Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/339

 TYPES OF WILL. 323 mastering passion ; so when, at the call of duty, we sacrifice what we most love, the passionate desire of love effaces the pale intellectual desire of duty. In this type, desire is no longer present as a motive to the will. There is desire for the end that we sacrifice, not for the end we accept. And we can quite well explain the motive which influences this choice without supposing it to be formed of an actual present desire. The austere love of duty, the calm but often steady desires that subserve it, explain the formation of a habit of acting in harmony with its dictates ; and this habit, where a sufficient interval occurs before action, is ordinarily reinforced by desire. Only when an intense desire competes with it, is it effaced for the time. Then the " feeling-tone " of the sentiment of duty is effaced, and the mental system which it qualifies becomes a dry mental fact. But it does not cease to be a motive ; its conation is diminished, but not destroyed. It still strives to exclude those ideas of action that are incompatible with it ; it thwarts the contrary desire. The habit of our past lives stands by us. It maintains these ideas within the focus of attention, so that passion cannot exclude them, or blind us to their true character. And they persist as an alternative motive to the will, unloved, undesired at the moment though they be. And the loss of their affective side, that side which affects us with pleasure and desire, is not anything exceptional. It seems to be a general psychological truth that only opposite desires nearly balanced in point of intensity can both be felt together. When one is calm and intellectual, and the other has reached the intensity of passion, the first disappears. But when the state of indecision is prolonged, amid the fluctuations of intensity of the contrary desire, the first may find an opportunity, and be reinstated. But at the moment we make those calm but steadfast resolves, when at the same moment that we see all the allurements of passion we reject them, then we feel only the desire that we will not to follow and not the desire to follow that we will. And were this not the case, did we in a moment see the beauty of self- sacrifice, and on the impulse achieve it, then we should not feel that terrible effort in our resolution. It would form easily, and, with the subsidence of emotion, as easily, perhaps, be forgotten or repented of. This effort that we feel in forming a resolution must be carefully distinguished from the effort felt in carrying it into effect. Great undertakings are hard to achieve ; but we will to achieve them in youth with facility. There may be little effort felt in going out into the cold, but the resolve may