Is it?  I may have thought so once, but I begin to believe that in this darkness a new strange light is beginning to show itself.  The victory may be won far more easily than the rather indolent and timid Essayist ever imagined.  MONTAIGNE, and many more, believed that absolute self-control is only to be obtained by iron effort, heroic and terrible exertion—­a conception based on bygone History, which is all a record of battles of man against man, or man with the Devil.  Now the world is beginning slowly to make an ideal of peace, and disbelieve in the Devil.  Science is attempting to teach us that from any beginning, however small, great results are sure to be obtained if resolutely followed up and fully developed.

It requires thought to realize what a man gifted to some degree with culture and common sense must enjoy who can review the past without pain, and regard the present with perfect assurance that come what may he need have no fear or fluttering of the heart.  Spenser has asked in “The Fate of the Butterfly”: 

    “What more felicity can fall to creature
    Than to enjoy delight with liberty?”

To which one may truly reply that all delight is fitful and uncertain unless bound or blended with the power to be indifferent to involuntary annoying emotions, and that self-command is in itself the highest mental pleasure, or one which surpasses all of any kind.  He who does not overestimate the value of money or anything earthly is really richer than the millionaire.  There is a foolish story told by COMBE in his Physiology of a man who had the supernatural gift of never feeling any pain, be it from cold, hunger, heat, or accident.  The rain beat upon him in vain, the keenest north wind did not chill him—­he was fearless and free.  But this immunity was coupled with an inability to feel pleasure—­his wine or ale was no more to his palate than water, and he could not feel the kiss of his child; and so we are told that he was soon desirous to become a creature subject to all physical sensations as before.  But it is, as I said, a foolish tale, because it reduces all that is worth living for to being warm or enjoying taste.  His mind was not affected, but that goes for nothing in such sheer sensuality.  However, a man without losing his tastes or appetites may train his Will to so master Emotion as to enjoy delight with liberty, and also exclude what constitutes the majority of all suffering with man.

It is a truth that there is very often an extremely easy, simple and prosaic way to attain many an end, which has always been supposed to require stupendous efforts.  In an Italian fairy tale a prince besieges a castle with an army—­trumpets blowing, banners waving, and all the pomp and circumstances of war—­to obtain a beautiful heroine who is meanwhile carried away by a rival who knew of a subterranean passage.  Hitherto, as I have already said, men have sought for self-control only by means of heroic exertion, or by besieging the castle from without; the simple system of Forethought and Self-Suggestion enables one, as it were, to steal or slip away with ease by night and in darkness that fairest of princesses, La Volonte, or the Will.