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CHAPTER III
HOW TO AVOID EXCESS OF ENTHUSIASM
We have just proved, in the preceding chapter that excess is always to be
avoided, even when it is in line with the cultivation of a desired quality.
We must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the line of demarcation which
separates healthy sentiments from the unreasoning impulses that are inimical to
a perfect mental balance.
The moment we attempt to overstep this line, a condition of over-excitement is
invariably produced that forces us beyond the limits that reason has set for the
harmony that must exist between our thoughts and our actions.
The man who does not pull himself up betimes upon the road of enthusiasm will
very soon begin to originate a horde of false ideas which will tend to undermine
the power that self-mastery gives to him who has been able to acquire it.
Our judgment will always find itself at fault upon these occasions, and the
resolutions made in the first ardor of an exaggerated enthusiasm will have
little chance of enduring.
Having no solid foundation of fact upon which to rest, they will crumble to
pieces the moment one attempts to put them into execution.
This would be no great matter for regret, if their disappearance did not always
involve the weakening of the feeble effort of will which brought them into
being.
The least harmful effect of exaggerated enthusiasm is that it invariably
produces disillusionment in its victim.
One pictures the object of one's devotion in such wonderful colors, one arrays
it in such magnificent vesture that by slow degrees, and quite apart from one's
own volition, it becomes a thing transformed.
The enthusiast is the first dupe of his own imagination.
He is acting in entirely good faith and is absolutely convinced of the truth of
what he says, when he enumerates the merits and the advantages of his enthusiasm
of the moment. But he quite forgets that the gold with which he is gilding it
will very soon peel off.
In point of fact, he will be the very first one to suffer from this unpleasant
occurrence. He has been so honestly carried away by his enthusiasm and his
descriptions have rolled up such a veritable snowball of fiction that he does
not in the least realize how he is continually magnifying and embellishing his
subject, or the changes he has effected in whatever it may be that has had the
quality of attracting his fancy.
But when the fever of his passion has spent itself he will be the first to
perceive the short- comings of the thing he has been lauding to the skies.
It is rarely indeed that this self-invited disillusionment is not the cause of a
very sharp discouragement.
Repeated self-deceptions are frequently the result of too hasty enthusiasms.
In this state of mind, the room left for judgment is so limited that this great
regulator of our daily actions finds itself debased to the condition of a mere
dependent upon a false partiality that time will always prove to be in the
wrong.
Enthusiasm is always the child of impulse and of intuition.
It rejects, just as do the obstinate, all reasoning that can be construed as
opposing the schemes that it has formed in the fever of its excited fancy.
Disinterested advisers become for the moment its worst enemies.
It is true that, when the moment of disillusion arrives, the enthusiast will
always go back to those same advisers, deploring his own blindness and promising
by all his gods to show more foresight in the future.
But on the very next opportunity he will again become the devoted slave of some
idea or of some object, whose value or whose beauty he will exaggerate to the
limit of his fancy.
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