that I
have not already got?' Further, the steady development of interest in
the hobby (call it!) of common-sense daily living will act as an
automatic test of any ambition. If an ambition survives and flourishes
on the top of that daily cultivation of the machine, then the owner of
the ambition may be sure that it is a genuine and an invincible
ambition, and he may pursue it in full faith; his developed care for the
present will prevent him from making his ambition an altar on which the
whole of the present is to be offered up.

I shall be told that I want to do away with ambition, and that ambition
is the great motive-power of existence, and that therefore I am an enemy
of society and the truth is not in me. But I do not want to do away with
ambition. What I say is that current ambitions usually result in
disappointment, that they usually mean the complete