Tractive effort

“ From the bottom to the top of the organized world we do indeed find one great effort; but most often this effort turns short, sometimes paralyzed by contrary forces, sometimes diverted from what it should do by what it does, absorbed by the form it is engaged in taking, hypnotized by it as by a mirror. ”

“ We have now brought things to a point at which we see that attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. The so-doing is the fiat; and it is a mere physiological incident that when the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should ensue. ”

“ Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Emotion, earnestness, fire, enthusiasm—these [Pg 42] are the very life of effort. They are steam to the engine; they are what the lighted fuse is to the charge of dynamite. They are the elements that give flash to the eye, spring to the step, resoluteness to the languid and certainty to effort. ”

“ But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. Those are, after all, but effects, products, and reflections of the outer world within. But the effort seems to belong to an altogether different realm, as if it were the substantive thing which we are, and those were but externals which we carry. If the 'searching of our heart and reins' be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero. ”

“ Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort without a corresponding energy of the body. We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpractised in writing, easily attain, when required to make the effort. As if plainness, and vigor, and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. ”

“ The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it reinforced—reinforced even immensely—the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter. ”

“ How then is reason to gain control over the appetites? Only by practice. It is only by continual effort, by the constant exercise of self-control, that the unruly passions can be tamed. Once brought under the yoke, their control becomes habit. ”

“ The feeling of effort may be 'an accompaniment,' as Mr. Bradley says, 'more or less superfluous,' and no more contribute to the result than the pain in a man's finger, when a hammer falls on it, contributes to the hammer's weight. Thus the notion that our effort in attending is an original faculty, a force additional to the others of which brain and mind are the seat, may be an abject superstition. Attention may have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like many a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe. It may be an excrescence on Psychology. ”

“ The ideal impulse appears, in comparison with this, a still small voice which must be artificially reinforced to prevail. Effort is what reinforces it, making things seem as if, while the force of propensity were essentially a fixed quantity, the ideal force might be of various amount. But what determines the amount of the effort when, by its aid, an ideal motive becomes victorious over a great sensual resistance? The very greatness of the resistance itself. ”

“ EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION
What is it that we really prize under the name of effort? What is it that we are really trying to secure when we regard increase in ability to put forth effort as an aim of education? Taken practically, there is no great difficulty in answering. What we are after is persistency, consecutiveness, of activity: endurance against obstacles and through hindrances. Effort regarded as mere increase of strain in the expenditure of energy is not in itself a thing we esteem. ”

“ We now see at one view when it is that effort complicates volition. It does so whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind; it does so whenever strongly explosive tendencies are checked, or strongly obstructive conditions overcome. ”

“ The interesting fact to the leader is not alone that these habits control so absolutely, but that any habit may be easily and unconsciously formed by repetition of the act or thought, and that a habit once formed is overcome only by conscious effort and even by determined action of the will. ”

“ Under the immediate impression of the perception of an act they are ready for a struggle to the death; but this ardor is quickly extinguished, and inertia, in its turn, having become an impulse, makes them throw far away from them the object which determined the effort. ”

“ So has he given to man a cooler temper, a grander deliberateness, a strength equal to every strain, which shall repair the fault of her warm impulses, her "nimble" action, her unfitness, casual or universal, for long-sustained effort. ”

“ It is through conscious and unremitting effort that we attain the happy expression of successful endeavor and realize the best in life, for slow ascension in winning this best leaves no room for satiety in this noble strife. ”

“ Above all, you may find that your mental training is defective, not from lack of capacity, but from some remediable or irremediable weakness of the will which robs you of the power of controlling your own minds. Never let it be forgotten that with steady effort, aided by the cumulative power of habit, the processes of the intellect can be brought under the control of the will. ”

“ And this machinery is essentially a system of arcs and paths, a reflex system, whether effort be amongst its incidents or not. The reflex way is, after all, the universal way of conceiving the business. The feeling of ease is a passive result of the way in which the thoughts unwind themselves. Why is not the feeling of effort the same? Professor Lipps, in his admirably clear deterministic statement, so far from admitting that the feeling of effort testifies to an increment of force exerted, explains it as a sign that force is lost. ”

“ Apart from an end to be reached, effort would never be anything more than a momentary strain or a succession of such strains. It would be a thing to be avoided, not so much for its disagreeableness as because nothing comes of it save exposure to dangers of exhaustion and accident. But where the action is a developing or growing one, effort, willingness to put forth energy at any point of the entire activity, measures the hold which the activity, as one whole affair, has upon a person. ”

“ We, however, call the more abundant mass of ideas ourselves; and, talking of its effort as our effort, and of that of the smaller mass of ideas as the resistance, [500] we say that our effort sometimes overcomes the resistances offered by the inertias of an obstructed, and sometimes [Pg 576] those presented by the impulsions of an explosive, will. Really both effort and resistance are ours, and the identification of our self with one of these factors is an illusion and a trick of speech. ”

“ The feeling of effort is, partly at least, a sensation complex resulting from stiffening the trunk and neck, knitting the brows, and other muscular strains that have practical utility in overcoming physical resistance and that are carried over to the overcoming of other sorts of resistance, where they have no obvious utility. Effort is a simpler emotion than anger, and occurs much more frequently. ”

“ Are not we much like them? Do we not use up our strength in useless effort? Then, how often we rush off to the gymnasium or to the drug-store in the vain hope of regaining our strength. New strength is not to be found in either place. It is within ourselves all the time. Stop the expenditure and permit re-cuperation through concentration. Don't go lie down. Don't take a nap. Stop right where you are and bring the thought down to one thing, strength. For the moment allow the body to remain still. ”

“ It is not ease, but effort—not facility, but difficulty, that makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life, in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved. ”

“ I must have passed hours making effort after effort in vain, and was on the point of abandoning the attempt in despair, when I was inspired with renewed energy by a circumstance that attracted my attention as I lay on my back, toiling diligently, but to no purpose. ”

“ What the heave of the will betokens metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to infer about a will-power distinct from motives, are not matters that concern us yet. Subjectively and phenomenally, the feeling of effort, absent from the former decisions, accompanies these. ”

“ Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. ”

“ Everywhere, then, the function of the effort is the same: to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip away. It may be cold and flat when the spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great and arduous when the spontaneous drift is towards repose. In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive, in the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. ”

“ To the thinking individual it suggests the need of serious, whole-souled, conscientious effort. If these laws exist,—as they most certainly do,—what is the use of trying to [Pg 372] achieve results in a wrong way? Why not conform to these laws and concentrate our effort in the right direction? A prodigious amount of energy is wasted in efforts to beat the game. One may scheme and contrive until all ambition withers and hope fades, but no one will ever find a satisfactory substitute for hard work. Many lives have been frittered away in the foolish attempt to find the "easy road." ”

“ The effects of unnecessary effort are strongly felt in the exhaustion which follows the interpretation of a very exciting role. It is a law without exception, that if I absorb an emotion and allow my own nerves to be shaken by it, I fail to give it in all its expressive power to the audience ”

“ I am very averse to trouble of any sort, so that the necessity for the simplest manual operations will rouse me to indignation: but if a thing will contribute largely to my ever-growing voluptuousness, I will undergo a considerable amount of labour to accomplish it, though without steady effort, being liable to side-winds and whims, and purposeless relaxations. ”

“ So long as he is stimulated by an interesting motive he puts forth his best effort. It is only when we set him tasks and demand blind obedience that he lags. If his crude work represents his best effort, honestly [Pg 120] put forth, he will, and he does, desire to do something better each time he tries. ”

“ Until a frustrated effort teaches him the difficulty of the attempt, he who has fallen may hope to rise again; and it is only when an exertion has been made with lessened means, that we learn the value of advantages, which have perhaps been long enjoyed, with a very undue estimate of their importance. ”

“ Now our spontaneous way of conceiving the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an active force adding its strength to that of the motives which ultimately prevail. When outer forces impinge upon a body, we say that the resultant motion is in the line of least resistance, or of greatest traction. ”

“ All growth depends upon activity. Life is manifest only by action. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work. ”

“ Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time. ”

“ Need for Mental Effort.—Trigger-pressing requires most careful individual instruction, during which the necessity for determination and strong personal effort of will will be impressed on the mind of every recruit. ”

“ We speak of effort, according to him, whenever a force expends itself (wholly or partly) in neutralizing another force, and so fails of its own possible outward effect. The outward effect of the antagonistic force, however, also fails in corresponding measure, "so that there is no effort without counter-effort,... and effort and counter-effort signify only that causes are mutually robbing each other of effectiveness." [499] Where the forces are ideas, both sets of them, strictly speaking, are the seat of effort—both those which tend to explode, and those which tend to check them. ”

“ The new inclination is at first acted upon with an effort, but, after every instance of success, less effort is required, until at length the new course of action is confirmed, and overpowers the habit to which it was opposed. ”

“ There must be effort back of the stimulus to initiate it; and back of the effort there must be purpose; and back of all there must be will-power to stabilize and to make continuous the purpose in a series of intelligent efforts. The detached question of will, imagination, and personality, is quite another matter. ”