Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/77

 But it is a matter of common experience that it is not enough merely to know that an impulse is unworthy. We may know that it is wrong, and still allow it to translate itself into action. We may, indeed, feel powerless to stop it. Take, for instance, this striking case. "A nurse, a gentle, peaceable creature as a rule, during her mistress's absence one day felt an irresistible impulse to cut the throat of the little child she was nursing, with a knife that she saw on the table, and this though she was devoted to the child. She ran into the kitchen with the knife, threw it away, and begged the cook to keep near her. The cook refused. The irresistible inclination to murder the child came on again, and she would probably have done it, had not her mistress returned in the nick of time. Later on she admitted what awful torture these impulses had been to her." But we do not need to go to such extreme and abnormal cases for examples of the overpowering strength of impulses. Most of us can think of occasions in our own experience when we have acted on impulse, though we were perfectly well aware of the unworthiness of the impulse. When we thus allow an impulse to become an action in contravention of our better judgment, it shows that our lives are not yet completely under the dominion of our wills. The open secret of controlling our impulses lies in "putting them in their proper place," in bringing them into subjection to the self as a whole, which, as conscience, is able to judge them, and, as will, is able either to restrain them or bring them into action.