Self-will

“ I have realised that my will, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people’s wills are even worse.”
“Oh! isn’t human life horrible!” she cried. “Every human being exerting his will all the time—over other people, and over himself, and nearly always self-righteous!” ”

“ Gratified self-will has afforded me the only permanent enjoyment of my life; but it has this disadvantage. While you rule your will and indulge it for fancy's sake, [78] the pleasure is unquestionable. When your will begins to rule you, there is no slavery so galling. ”

“ As, for example, should the Will Almighty Permit the Free-will of particular man To break the meshes of else strangling fate— Which Free-will, fearful of foretold abuse, I have myself from my own son fore-closed From ever possible self-extrication; A terrible responsibility, Not to the conscience to be reconciled Unless opposing almost certain evil Against so slight contingency of good. ”

“ And I turn accordingly to the Heavenly Footman for an excellent illustration of the wilfulness of the will both in a good man and in a bad; as, thus: ‘Your self-willed people, nobody knows what to do with them. We use to say, He will have his own will, do all we can. If a man be willing, then any argument shall be matter of encouragement; but if unwilling, then any argument shall give discouragement. The saints of old, they being willing and resolved for heaven, what could stop them? ”

“ Those who are most obviously the slaves of self-will, will, generally, be loudest in their protestations of the purity and excellence of their motives; so that my advice to those who wish to establish in the minds of others a good opinion of their sincerity, would generally be, to say nothing about it, and let their conduct speak for itself. ”

“ But, if we watch the influence upon the will itself, of its own wrong decisions, its own yielding to temptations, we shall discover that the voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to good by its own action; may surrender itself with such an intensity and entireness to appetite, passion, and self-love, that it becomes unable to reverse itself, and overcome its own wrong disposition and direction. ”

“ Turning now from the question of content to that of origin, we must consider first the genesis of the good self, not in the world in general, but in the will of the individual: and the question here is, how is it possible for the self to identify itself with what seems to be altogether outside it? How is it that I can feel pleasure in the successes of persons and causes which do not affect my private personality? how can I desire their furtherance, not as means but as an end? How can the content of my will be not myself, as this or that exclusive individual? ”

“ The cause is the reaching and grasping, the unreasonable insistence on its own way of kicking, dust-raising self-will at the back of the mind.
A quiet will, a will that can remain quiet through all emergencies, is not a self-will. It is the self that raises the dust—the self that wants, and strains to get its own way, and turns and twists and writhes if it does not get its own way. ”

“ For self-glorying, self-seeking, self-will is that which he will be continually dreading in himself, from which he will be continually flying in himself. He will know that that has been and is the cause of all falsehood in his words, his deeds, his thoughts; and therefore he will acknowledge that One in whom there is no such self-seeking, self-glorying, self-willing, who was entirely seeking the glory of another, and doing the will of another, must be true altogether, must be right altogether,—that there can be no falsehood, no wrong in Him. ”

“ But it will be seen that the Will or Free Will mentioned here, and defined as self-assertion and determination to please one's self, is self-assertion as opposed to environment—a self-assertion which, irrespective of the qualities or nature of the motives comprised in that self, determines to work out its own pleasure there and then in spite of all opposition. ”

“ Infants who scarcely show the first weak trace of intelligence are already full of self-will: through unlimited, aimless roaring and shrieking they show the pressure of will with which they swell, while their willing has yet no object, i.e., they will without knowing what they will. ”

“ The radical fault of our nature, be it remembered, is self-will; and we little suspect how largely self-will and self-pleasing may be at the bottom of plans and pursuits, which still have God’s glory and the furtherance of his service for their professed end. ”

“ We saw that duty’s universal laws are not universal, if that means they can never be overruled, and that its form and its absolute imperative are impracticable. What after all remains is the acting for the sake of a good will, to realize oneself by realizing the will which is above us and higher than ours; and the assurance that this, and not the self to be pleased, is the end for which we have to live. But as to that which the good will is, it tells us nothing, and leaves us with an idle abstraction. ”

“ The extensive and intensive affirmation of our will, as this ‘I’ or that ‘You,’ whether in bodily well-being, psychical harmony, influence on others, or appropriation of physical or spiritual good things,—all these assert our particular personal existence, and all that opposes the actuality or possibility of these lowers it. Self-sacrifice is knowingly to give up this existence to that which is higher. In it we bestow our will on what, we believe, either will or may lessen the extensive and intensive assertion of our private self. ”

“ There, he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind. ”

“ One of the interesting anomalies of our language is the marvellous fact that the term “self-willed” should ever have been considered a term of reproach or a description of a defect in character. The child with strongest self-will may become the greatest champion for righteousness if properly trained. ”

“ The personality—the me—the will, a self-moving cause, directs itself by an act of attention to the reason, and receives the laws of its action. The perception of these laws is attended with the conviction of their rectitude and imperative obligation; at the same time, there is the consciousness of power to obey or to disobey them. ”

“ His after efforts are for the subjection of the will to the judgment. There are times which come to all of us when our will is not completely fashioned to our hands, and the restless passions of the mind hold us in sway—seasons when all of us do and say things which are unbecoming, unseemly, and which lower and debase us in the opinion of others and also of ourselves. Self-control, however, is a virtue which will become ours if we cultivate it properly, if we strive right manfully for its possession ”

“ And here is the line which divides the effective from the non-effective people, the great from the small, the good from the well-intentioned and respectable; it is in proportion as a man has self-controlling, self-compelling power that he his able to do, even of his own pleasure; that he can depend upon himself, and be sure of his own action in emergencies.
How the Will operates.--Now, how does this autocrat of the bosom behave? Is it with a stern 'Thou shalt,' 'Thou shalt not,' that the subject man is coerced into obedience? ”

“ So far as the will can be trained to obey only those instincts that tend to the growth and maintenance of self-respect—to prevent the subordination of our better feelings to the overpowering effects of passion, greed, or injustice—it must help to the development of one of the primary necessities of a sane existence. ”

“ But to say that the will is always according to the greatest apparent good, is to resolve all volition into the pursuit of the agreeable, and all motives of action into self-love. It is to merge the feeling of obligation in the feeling of desire, and lose sight of it as in itself a distinct motive of action. ”

“ The self-sufficing, imperturbable will is the ideal possession, beside which all else in the world is valueless. But the quest of it is difficult, and success in the pursuit is rare. Mastery of the will is the result of a rare conjunction—a perfect commingling of blood and judgment. ”

“ I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. ”

“ Conclusions which they had a perfect right to come to, practices innocent and edifying to themselves, but of secondary account, began to be thrust forward into prominence, whether or not these instances of self-will really helped the common cause, whether or not they gave a handle to ill-nature and ill-will. ”

“ Are you passionate, self-willed, ever seeking to gain your own ends, self-indulgent, and self-centered; or are you gentle, mild, unselfish, quit of every form of self-indulgence, and are ever ready to give up your own? If the former, self is your master; if the latter, Truth is the object of your affection. Do you strive for riches? Do you fight, with passion, for your party? Do you lust for power and leadership? Are you given to ostentation and self-praise? Or have you given up the love of riches? Have you relinquished all strife? ”

“ There are two chief aims which, if held in view, will surely strengthen our self-control; one is attention to conscience, the other is a spirit of good-will. The lawless nature, not intending to live according to right, is always breaking over proper restraints,—is suspicious and quarrelsome. And he who has not the disposition to love his fellow-men, grows more and more petulant, disagreeable, and unfair. ”

“ Our personal life is, in its deepest reality, a single self-conscious unit, and the action of all its capacities and powers needs to be rhythmically adjusted to the morally good. But the imperative of the conscience addresses itself pre-eminently and peculiarly to the will, or the personal self as free in choosing, and thus capable of directing and using all the personal capacities and functions. ”

“ One's modesty; the fact that one has not lent an ear to one's most individual needs; the fact that one has mistaken one's self; the fact that one has esteemed one's self low; the fact that one has lost all delicacy of hearing in regard to one's instincts.—This want of reverence in regard to one's self is avenged by all sorts of losses: in health, friendship, well-being, pride, cheerfulness, freedom, determination, courage. A man never forgives himself, later on, for this want of genuine egoism: he regards it as an objection and as a cause of doubt concerning his real ego. ”

“ It all depends on the way in which we use ‘will.’ If by ‘will’ we mean ‘choice,’ ‘volition,’ the conscious realizing of myself in the object of one desire (in the widest sense) , which has been separated from and put before the mind, as a possibility not yet real—then the will can not be forced. For, supposing you could produce a state of mind, which certainly would issue in such and such a volition, yet the result, when produced, comes from the self. ”

“ Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. ”

“ The essential character of our doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, 180 which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development, and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality. ”

“ Up to the present we have been trying to point out that what we aim at is self, and self as a whole; in other words, that self as a whole is, in the end, the content of our wills. It will still further, perhaps, tend to clear the matter, if we refer to the form of the will,—not, of course, suggesting that the form is anything real apart from the content. ”

“ In truth there is no such agency beyond the will and determining how the will shall be determined; not in the man, for the will is the self-conscious man; not elsewhere than in the man, not outside him, for the self-conscious man has no outside. ”

“ In the ought the self is commanded, and that self is the sensuous self in me, which is ordered, and which, if I obey, is forced by the non-sensuous formal will which stands above the empirical element, and, equally with that, is myself. The ought is the command of the formal will, and duty is the obedience, or, more properly, the compulsion of the lower self by that will, or the realization of the form in and against the recalcitrant matter of the desires. ”

“ What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession; reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is necessary to a good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward defeat if he is to remain whole, but must feel the courage and the hope and the will to live by the best that is in him, whatever outward or inward obstacles it may encounter. ”

“ For,—and this is the substance of my belief,—my will, absolutely by itself, and without the intervention of any instrument that might weaken its expression, shall act in a perfectly congenial sphere,—reason upon reason, spirit upon spirit;—in a sphere to which nevertheless it does not give the law of life, activity, and progress, but which has that law in itself;—therefore, upon self-active reason. But self-active reason is will. The law of the super-sensual world must, therefore, be a Will:—A Will which operates purely as will; ”