To transmute desire, to continually replace the lower with the higher, really is killing desire out but it is doing it by the slow and safe evolutionary process.  As to crushing it suddenly, that is simply impossible; but substitution may work wonders.  Suppose, for example, that a young man is a gambler and his parents are much distressed about it.  The common and foolish course is to lecture him on the sin of gambling and to tearfully urge him to associate only with very proper young men.  But the young gambler is not in the least interested in that sort of a life, which appears to him to be a kind of living death, and such entreaty does not move him.  His parents would do better by looking more closely into the case.  Why is he a gambler?  He desires money.  He seeks excitement.  He wants to live in an atmosphere of intense life and activity.  Very well.  These desires are quite right in themselves.  It is useless to try to crush them.  It is nonsense to argue that he does not want these things.  Clearly enough he does want them and that is precisely why he gambles.  Then do not attempt the impossibility of killing the desire but change the objects of his desires.  Say to him:  “You desire money and a life full of turbulence and excitement.  Well, you can get all that in a better and a legitimate way and have the respect of your friends besides.  You can go into politics.  That is a field within the pale of the law and in it you can have scope for all the energy and activity and intensity of life you long for, with all the element of chance which you find so attractive.”  And when the young man has had his fling there and tires of it then something else can be attempted.  But to try to crush desire and curb the outrushing life is both foolish and impossible.  We can only direct it.

There are, of course, certain gross desires that must be gotten rid of by the most direct and least objectionable method, and when one really desires to be free from a given vice or moral weakness and sets earnestly and intelligently about it his release is not so difficult as the complete tyranny of most vices would lead one to suppose.  There is a process by which any of us may be free if we will take the trouble to patiently put it into practice.  This method will apply to any desire from which we wish to be released.  For example, let us take the person who has a settled desire for alcoholic stimulants but really wishes to be rid of it forever.  Many people who are thus afflicted to the point where they occasionally become intoxicated feel, when they recover their normal condition, that no price would be too great to pay for freedom from this humiliating habit.  As a rule such a man tries to close his eyes to his shame and forget it, promising himself that he will be stronger when the temptation again assails him.  But it is just this putting it aside, this casting it out of his mind, that perpetuates his weakness.  He instinctively shrinks from dwelling upon the thought of whither he is drifting.  So he puts the unpleasant subject aside altogether and when the inner desire asserts itself again he finds himself precisely as helpless as before.