Effort and Energy

AN important hindrance to further development in the art of thought arises from a want of clearness in our conception of the facts behind our use of such words as “energy,” “effort,” or “ease,” in speaking either of conscious or of subconscious mental activity. Creative thinkers have noticed, not only that their best single ideas seemed to come to them by automatic Illumination, but that their more continuous work was often most successful when it was done without the strain of effort, and even without any conscious feeling of volition. Milton speaks of the “celestial patroness” who

“Deigns

“Her nightly visitation unimplored

And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires

Easy my unpremeditated verse.”

(Paradise Lost, Bk. IX, ll. 21-4.)

But it is difficult, with our existing psychological vocabulary, to indicate the fact that work done without conscious effort may vary greatly in respect to the “energy,” or “force,” or “vitality,” with which it is done. The effortless thought-process which Milton describes must in his case have involved intense mental energy. His words, however, would equally describe a process involving little or no energy; and he was probably not himself aware of any difference between his consciousness of more energetic and of less energetic effortless thought. There is a hint of awareness of such a difference in a letter of Mozart’s in which, describing his conscious experiences during the production of one of his great musical creations, he says, ‘All the inventing and making goes on in me, as in a beautiful strong dream.” Mozart apparently recognized a difference in the form taken in consciousness by a “strong” and a less strong “dream”; but most thinkers, even if they may have a theoretical knowledge that effortless thought can be more and less energetic, seem unable to be sure whether at any given moment their effortless ease of production is accompanied by a rise or by a fall of mental energy. Mr. J. Middleton Murry, who is not only a professional critic but also a man with personal experience of original literary creation, has written (in his Problem of Style, 1922) some interesting sentences on this point. When discussing “the kind of hallucination from which Swinburne sometimes suffered,” he says: “Any one who has tried to write has experienced moments when, in the flagging of his own creative effort, his writing seemed to be endowed with a sudden vitality. Word follows word, sentence follows sentence in swift succession; but so far from being the work of inspiration, on the morrow it appears flabby and lifeless” (p. 22).

The whole problem is complicated by the well-known phenomena of habit. Mental activities which were originally carried through with severe voluntary effort, inevitably become on repetition less effortful and less conscious; how, therefore, can a thinker, as his work becomes more habitual, prevent the resulting decline in effort from being accompanied by a decline in energy? Wordsworth, when, after Coleridge’s return from Germany, he began to think about his own mental processes, made the mistake of ignoring this difficulty; he assumed that the ease of production resulting from habituation was the same thing as the ease of production which accompanied, in Milton’s case and in his own best work, the greatest energy of thought. In the celebrated preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, he says that ‘poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts . . . so by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated.” Wordsworth here, by using the words “blindly and mechanically,” describes exactly the mental attitude which was most likely to lead to loss of energy, and which did, in fact, help to destroy in him the power of producing great poetry. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets were the natural result of a “blind and mechanical” following of habit in production. Mr. John Drinkwater, on the other hand, seems to imply that the ease resulting from habit is necessarily accompanied by a loss of energy. In his “Carver in Stone” he speaks of

‘Figures of habit driven on the stone

By chisels governed by no heat of the brain

But drudges of hands that moved by easy rule.

The problem, however, of the relation between habit and energy is not so simple; and I have already used the same metaphor as Mr. Drinkwater in pointing out (p. 134), that time-habit can be so managed as to aid that “warming up” of the mind which indicates an increase of energy.

A more fundamental method of establishing a mental habit (if one can still use the term) by which mental energy, instead of being diminished, is constantly renewed, can be inferred from the contrast which Mr. Henry Hazlitt draws, in his Thinking as a Science, between the accounts given by Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill of their respective intellectual methods. Spencer describes in his Autobiography a mental habit which was almost certain to lead to a progressive decline of energy. When George Eliot told him that she was surprised to see no lines on his forehead, he explained, he says, that “My mode of thinking did not involve that concentrated effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows. It has never been my way to set before myself a problem and puzzle out an answer. The conclusions at which I have from time to time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions raised; but have been arrived at unawares—each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thoughts which slowly grew from a germ. Some direct observation or some fact met with in reading, would dwell with me: apparently because I had a sense of its significance. ... And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organized theory. Habitually the process was one of slow unforced development, often extending over years; . . . it may be that while an effort to arrive forthwith at some answer to a problem, acts as a distorting factor in consciousness and causes error, a quiet contemplation of the problem from time to time, allows those proclivities of thought which have probably been caused unawares by experiences, to make themselves felt, and to guide the mind to the right conclusion.”

Mill, on the other hand, uses the term habit, as Aristotle * does in the Ethics, to describe a mental attitude in which a high degree of energy is so maintained by repeated voluntary effort as to become at least partially automatic. He speaks of “a mental habit to which I attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in speculation; that of never accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored, because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole.” We can detect in the two statements the chief cause which made Mill’s thought, though done by a tired man after or before office hours, more valuable to mankind than Spencer’s thought, though he gave his whole time to it.

But in the art of thought, as in other arts, the efficient stimulation of energy does not depend merely, or even mainly, on either the intensity or the repetition of the original effort. The thinker must also learn how to make that particular kind of effort, that particular “stroke,” which will bring the energy of his organism most easily and most completely to bear on his task. “Natural” thinkers, like “natural” cricketers, or boxers, or oarsmen, may learn that “stroke” for themselves. Some thinkers never learn it at all; I have listened, on the public bodies of which I have been a member, for hours together to slack rambling speeches delivered with tremendous effort by good and earnest men and women who have never caught the trick of stimulating in themselves the mental energy which would have given point to their thought. Sometimes a thinker will miss the necessary “stroke” because he directs his conscious effort to some form of activity which is not that essentially needed by the task in hand. I remember that when William Morris was fatiguing his great brain and wearing out his powerful body by delivering innumerable confused Marxist speeches at street corners, Bernard Shaw said to me, “Morris has come into this movement with all his energy, but not with all his intellect.” Shaw was here using the word “energy” in the sense in which I am using the word “effort.” Morris, in the arts of designing and printing, and sometimes in his poetry, had learnt the stroke by which the “energy” (in the sense in which I am using the word) of his intellect could be most effectively brought to bear. In the kind of thought which is the first duty of a social critic and inventor he had not learnt that stroke, and had hardly recognized that he needed to learn it.

Most thinkers, however, are neither natural artists in thought, nor unable or unwilling to learn their art. But, in the absence of an accepted “scientific art,” they learn by a puzzled and often unsuccessful imitation of the thought-processes and mental attitudes of others, until a sense of the craftsman’s mastery comes to them. And to learn by such a method the right kind of stroke in thought is much more difficult than to learn it in cricket or rowing or designing; success in the self-stimulation of mental energy requires the co-ordination of innumerable psychological factors of whose nature and working we are largely ignorant, and often the overcoming of unconscious inhibitions. And sometimes the thinker will be tormented by the fear, well or ill founded, that he is contending, not against a temporary inhibition, but against innate and permanent inability. Much of the best existing material for those who seek in this respect to improve their mental methods is the negative evidence contained in accounts given by thinkers of their own sense of failure. In the Memoir of Henry Sidgwick, for instance, with its noble record of a life-long intellectual service which never quite attained its end, there are two letters—written in 1864, within a few days of each other, at the age of twenty-six after a stay in Germany—which make one feel that Sidgwick then had a glimpse both of a form of mental effort which his splendid ability, his industry and courage, the advice of his friends, and the psychological treatises of his time never made clear to him, and of the degree of mental energy to which that effort might lead. “I believe,” he says, in one letter, “I am cursed with some original ideas, and I have a talent for rapid perception. But I am destitute of Gibbonian gifts which I most want. I cannot swallow and digest, combine, build. Then people believe in me somewhat. I wish they would not.” If he had been a physicist or a biologist, he might a little later have learnt the secret which he sought at Cambridge, when Clerk Maxwell returned there in 1871, or when Francis Balfour began his embryological work in 1875. In his own sphere of work, one feels that the atmosphere of “thoroughness” in the academic Germany of 1864 might then have helped him, and that it may have been a wise impulse which led him to write in the other letter, with a possible return to Germany in his mind, “I always feel it only requires an effort, a stretching of the muscles, and the tasteless luxury, the dusty culture, the noisy and inane polemics of Cambridge and Oxford are left behind for ever.”

Sometimes the effective stimulation of mental energy depends on the establishment of a right relation between the thought-process and those “emotions” or “instincts” or “passions” whose part in rational thought has been so much discussed by modern psychologists. Mr. J. M. Murry, for instance, after quoting a good many introspective accounts of literary creation, says (The Problem of Style, p. 14) that “the lesson of the masters is really unanimous’ and that “the source of style [he is here using the word style as almost equivalent to thought] is to be found in a strong and decisive original emotion” (ibid., p. 15). The word “emotion” is, however, here, as often elsewhere, ambiguous. It may mean little more than the form taken in consciousness by any kind of intense mental energy—the “continuous excitement,” for instance, under which Mr. A. E. Housman says that in the early months of 1895 he wrote the greater part of his “Shropshire Lad.” If we use the word in this sense, Mr. Murry’s statement amounts to little more than the proposition that mental energy is not to be acquired without mental energy. But “emotion,” in its more exact sense, means the form taken in consciousness by any one of those impulses which apparently arise in the lower brain, and which in the primitive psychological cycle mediate between sensation and associative thought; the “passion” to which Milton referred when he said that poetry should be ‘sensuous and passionate,” or the “love” to which Wordsworth referred when he wrote, “In a life without love there can be no thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain) but as far as we have love and admiration,” 2 and which Dante meant when he said, “I am one who when Love inspires take note, and as he dictates within me I express myself.” Sometimes the white heat of such a passion will stimulate the brain into abnormal achievements of thought in solving the problems of the moment, as in the instances given by William James in his essay on “The Energies of Men,” and in the description of war-passion which he there quotes from Colonel Baird-Smith, who, when barely alive from fatigue and disease and wounds at the siege of Delhi, found that “the excitement of my work was so great that no lesser one seemed to have any chance against it, and I certainly never found my intellect clearer or my nerves stronger in my life.” More often emotion becomes an effective factor in thought only when the original nervous excitement has died down (Wordsworth’s “emotion remembered in tranquillity”) or when the emotions have been organized into what Mr. Shand calls “sentiments.” When the war broke out in 1914, I expected that the emotions stimulated by it would at once create memorable poetry or prose, and prepared to collect a small anthology of war-philosophy and war-poetry. I soon found, however, that the terrific emotions of a modern war are apt to benumb rather than to stimulate all the higher processes of the mind which are not applied to the work of fighting Before the fighting began, Mr. John Masefield wrote his lovely “August, 1914,” and when the fighting was over, Mr. Housman produced an epigram on “A Mercenary Army” which was worthy of Simonides; and that was all, except a tiny German lyric in a newspaper, which I found myself desiring to keep.

The physiological events, indeed, which underlie our consciousness of passion may often, even in ordinary

1 William James, Selected Papers on Philosophy (Everyman’s Library, 1917), p. 49. life, prevent that harmonious energy of the whole organism on which efficiency in thought depends. The psychiatrists have shown us that when our upper brain needs the passive expectance of a new thought, our teeth may be clenched, our fingers taut, the “sympathetic” nervous system may be in a condition of strain, and our ductless glands in full activity; and then when our upper brain calls for activity all or part of the rest of our organism may refuse to respond. Therefore, during the last half-century, ever since, indeed, the psychology of the subconscious has been studied, recurrent advice has been given to thinkers that they should secure organic unity by a conscious attempt to extend the condition of relaxation throughout their whole organism. William James, in one of the best known of his “Talks to Teachers” (The Gospel of Relaxation) * insists on the special importance of this advice for America. Some Americans, he says, on returning from Europe, observe the “desperate eagerness and anxiety” in their compatriots’ faces, and say: “What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate behaviour we have been seeing in the British Isles” (p. 28). “But,” says James, “that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment, but they are more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run” (p. 31), and he goes on to advocate “the gospel of relaxation . . . preached by Miss Annie Payson Call in her admirable little volume called Power through Repose” (p. 33). James’s warning must, in thousands of cases, have saved teachers and others all over the world from wearing themselves out by the mere friction of opposing nervous tensions. But Miss Call’s gospel of relaxation must have led many of those who followed it faithfully into that state of mild intellectual passivity which was attained by Herbert Spencer at his worst moments. The thinker should judge his work, not by the degree of his internal harmony as he does it, but by his success in the creation of new thought in a world the most important of whose conditions are external to himself. No thinker, therefore, can do all his work in a state of organic harmony. Between the moments of harmony there must come times of painful strain and discord, when, as Maudsley says, “the face of a person eagerly pursuing a thought is that of one trying eagerly to see something which is difficult to be seen, pursuing it, as it were, with his eye,” the face that one can watch in the British Museum Library when a writer is striving to capture some elusive Intimation, or to hold his unwilling attention to some distasteful problem. Shelley, in those months when the true conditions of creative thought were being revealed to him, wrote to Godwin of the “alternate tranquillity . . . which is the attribute and accompaniment of power; and the agony and bloody sweat of intellectual travail.”

The relation between “tranquillity” and “agony,” and between all the intermediate grades of harmony and conflict in the thinking organism, must, of course, and should vary constantly with variations in the individual thinker and his task. The genius will differ from the intelligent man of industry, the dramatist from the archeologist, the young man from the old, the man beginning his task from the man ending it. But every thinker, even at his moments of most harmonious energy, must be prepared for the sudden necessity of straining effort, and in his moments of greatest effort may hope for the sudden sense of harmony.

The young thinker, if he requires a general formula for the increase of mental energy, will find the phrase “Power through Action” more helpful than “Power through Repose.” Action, in subtle ways that are the result of millions of years of organic evolution, brings all the factors of the organism into relation to each other, and in that region of full consciousness which is indicated by the word “self” action, more than any other expedient, brings unity without loss of energy. Whoever has been called upon to act publicly on what have hitherto been his private speculative opinions, can remember that the various “selves” of his thoughts and words, and of the thoughts and words of other men in relation to him, came wonderfully nearer to each other—that, to use the language of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, ‘The real John, John’s ideal John, and Thomas’s ideal John” were more nearly one than they had ever been before. He seemed to drop a hundred intellectual disharmonies as Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress dropped his burden. John Dewey says, “All people at the outset, and the majority of people probably all their lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action.” But even when the thinker has acted on his thoughts, and has thereby attained a new measure of moral and intellectual unity, he should beware of deceiving himself by the belief that he can now substitute a single formula for the whole complex art of thought. That on which the efficiency of his work will ultimately depend may be no part of his new confident unified self, but some vaguely disturbing Intimation, whose significance arises from its relation to causes and effects in the world outside his self, and which can only be brought to the surface of consciousness by a difficult effort of will. Bernard Shaw’s whole life has been a protest against contentment with premature emotional and intellectual unity, and on one occasion, when in debate a critic had said, “Mr. Shaw, you seem to talk like two people,” Shaw answered, “Why only two?” And, on the other hand, Mr. Shaw’s selves may be offering him contradictory interpretations of a single universe; and contradictory interpretations of the universe, though they may all be helpful in providing a choice of decisions and a wider range of association, cannot all be right. Verification with her lame foot and painful step must follow Illumination.

Action, again, not only produces psychological unity, with all its advantages and all its dangers, but may also directly increase—in the course of that physiological process one of whose manifestations we call habit—the energy which it stimulates. William James’s great chapter on “Habit” in his Principles of Psychology can indeed be read, almost line for line and word for word, as a direction for strengthening, not only habituation, but also energy. “Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on any emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain . . . When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.’ And his advice to “speak genially to one’s grandmother . . . if nothing more heroic offers,” indicates a means of strengthening not only the habit of genial speech but also the energy of our geniality.

But if we are to use action as a means of stimulating the energy of our thought, we shall require a more detailed analysis of the term “action” than that offered in James’s chapter. “It is not,” he there says, “in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new ‘set’ to the brain (ibid., p. 62). In its influence on the organism mere motor movement may sometimes be almost negligible; Prof. Lloyd Morgan and others have pointed out that if we put the limbs of a passive or resistant animal or child through any movement we do not thereby create a habit. The movement must be voluntary, and the whole organism must take part in it. It is not the muscular movement of speaking genially to one’s grandmother that increases one’s love for her; an actor may, in the run of a successful play, speak genially a thousand times to an actress whom he detests, and may thereby increase his loathing for her; he will only increase affection if his whole organism takes part—if he “means what he says.” Even completely voluntary acts will also differ, as to their effect in increasing energy of thought and emotion, according to our knowledge of the range of persons and things which will be influenced by them, and our purpose in exercising that influence. Two men, for instance, of about the same age, were once walking on an American winter’s day, and recalling the political discussions which had gone on in the groups to which as young men they had belonged. ‘I remember,” said one of them, “that I and my friends used to discuss such questions in order that we ourselves might know the truth and vote wisely. You and your friends seem to have discussed them in much the same words, but you all seem to have felt (as a naturalist feels about his science) that if you could discover the truth about democracy, or socialism, or federalism, you had the responsibility of doing so on behalf of the human race,’ Bentham sat for nearly seventy years scribbling speculative paragraphs on morals and legislation, and looking like any one of many scores of insignificant little scribbling men. But the energy which vitalized his thought, and which grew stronger decade by decade, would have died down, had he not always retained his belief that the movements of his pen and the efforts and discoveries of his brain were acts as important to mankind as the battle-orders of a general in the crisis of a war. The psychological effect of an act may even be greatly changed by knowledge only received after the act is concluded. A man may sit at his microscope dissecting the mouth of a fly, or a freshwater mollusc. He may note the presence of certain foreign bodies, may sketch them, and may publish his sketch. That sketch may afterwards become the starting-point for a beneficent world-wide campaign against sleeping sickness or malaria or bilharzia. And while, at the moment of observation or the moment of publication, the energy of the observer may have been in no way heightened, the whole force of his thought may be changed when a year hence he sits reading his newspaper and suddenly realizes what he has done.

When Æschylus fought at Marathon, and Socrates defied the Thirty Tyrants, each of them strengthened the energy of his thought because, in Aristotle’s phrase, he “knew what he was doing.” And that fact is the answer to those who would plunge, or advise others to plunge, into mere physical action as both a guide to truth and a relief from the effort of thought. The student who has toiled in vain to think out a solution of the problem of the distribution of wealth, or of the relation of man to the universe, determines to “stop thinking and act.” He joins a propagandist socialist body, or becomes a Trappist monk. He finds, for the moment, an escape from his troubles, and begins, perhaps, a period of “Incubation,” during which new thoughts may form themselves, and lead to a new Intimation. But that Intimation, when it comes, may find that his mental energy has meanwhile been lowered, and that he can no longer develop or act on his thought. To shout speeches, to tell beads, to dig in a monastery garden, are ways in which some of our physiological and psychological needs may be satisfied. They are not for the thinker—as the acts of finishing his book, or formulating his opinions, or even resigning his office might be—means of carrying into effect and thereby strengthening his mental energy.

Throughout this chapter, while discussing suggestions for the preservation or increase of mental energy, I have kept on the plane of empirical observation. I have not inquired what is the relation between “energy,” as the writer or psychologist uses the word, and the “energy” of the physicist or physiologist. But a day may come when, as I argued in Chapter I, the physicists and physiologists will learn enough about the nature of life to get in touch with the psychologists, and to help them to invent means of increasing mental through atomic “energy.” At present, even if we accept the view that thought is driven by a “hormé” which is life itself, we can seldom relate our belief to the facts of physical energy further than the broad statement that a man in good health is likely to be a more effective thinker than the same man in bad health. At the Oxford International Psychological Congress of 1923, Dr. E. D. Adrian, the Cambridge physiologist, said (in a paper on “The Conception of Nervous and Mental Energy’), “I am quite ready to believe that the conception of mental energy, properly defined, may be as necessary to psychology as that of physical energy is to physiology”; but that “at present I do not think that the physiology of nervous conduction has advanced far enough in its results to be of any real significance for the psychologist (except so far as he studies the physiology of the sense organs); speaking from a purely physiological point of view, it seems to me that the less we say about nervous and mental energy the better” (Proceedings, pp. 162 and 158). As against Dr. Adrian, Professor C. S. Myers at the same congress could only claim “that no harm can result from applying the term ‘energy,’ even though we are ignorant of its nature, and are unable directly to measure it in terms of mass and velocity” (ibid., p. 186). There may, however, be students now living who will succeed in relating our inexact and empirical observations of the effects of emotion and habit and action on the success of our thinking, to those measurable facts as to the energy of the nerve-cell with which Dr. Adrian’s researches deal. If that happens, the art of thought may be helped and extended by knowledge of such things as the conditions of cell-nutrition, and the influence on living tissues of stimulation by sunlight or glandular secretions. We may then learn how, by means unknown to Miss Annie Payson Call, to increase the “energy” of our thought by increasing the “energy” of our whole organism.

Notes

* Quoted by William James, Principles, Vol. I, p. 255.

* Lyrical Ballads, 1800, Preface, p. xiv. Part of this passage is also quoted by Mr, Murry, but for a purpose somewhat different from my own.

1 Georgian Poetry, 1913–15, p. 94.

1H. Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. I, pp. 399-401. The whole of the passage is worth studying, Part of it is quoted by H. Hazlitt (loc. cit., pp. 84-8),

1 See e.g., Aristotle’s definition (Ethics, I, vii, 15, and II, vi, 15) of happiness as “an energy of the mind in accordance with virtue” and of virtue as “an established habit of voluntary decision.” 2J. S. Mill, Autobiography, 1873, Pp. 123 (see Hazlitt, loc. cit., p. 87).

? Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, p. 118. The seeker for guidance in the more difficult kinds of mental effort may find another negative hint in a casual remark by Sir William Harcourt’s biographer, that Harcourt’s mind, trained first by Cambridge scholarship and afterwards by professional law practice, had “a power of illustration rather than imagination” (Life, by A. G. Gardiner, Vol. I, p. 175).

1 Preface to Last Poems (1922). 2Mrs. O. Campbell, Shelley and the Unromantics (1924), p. 268. 3 Purgatorio, Canto XXIV.

1 William James, Ibid., pp. 22-39.

1H. Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind (1876), p. 381, quoted by Rignano, The Psychology of Reasoning (1923), p. 81.

1, Dowden, Life of Shelley (1886), Vol. II, pp. 171-3.

1 How we Think (1910), p. 41.

1 Selected Papers on Philosophy (1917), pp. 62-4.

1 Ethics, Book I, Chapter IV. (See also my Great Society, Chapter V.)