Читать книгу Making Life Worth While - Fairbanks Douglas - Страница 5

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Temperament looms large in the game of life, and, like all other human brain tendencies, is subject to regulation through the exercise of ordinary horse sense. We often hear one person speak of another’s temperamental qualities in the light of an incurable disease, and more than likely in an apologetic way. A faulty tendency is usually laid at the door of a doughty grandsire on one or both sides of the house and left there as a piece of ordinary table gossip to be resumed any old time without notice.

We’ve all heard someone dispose of another with quick dispatch by the casual remark, “He’s temperamental.” It all depends upon the inflection of the speaker’s voice whether his words are intended as a knockout blow or an apology in behalf of the culprit. But any time you want to pursue the subject you’ll hear about some obdurate old ancestor who passed the buck on to his posterity.

While we most assuredly do inherit various mental attitudes from our ancestors, there’s nothing we cannot get rid of if we resolve to do so. There is nothing fatal about preconceived notions handed down to us. Mental culture through education and association is the royal road. If, through ignorance, or narrow-mindedness, one should prefer to hang on to certain personal or mental crudities just for the sake of posing as a “chip off of the old block,” then let the punishment fit the crime.

Temperament plays a big part in making life worth while and is more largely due to the time in which we live and with whom we associate than to inheritance. It is the physical department that is really handed down to us—the blood in our veins rather than the dents on our brains. To be subject to scrofula from infancy is no fault of our own, but to continue an eccentricity under the claim of inherited temperament is excusable only upon the score of ignorance.

People do inherit brain tendencies, but they are all subject to control through the will to do or don’t, as the case may be. Supposing grandfather used to swear like a trooper—and he probably did—the habit was temperamental to the extent of being in tune with the times in which he lived. But what grandson of to-day would think of claiming exemption by reason of inherited temperament if addicted to the same vulgar habit? On the other hand, if we are born with rheumatic tendencies we may expect to fight with them all our lives. One is a brain tendency, subject to control; the other is a blood-inheritance that we may never correct.

Personal habits of thought or action are temperamental according to the avidity with which we cling to them. George Ade has said that a man might be born with a hair lip or a club foot, but whiskers were his own fault. Thus we were handed the best possible line of demarcation between the inherited tendency and the personal temperament. So, if we were of the temperament to wear a beard because our great grandfather wore one we could, if the notion struck us, take it to the barber and have it cut away. Just so we may get out from any other temperamental habit, or thought, or action, through the very simple process of becoming masters of our own minds. Grandfather may hand us a line of tainted blood that we can’t manage, but temperament is our own to manage as we will.

Control over one’s temperament is positively necessary in making life worth while. If we are bent on securing full happiness for having lived, we are bound to contribute our share toward an ultimate world sanity in which the word temperament may not serve to cloak mental deficiency. College life takes the kink out of the untrained mind and makes it behave normally. It makes no allowance for the accentuated temperament. Fool notions brought along from the dear old home town are soon sifted into the chaff barrel and common sense comes into its own.