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我认为答案一定是，我们经历了地地道道的失败——悲剧一般的失败。如果我们不能迅速地将决心付诸行动，对以新的隐蔽形式出现的暴政没有给予应有的处理，我们就面临着全面溃败的危险。对于左右我们发展的主要利益集团的力量，一刻也不要自欺欺人。这些利益集团力量强大，乃至美国政府能否对其有效控制仍然是个未知的问题。如果再进一步，让他们组织化的力量永久持续下去，那时恐怕就无法回头了。在我们的脚下，出现了岔路。它们延伸到远方，彼此互不相通。在一条路的尽头，是政府与特殊利益集团勾结的龌龊景象；而另一条路的尽头，闪耀的是个体主动、自由、不受羁绊、积极进取的解放之光。我相信，那光明来自上帝所创造的天堂。我相信人类自由，我视它如生命的美酒。工业巨头的屈尊怜悯不会拯救人类。在自由人民的土地上，无须为卫士留出位置。托管机构所保障的繁荣是没有长久的前景的。垄断意味着进取精神的衰退。如果垄断继续存在，它将永远掌握着政府。我不奢望垄断会自我克制。如果这个国家有人力量强大，足以拥有美国政府，那么他们就会这么做；我们现在必须确定的是，我们是否足够强大，是否足够勇敢，是否足够自由，能夺回原本属于我们的政府。十多年来，我们不能自由地进入政府，我们的思想也没能通过引导而与之接触，现在我们所投身的事业恰恰是夺回我们用双手创造的东西，令它只通过我们委派的权威代表行使权力。
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告诉你吧，当你讨论关税和托拉斯时，你在讨论的正是你自己和子女的生活。我相信，当我提倡在美国实行自由产业时，我所提倡的恰恰是一些我所反对的先生们的事业。因为我认为他们在慢慢地束缚结出我们生命中丰硕果实的树木，如果任由他们把树木完全束缚起来，大自然会向人类报复，树木必将枯亡。
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我并不会因为美国现在拥有杰出的人才，就相信美国强大、高枕无忧。美国的强大程度，与能否确保下一代大量涌现杰出人才息息相关。美国的财富在于那些尚未出生的婴儿；也就是说，如果这些孩子看到太阳的那天，是充满机遇的一天，是他们能够自由发挥能力的一天，那么国家才算得上富有。如果他们睁开眼睛，眼前是一块没有特权的土地，那么我们将步入美国强大自由的新时代；但是如果他们睁开眼睛时，这块国土只能让他们成为雇工甚至失业，垄断仅仅略有收敛，所有的工业条件仍由少数人决定，那么他们看到的是会令这个民主国家的创立者哭泣的美国。唯一的希望是释放慈善托拉斯总裁们希望垄断的权力。唯有解放，使所有人的重要能力都得到释放与鼓励，我们才能获得拯救。在美国公共事务中我有许多要做的，其中之一就是建造我在印第安纳参观过的城镇，那些古老的美国风格的城镇，它们拥有并运营着自己的产业，充满希望与快乐。我更愿意看到那种城镇的数量增加，防止国家产业大范围集中，以致城镇无法拥有这些产业。你们知道美国的生命力所在。它的生命力不在纽约，也不在芝加哥；圣路易斯发生的任何事情也不会将其削弱。美国的生命力在于整个国民的智慧、精力、进取精神；在于工厂的效率、绵延到城镇以外的田野的富庶；在于从大自然所获取的财富以及通过发明天赋所创造的财富，而这种发明天赋是所有自由的美国社区所具有的。
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那是美国的财富，如果美国打压那片区域、那个社区、那个自给自足的城镇，将会扼杀这个国家。国家的富有程度即其自由社区的富有程度，而不是首都或者都市的富有程度。华尔街的金钱并不能代表美国人民的财富。唯有美国土地上所有美国人民都拥有丰富的思想，美国工业拥有很高的产出效率，才能说明美国的富庶。如果美国并不富有而肥沃，华尔街就不会拥有金钱。如果美国人缺乏生命力，不能妥善地管理自己，那些庞大的金钱交易机构就会崩溃。福利是国家的存亡之本，归根结底在于人民大众；国家是否繁荣，取决于广袤国土上的人民在各自社区里工作的精神状态。如果城镇和乡村都充满幸福与希望，美国就会实现远大的抱负，这远大的志向是美国在全世界人民眼中的标志。
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每天在矿山、工厂、铁路、办公室、贸易口岸、农场、海上辛勤工作的男男女女，他们的福利、幸福、精力与精神状态，是一切繁荣的必要基础。没有健康的生活，就没有健康；如果得不到满足，满足感就荡然无存。他们的物质福利影响到整个国家的稳固。如果每天上班大家都悲伤沮丧，何谈美国的繁荣，何谈繁忙的事业？如果你发觉多数人已经丢掉期望，丧失了成功的信心，抛弃了改变境遇的希望，那么，你认为未来会如何？你不曾看到吗，当美国昔日的自信，还有昔日引以为傲的自由与机会被剥夺之时，美国人民的所有力量都开始衰弱、松懈、疲软乏力，再没有一点儿个性，而人们却在苦苦寻找，希望白昼没有灾难般地随之消失。
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所以我们必须消除政治、商业和工业中的无情因素，使人们重拾勇气。我们必须改变政治，使正直的人能从中感到满足，因为他知道他的意见会和其他人的一样重要，老板和利益集团已经不再高高在上了。我们必须清除商业障碍，废除关税优惠、铁路歧视、信贷拒绝，以及针对弱势人士的所有形式的不公正待遇。我们应让工业更有人情味，不是通过托拉斯，而是通过直接的法律行为，这些法律保护工人免遭危险，获得伤害赔偿，保障卫生条件、适当的工作时间、组织的权利，以及国家正义所要求的其他工人权利。我们必须展现社会正义与公平回报的确定前景，提供对一切人开放的机会之门，以此来鼓舞、激励我们的人民。我们必须使这个伟大民族的生命力和主动性获得绝对自由，未来的美国才会比以往更加强大，美国的自尊才会随着成就而增长，经过一代又一代人的努力进步，美国会看到：每代儿女都比他们的父辈更加杰出、更加开明，美国正在履行她向全人类做出的承诺。
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这就是我们一些人现在致力实现的愿景。假如没有愿景，我们民主党人是无法承受漫长流放的巨大压力的。我们可能会进行交易，可能融入这场博弈之中，可能投降妥协，可能去支持那些希望控制国家利益的人——还有随处可见的假托为了我们而做出那些安排的先生们。他们不能忍受贫困。你们也永远不能忍受，除非心中有不灭的食粮，足以延续生命与勇气，足以维持精神的愿景——我们面前放好了一张桌子，上面摆满了甜美的水果，那是希望之果、想象力之果，那些看不见的精神是唯一使我们在这个枯燥乏味的世界不会晕倒、继续生存下去的东西。你曾认为那些最先踏上美国土地的人们的理想已经模糊，但它们一直保留在我们的思想中。那一群群人在一片荒芜中寻找立足之地，因为他们抛在身后的强大富庶的国家已经忘记了何为人类自由——思想自由、宗教自由、居住自由、行动自由。
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从他们那时起，自由的意义得到了深化。但是它依然是人类精神的基本要求，灵魂生活重要的必需品。在这片神圣的土地上，新自由实现之日已不遥远，其意义得到了扩展与深化，这与现代美国人的生活范围扩大相适应。它使美国人真正重新控制政府，敞开所有鼓励合法进取的大门，释放他们的能量，温暖内心慷慨的冲动——这是一个释放、解放、鼓舞的过程，充满生命的气息，它就像鼓起哥伦布船帆的空气一样清新而健康，给美国不会错失的伟大机遇带来承诺与自豪。
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（李春江 译）
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28 HABIT
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By William James
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HABIT, by William James, in his The Principles of Psychology ,1890. Reprinted in Rudolph W.Chamberlain’s Progressive Readings in Prose , New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1923, pp. 22-26.
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“Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature,” the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.
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“There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out,‘Attention! ‘ whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the man’s nervous structure.”
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Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of the bugle call. Most trained domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident to a traveling menagerie in the United States some time in 1884, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.
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Habit is thu s the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselor at law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the “shop,” in a word, from which the man can by and by no more escape than his coat sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.
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The great thing, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible , as many useful actions as we can , and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the li ghting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.
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In Professor Bain’s chapter on “The Moral Habits” there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible . Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reënforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.
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The second maxim is
:Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life . Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says:
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“The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortifie d it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress.”
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The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: “Ach! you need only blow on your hands!” And the remark illustrates the effect on Goethe’s spirits of his own habitually successful career. Professor Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote, says that the collapse of barbarian nations when Europeans came among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the newcomers do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed.
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The question of “tapering-off,” in abandoning such habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way,if there be a real possibility of carrying it out . We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset;but,provided one can stand it , a sharp period of suffering and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one’s hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.
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“One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can begin ‘to make oneself over again.’ He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work .”
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A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair
:Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain . It is not 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. As the author last quoted remarks:
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