y
warned, may abandon the entire enterprise in a fit of disgust, and for
ever afterwards maintain a cynical and impolite attitude towards all
theories of controlling the human machine. Now, the enterprise is not a
simple one. It is based on one simple principle--the conscious
discipline of the brain by selected habits of thought--but it is just
about as complicated as anything well could be. Advanced golf is child's
play compared to it. The man who briefly says to himself: 'I will get
up at 8, and from 8.30 to 9 I will examine and control my brain, and so
my life will at once be instantly improved out of recognition'--that man
is destined to unpleasant surprises. Progress will be slow. Progress may
appear to be quite rapid at first, and then a period of futility may set
in, and the would-be vanquisher of his brain may suffer a series of the
most deadly defeats. And in his pessimism he may imagine that all his
pains have gone for nothing, and that the unserious loungers in
exhibition gardens and readers of novels in parlours are in the right of
it after all. He may even feel rather ashamed of himself for having
been, as he thinks, taken in by specious promises, like the purchaser of
a quack medicine.

The conviction that great effort has been made and no progress achieved
is the chief of the dangers that affront the beginner in
machine-tending. It is, I will assert positively, in every case a
conviction unjustified by the facts, and usually it is the mere result
of reaction after fatigue, encouraged by the instinct for laziness. I do
not think it will survive an impartial examination; but I know that a
man, in order to find an excuse for abandoning further effort, is
capable of convincing himself that past effort has yielded no fruit at
all. So curious is the human machine. I beg every student of himself to
consider this remark with all the intellectual honesty at his disposal.
It is a grave warning.

When the machine-tender observes that he is frequently changing his
point of view; when he notices that what he regarded as the kernel of
the difficulty yesterday has sunk to a triviality to-day, being replaced
by a fresh phenomenon; when he arises one morning and by means of a
new, unexpected glimpse into the recesses of the machine perceives that
hitherto he has been quite wrong and must begin again; when he wonders
how on earth he could have been so blind and so stupid as not to see
what now he sees; when the new visio