I. A Revelation

I

A REVELATION

YOU have seen the advertisements. The lion and the man are facing each other; the man upstanding, hands clenched, his look defiant and terrible; the lion crouching. Who will win? The man, without doubt. He has what the beast lacks, Will-Power.

And at the bottom of the page is the triangular clipping which you cut out and send for the book on how to acquire it.

Or perhaps the advertisement promises you a $10,000 a year position. Nothing less than $10,000 a year seems capable of attracting the present-day reader of twenty-cent magazines. And those positions, one learns, are reserved for the men of Will-Power (not forgetting the capitals).

The advertisements betray bizarre ideas about the will and will-power. Any one who has the remotest notion of psychology might be led from them to suspect the advertised course. But the advertisements reflect not alone the advertiser’s ideas, but the ideas of the plain man. They are written to catch the plain man’s eye, and they do catch his eye, how else to account for their persistence, their enlargement and their multiplication, notwithstanding the notorious expensiveness of advertising?

Now I am about to reveal a profound secret about the will. The revelation will cause a good deal of shock and disappointment and a bedlam of protest. However, I derive courage to meet the protest because I have an imposing body of psychologic opinion behind me. I have behind me most of the reputable psychologic opinion since Herbert Spencer. And so here it is:

The will does not exist.

I repeat it, lest you fancy there has been a misprint. There is no such thing as the will. Nor such a thing as will-power. These are merely convenient words.

Now when a man denies the existence of the will he is on dangerous ground. It is as if he were to deny the existence of the tomato. Yet I do deny that the will exists, in anything like the same sense that the tomato exists. The tomato is a definite entity. You can pick it up, handle it, feel it, or throw it at the person who denies its existence. And this evidence of reality may convince him. But I am not so crude nor so fatuous as to deny the existence of the will simply because you cannot feel it or taste it. I do not deny it simply because it is not material and tangible. I deny it because it is not even spiritual. The plain man’s conception of the will is utterly and grotesquely wrong, and he must be shaken from it violently.

The popular conception seems to be that the Creator, having decided that a man might want to have a brain to use upon occasion, bethought Himself about the ingredients, and dropped in first a memory, then an imagination, then a will, and then a power to reason. Though popular conception is vague on the details, it is probably that the last was a small parcel, wrapped in prejudices to protect it from strain.

But the Creator could have left out the will, and no one would have been the wiser. Proof of it is that so few of us were. It was only recently that psychologists began to suspect its absence.

You are making a gesture of impatience. “This is a little to stiff,” you say. “There is a limit to which you can impose on me. I know when a man shows a will, and when he doesn’t. I have met strong-willed men, and I have met weak-willed men, and I know the difference when I see it.”

For your remonstrance I have the greatest respect. And I will now proceed to give heed to it.