Chapter IX: Perseverance

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

In the course of evolution from brute to man some of our organs have been highly developed by constant use, while others have been stunted by habitual disuse. In special adaptations of the sense of touch and sight, for instance, man surpasses all his fellow-creatures, most of whom, in turn, surpass him in the acuteness of their olfactory organs. An analogous result seems to have been produced by the exercise or neglect of certain mental faculties and dispositions. The instinct of enterprise, for instance, has been developed from rather feeble germs of the animal soul, while the instinct of perseverance appears to have lost something of its pristine energy. The African termite ant rears structures which, in proportion to the size of the builders, surpass the pyramids as a mountain surpasses the monuments of the mound-builders. By the persistent coöperation of countless generations the tiny architect of the coral reefs has girt a continent with a rampart of sea-walls. The prairie wolf will follow a trail for half a week. The teeth of a mouse are thinner and more brittle than a darning needle, yet by dint of perseverance gnawing mice manage to perforate the stoutest planks. Captive prairie dogs have been known to tunnel their way through forty feet of compact loam.

An instinct, which one might be tempted to call a love of perseverance for its own sake, seems sometimes to influence the actions of young children. There are boys whose energies seem to be roused by the resistance of inanimate things. I have seen lads of eight or nine years hew away for hours at knotty logs which even a veteran woodcutter would have been pardoned for flinging aside. There are school boys, not otherwise distinguished for love of books, who will forego their recess sports to puzzle out an arithmetical problem of special intricacy.

Our desultory mode of education hardly tends to encourage that disposition which, nevertheless, is now and then apt to develop into a permanent character trait. There are young men who will act out a self-determined programme of study or business with persistent disregard of temporary hardships, and pursue even minor details of their plan with a resolution only strengthened by difficulties. The moral ideals of antiquity seem to have been more favorable to the development of that type of character, which also manifests itself in the national policy of several ancient republics, and the inflexible consistency of their legal institutions.

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The advantages of perseverance are not too readily admitted by the numberless victims of that facile disposition that loves to ascribe its foibles to the “versatility of genius,” or a high-minded “aversion to pedantic routine;” yet now, as in the days of yore, life reserves its best rewards for the most persistent competitors. Singleness of purpose, like a sharp wedge, forces its way through obstacles that resist many-sided endeavors. The versatile poets and philosophers of Athens have wreathed her memory with unrivaled laurels, yet in the affairs of practical life her merchants were out-traded, her politicians out-witted, and her generals beaten by men whose nations had steadfastly followed a narrower but consistent policy. “Aut non tentaris aut perfice,” “either try not, or persevere,” was a Roman proverb that made Rome the mistress of three continents. In the Middle Ages the dynasty of the Abbassides, as in modern times the house of the Hohenzollern, attained supremacy by persistent adherence to an established system of political tactics. Even questionable enterprises have thus been crowned with triumph, as the ambitions of the Roman pontiffs, and the projects of Ignatius Loyola. The chronicles of war, of industry, and of commerce abound with analogous lessons. Patient perseverance succeeds where fitful vehemence fails. In countless battles the steadiness of British and North German troops has prevailed against the enthusiasm of their bravest opponents. The quiet perseverance of British colonists has prevailed against the bustling activity of their Gallic rivals, on the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, as well as on the Ganges and Indus. Steady-going business firms, consistently-edited journals, hold their own, and ultimately absorb their vacillating competitors. Dr. Winship, the Boston Hercules, held that the chances of an athlete “depend on doggedness of purpose far more than on hereditary physique.” Even the apparent caprices of Fortune are biased by the habit of perseverance. “In the Stanislaus mining-camp,” says Frederic Gerstaecker, “we had a number of experts who seemed to find gold by a sort of sixth sense, and came across ‘indications’ wherever they stirred the gravel of the rocky ravines. We called them ‘prospectors,’ and the brilliancy of their prospects was, indeed, demonstrated by daily proofs. But at the first frown of Fortune they would get discouraged, and remove their exploring outfit to another ravine. Most of the actual work was done by the ‘squatters,’ as we called the steady diggers, who would take up an abandoned claim and stick to it for weeks. Bragging was not their forte, but at the end of the season the squatter could squat down on a sackful of nuggets, while the prospector had nothing but prospects.”

C.—PERVERSION.

The ambition of the ancients was encouraged by the conviction that life is worth living, and that all its social and intellectual summits can be reached by the persistent pursuit of a well-chosen road. But the basis of that confidence was undermined by a doctrine which denied the value of earthly existence, and made the renunciation of worldly blessings the chief purpose of moral education. The pilgrim of life who had been taught to spurn earth as a vale of tears, and turn his hopes to the promises of another world, was not apt to trouble himself about a consistent plan of secular pursuits, which, moreover, he had been distinctly instructed to trust to the chances of the current day: “Take no thought for the morrow;” “Take no thought for your life, nor yet for your body ... for after all these things do the gentiles seek.”

Indecision, inconsistency, fickleness of purpose, vitiated the politics of the Christian nations through-out the long chaos of the Middle Ages, and in their features of individual character there is a strange want of that moral unity and harmony which the consciousness of an attainable purpose gave to the national exemplars of an earlier age.

The Rationalistic reaction of the last two centuries has greatly modified the moral ideals of the Caucasian nations; the legitimacy of secular pursuits is more generally recognized, but still only in a furtive, hesitating manner, and the glaring contrast of our daily practice with the theories of a still prevalent system of ethics cannot fail to involve contradictions incompatible with true consistency of principles and action.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

For thirteen hundred years the importance of perseverance in the pursuit of earthly aims was depreciated by the ethics of Antinaturalism, and the word Failure is written in glaring letters over the record of the physical, mental, and moral enterprises of all that period. The nations of northern Europe, whom the prestige of Rome surrendered to the power of popish priests, were giants in stature and strength, and the love of physical health was too deeply rooted in the hereditary constitution of those athletes to be at once eradicated by the machinations of spiritual poison-mongers. Yet the poison did not fail to assert its virulence. Athletic sports were still a favorite pastime of all freemen; but the gospel of the Nature-hating Galilean insisted on the antagonism of physical and moral welfare; penances and the worship of cadaverous saints perverted the manlier ideals of the masses, the encouragement of ascetic habits and the enforced inactivity of convent life undermined the stamina of the noblest nations, and in the course of a few orthodox generations the descendants of the herculean hunter-tribes of northern Europe became a prey to a multitude of malignant diseases.

The love of knowledge still fed on the literary treasures of antiquity; the flame of philosophy was now and then rekindled at the still glowing embers of pagan civilization; but the doctrine of other-worldliness denounced the pursuit of worldly lore, and science degenerated into a medley of nursery-legends and monkish fever-dreams. Men walked through life as Sindbad walked through the perils of the spirit-vale, in constant dread of spectral manifestations, in constant anticipation of ghostly interference with their earthly concerns, the pursuit of which all but the wisest undertook only in a desultory, tentative way, haunted by the idea that success in worldly enterprises could be bought only at the expense of the immortal soul.

And how many thousand wanderers of our latter-day world have thus been diverted from the path of manful perseverance, and almost directly encouraged in the habit of palliating inconstancy of purpose with that “dissatisfaction and weariness of worldly vanities,” which the ethics of their spiritual educators commend as a symptom of regeneration! The voices of re-awakened Nature protest, but only with intermittent success, and the penalty of vacillation is that discord of modern life that will not cease till our system of ethics has been thoroughly purged from the poison of Antinaturalism.

E.—REFORM.

That work of redemption should include an emphatic repudiation of the natural depravity dogma. Our children should be taught that steadfast loyalty to the counsels of their natural reason is sufficient to insure the promotion of their welfare in the only world thus far revealed to our knowledge. The traditional concomitance of perseverance and mediocrity should be refuted by the explanation of its cause. For a long series of centuries the predominance of insane dogmas had actually made science a mere mockery, and application to the prescribed curriculum of the monastic colleges a clear waste of time—clear to all but the dullest minds. The neglect of such studies, of the disgusting sophistry of the patristic and scholastic era, was, indeed, a proof of common sense, since only dunces and hypocrites could muster the patience required to wade through the dismal swamp of cant, pedantry, and superstition which for thirteen centuries formed the mental pabulum of the priest-ridden academics. During that era of pseudo-science and pseudo-morality, of fulsome rant centered on a monstrous delusion, the eccentricity of genius was more than pardonable, being, in fact, the only alternative of mental prostitution. The ideas of waywardness and mental superiority became thus associated in a way which in its results has wrought almost as much mischief as in its cause. The delusions of that idea have wrecked as many promising talents as indolence and intemperance.

The pupils of Secularism should be instructed to observe the benefits of perseverance in the pursuit of minor projects, and encouraged to apply that experience to the higher problems of life. Perseverance should be recognized as the indispensable ally of loftiest genius as well as of the lowliest talent.

Failure in secular enterprises should cease to be regarded as a symptom of divine favor; and for those who insist on claiming the protection of supernatural agencies, Goethe’s grand apostrophe to the Genius of Manhood [1] should be condensed in the motto that “Heroic perseverance invokes the aid of the gods.”