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STEVEN MARCUS
force of his character, braced and multiplied by the exercise of a
lifetime, drives him with unwavering energy along his chosen course
of purity." These are admirable ideas, and one is right to take them
as representative of an epoch of culture, in both its strengths and
weaknesses. Placed as they are, however, in this context of darkness,
danger, and fear, they appear more as gallant ineffectualities, resolute
impossibilities than they do as practical solutions. For although the
will
is a form of consciousness and is consciously employed, its energies
have historically been directed against consciousness itself-against
intellect, introspection, self-examination, curiosity. Will is, in other
words, a controlled consciousness which often contains within itself
a fear of consciousness. And however much Acton is for the con–
sciously willed direction of life, he is unequivocally against turning
it inwards; and he holds up Rousseau as a horrible example of what
happens when a man "pries into his mental and moral character with
a despicably morbid minuteness." This sort of "hideous frankness,"
he believes, can only lead to a perpetuation of the condition which
it unjustifiably reveals.
Acton carries this idea one step further in his discussion of
"nocturnal emissions or pollutions"-which are just about as un–
desirable, dangerous, and controllable
cis
masturbation.
If
while he
is awake a man "who has not debased and enervated his
will
is
perfectly able to keep his thoughts entirely pure," then it is hardly
less difficult for him to exercise the "power of keeping his dreaming
thoughts pure, if he goes the right way to work." To those patients
who complain that they cannot control their dreams, Acton delivers
a properly authoritative reproach. "This is not true," he flatly de–
clares. "Those who have studied the connection between thoughts
during waking hours and dreams during sleep, know that they are
closely connected. The
character
is the same sleeping or waking . . .
if a man has allowed his thoughts during the day to rest upon
libidinous subjects, he finds his mind at night full of lascivious
dreams.... A will which in our waking hours we have not exercised
in repressing sexual desires, will not, when we fall asleep, preserve us
from carrying the sleeping echo of our waking thoughts farther than
we dared to do in the daytime." Without pausing to analyze the
confused mixture of half-truths, quasi-observations, wishful thinking,
received ideas, and pure affirmative flummery in these remarks, we
