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PART TWO
PERSEVERANCE: ITS ACQUISITION AND EFFECT
PRACTICAL EXERCISES
CHAPTER I
HOW TO DEVELOP PERSEVERANCE
Like the great majority of virtues which demand a constant effort of will,
perseverance is rarely a natural gift.
It may happen, however, that the bent of their characters, the absence of
changeableness in their feelings, a certain tendency to reflection, and a
predisposition to patience, may dispose some people toward the practice of
perseverance.
But they will not make use of this quality with any fruitful results unless they
know how to employ it in a rational manner.
The conquest of the art of perseverance calls for two sorts of study.
Mental effort and physical effort.
We will take up the question of the second in the next chapter. Before making
any physical preparations for the conquest of perseverance it is a good thing to
educate and exercise our minds by the practice of will-power, of self control,
of deduction and of all the other qualities which unite to form the pedestal on
which perseverance, the daughter of wisdom and of hope, may be set up.
One of the principal foes of perseverance is the need of dreaming which torments
so many people.
There are few, indeed, of us who are wise enough to be contented with our
present lot without intermingling with the actualities of our lives some dreams
which have no place at all among them.
Such people love to say that they are cherishing an ideal, and use this as a
starting-point for transporting themselves into the land of visions.
There is too great a tendency to confound these two conceptions, or rather the
two things that they represent.
An ideal is not the dream that can never be realized that certain weak brains
love to conjure up, if only to provide themselves with an excuse for carping at
life.
Nor is it the vague and unsubstantial speculation in which minds without
stability are wont to indulge.
People in this condition, which is familiarly termed a, ''brain study," like to
lose themselves in the contemplation of some more or less abstract idea, the aim
of which is generally nebulous and undefined.
They pompously christen this idea "my ideals," and employ it as a refuge for
their idleness of mind.
It is, however, indispensable to have an ideal --and this not a vague dream or a
chimerical aspiration, but something of the nature of that of which Harold
Mansfield speaks:
"The true ideal," he says, "is not a definite goal, which, once attained, leaves
the mind in- active.
"It is the continuous impulse toward a desire, which, by means of tangible
realizations, gives us the courage to persevere.
"It is the constant effort toward a whole, of which the partial realization
provides us with satisfaction and with encouragement."
And, a little later, he defines it thus:
"One may compare the ideal to a chain, of which every link, complete in itself,
is added to the one before it to form a durable and constantly lengthening bond.
"
An ideal is then a dominant aspiration toward which all our acts are directed
under the form of successive endeavors, which each and all contribute to its
formation.
There is no situation in life, however modest, in which it is not of advantage
to have an ideal.
The workman will have thought of becoming the owner of the shop, and he will
perform every bit of his labor to that one end.
Does this imply that when the ideal is once attained, it ceases to exist?
Not at all. It merely changes.
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