3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES.
From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate
things, to one's self control, the regulation of one's personal life.
And first about abstinences and disciplines.
I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that
dislikes abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.
I do not feel that it is right to suppress altogether any part of one's
being. In itself abstinence seems to me a refusal to experience, and
that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is to say that abstinence for
its own sake is evil. But for an end all abstinences are permissible,
and if the kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his
associated efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is
convinced that he must specialize because of the discursiveness of his
motives, because there is something he wants to do or be so good that
the rest of them may very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must
suppress. But the virtue is in what he gets done and not in what he does
not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason for abstinence, as when a man
has a passion like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest
indulgence will arouse.
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