Warren Hillon Applied Psychology: Driving Power of Thought

Take for granted that you have the courage, the energy, the self-confidence and the enthusiasm to do what you want to do, and you will find yourself in possession of these splendid qualities when the need arises.

Arnold Haultain "Hints for lovers"

What a paltry thing, after all, is man, man uncomplemented by woman! Left to himself, he stagnates; linked with a woman, he rises—-or sinks. A gentle touch stimulates him, a confiding heart makes of him a new creature. Under the rays of feminine sympathy, he expands who else would remain inert. Fame may allure him, friends encourage him, fortune cause him a momentary smile, but only woman makes him; and fame, friends, fortune, all are naught if there be not at his side a sharer of his weal. A man will strive for fortune, strip himself for friends, scour the earth for fame; but were there no woman in the world to be won, not one of these things would he do.

A woman asks a woman questions in order to discover something. She asks a man questions in order to discover the man.

Man has two sides to his nature, woman but one:

Man wears one aspect when facing the world; he wears quite another aspect when facing women;

A woman generally controls love: a man is controlled by it.

The last refuge of an unrequited love is the belief that love will create love. Nothing can be more futile than such a faith. Yet

Love without hope, has its mitigations; but

How alleviate the pain of a love that mistook a simulated love for a true one?

A simulated love is a contradiction in terms.

Either one loves or one does not, that is the conclusion of the whole matter.

Love creates a world of its own, a world populated by two—and these make their own laws—or make none.

To each other, lovers are the most interesting personages alive; but onlookers regard them partly with amusement, partly with pity, partly with compassion—in the etymological sense of that word.

Little as people seem to be aware of it, love requires constant replenishing: no flame can burn without a feeding oil, no pool overflow with out a purling brook. Yet

The first ecstasies of love often blind both lover and lass to the care necessary for the nurture of love. Indeed,

To many treat love as if it were a passing whim; whereas in sober reality it is (or should be) a lasting emotion.

The intenser the love, the more flawless does its object appear. For

The surest test of the sincerity of love is that it thinketh no evil.

The surest test of a waning love is that it begins not to content itself when it sees its object suffer.

The surest test of a dead love is that it forgets how to be jealous.

In love, a woman is generally cool enough to calculate pros and cons; a man, in similar plight, is incapable of anything but folly.

Wouldst thou ask ought of a woman? Question her eyes: they are vastly more voluble than her tongue. Indeed,

There is no question too subtle, too delicate, too recondite, or too rash, for human eyes to ask or answer. And

He who has not learned the language of the eyes, has yet to learn the alphabet of love. Besides,

Love speaks two languages: one with the lips; the other with the eyes.

The eye tells more than the tongue. And

If the eye and the tongue contradict each other, believe the eye.

The austerer a woman, the sweeter her surrender. And, again,
A woman is never sweeter than in surrender. 

Often enough it is the admiration, not the admirer, that a woman covets.
Indeed,

Many a woman is in love with love (3), but not her lover. 

Friendship and courtship are two totally distinct things:

In courtship, men and women meet on the flowery-thorny common of love;

In friendship, men and women invite each other over to their respective plots. So,

A friend will show a friend all over his domain;

A lover can but point out to the lover the flowers (and thorns) which grow in the soil to which they are both strangers.

A man can never know too much. Perhaps a woman can. And

It is a question how far a man admires a woman who knows too much. 

here is no stronger argument against the equality of the sexes than a woman's hand. It was made to toil? No; to place in her lover's. In truth,

Is there anything more fragile in nature than a woman's hand? But put it in her lover's. and what a force it has!

Anomaly of anomalies, with women, fragility, delicacy, dependence, beauty, grace,—it is by these weak weapons that she wins. 

Confidences are evoked rather by friendship than by love:

A woman will tell a man friend what she will not tell a lover.

Few lovers will understand this, fewer still will believe it. Yet it is true, and the explication of its truth would be long and complex. This much may be said:

Love idealizes; friendship does not. At the same time,

Love probes the innermost recesses of the womanly nature; and, until the woman is wholly won,

The woman resents the inspection of love. She knows that,

To stimulate love, the woman must conceal, not reveal;

To stimulate love, the woman must conceal, not reveal. Furthermore,

Never was there a man who could be at once friend and lover.

Which is only one more proof that

Never will the sexes understand each other.

The majority of men are so blind, so abominably blind, that they cannot distinguish the women who are really in love with them, from the women who pretend to be in love with them, but are not. For because,

So completely do women know men, that it is easy for any woman to delude any man. This is one of the reasons why

Every woman is the rival of every other woman:

Many are the women who, soon after marriage, silently turn over in their minds this little problem: whether it were better to marry the man they loved but who did not love them; or to marry the man who loved them but to whom they were indifferent. 

To get, the human heart must give.

The heart eats out itself; causes its own emptiness; creates its own void.

The selfish and egoistical life breeds always the vapid and vacuous heart.

Would you appease your own hunger? Feed the hungry hearts around you.

Do you crave fullness of joy? Give joy to the joyless.

Would you fill your own cavity, satisfy your craving, attain your desire, find what you seek? Give—give—give. The more the better, for

The greater the donation, the greater the repletion.

Nature gives, gives lavishly, wantonly, unquestioningly.

Ralph Waldo Trine "Thoughts I Met On the Highway"

This same Shakespeare, whose mere passing causes all this commotion, is the one who put into the mouth of one of his creations the words: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." And again he gave us a great truth when he said:

"Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt."

There is probably no agent that brings us more undesirable conditions than fear. We should live in fear of nothing, nor will we when we come fully to know ourselves. An old French proverb runs:

"Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived;
But what torments of pain you endured
From evils that never arrived."

Fear and lack of faith go hand in hand. The one is born of the other. Tell me how much one is given to fear, and I will tell you how much he lacks in faith. Fear is a most expensive guest to entertain, the same as worry is: so expensive are they that no one can afford to entertain them. We invite what we fear, the same as, by a different attitude of mind, we invite and attract the influences and conditions we desire.

Thoughts are forces, and each creates of its kind, whether we realize it or not. The great law of the drawing power of the mind, which says that like creates like, and that like attracts like, is continually working in every human life, for it is one of the great immutable laws of the universe.

For one to take time to see clearly the things one would attain to, and then to hold that ideal steadily and continually before his mind, never allowing faith--his positive thought-forces--to give way to or to be neutralized by doubts and fears, and then to set about doing each day what his hands find to do, never complaining, but spending the time that he would otherwise spend in complaint in focusing his thought-forces upon the ideal that his mind has built, will sooner or later bring about the full materialization of that for which he sets out.

Would you remain always young, and would you carry all the joyousness and buoyancy of youth into your maturer years? Then have care concerning but one thing,--how you live in your thought world. It was the inspired one, Gautama, the Buddha, who said,--"The mind is everything; what you think you become." And the same thing had Ruskin in mind when he said,--"Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. None of us as yet know, for none of us have been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought--_proof against all adversity_." And would you have in your body all the elasticity, all the strength, all the beauty of your younger years? Then live these in your mind, making no room for unclean thought, and you will externalize them in your body. In the degree that you keep young in thought will you remain young in body. And you will find that your body will in turn aid your mind, for body helps mind the same as mind helps body.

Believe it, believe it absolutely. Expect it,--keep it continually watered with expectation. You thus make yourself a magnet to attract the things that you desire. Don't be afraid to suggest.

"Comfort one another.
For the way is often dreary
And the feet are often weary,
And the heart is very sad.
There is a heavy burden bearing,
When it seems that none are caring,

And we half forget that ever we were glad.

"Comfort one another
With the hand-clasp close and tender.
With the sweetness love can render,
And the looks of friendly eyes.
Do not wait with grace unspoken,
While life's daily bread is broken--
Gentle speech is oft like manna from the skies."

And then when we fully realize the fact that selfishness is at the root of all error, sin, and crime, and that ignorance is the basis of all selfishness, with what charity we come to look upon the acts of all. It is the ignorant man who seeks his own ends at the expense of the greater whole. It is the ignorant man, therefore, who is the selfish man.

Nothing is more subtle than thought, nothing more powerful, nothing more irresistible in its operations, when rightly applied and held to with a faith and fidelity that is unswerving,--a faith and fidelity that never knows the neutralizing effects of doubt and fear. If one have aspirations and a sincere desire for a higher and better condition, so far as advantages, facilities, associates, or any surroundings or environments are concerned, and if he continually send out his highest thought forces for the realization of these desires, and continually water these forces with firm expectation as to their fulfillment, he will sooner or later find himself in the realization of these desires, and all in accordance with natural laws and forces.

Will is the sun-glass which so concentrates and so focuses the sun's rays that they quickly burn a hole through the paper that is held before it. The same rays, not thus concentrated, not thus focused, would fall upon the paper for days without any effect whatever. Will is the means for the directing, the concentrating, the focusing, of the
thought-forces. Thought under wise direction,--this it is that does the work, that brings results, that makes the successful career. One object in mind which we never lose sight of; an ideal steadily held before the mind, never lost sight of, never lowered, never swerved from,--this, with _persistence_, determines all. Nothing can resist the power of thought, when thus directed by will.

In the degree that we love will we be loved. Thoughts are forces. Each creates of its kind. Each comes back laden with the effect that corresponds to itself and of which it is the cause.

If our heart goes out in love to all with whom we come in contact, we inspire love and the same ennobling and warming influences of love always return to us from those in whom we inspire them. There is a deep scientific principle underlying the precept--If you would have all the world love you, you must first love all the world.

By example and not by precept. By living, not by preaching. By doing, not by professing. By living the life, not by dogmatizing as to how it should be lived. There is no contagion equal to the contagion of life. Whatever we sow, that shall we also reap, and each thing sown produces of its kind. 

Not to love is not to live, or it is to live a living death. The life that goes out in love to all is the life that is full, and rich, and continually expanding in beauty and in power. Such is the life that becomes ever more inclusive, and hence larger in its scope and influence.

All things are for a purpose, all should be used and enjoyed; but all should be rightly used, that they may be fully enjoyed.

What one lives in his invisible thought world he is continually actualizing in his visible material world. If he would have any conditions different in the latter he must make the necessary change in the former. A clear realization of this great fact would bring success to thousands of men and women who all about us are now in the depths of despair. 

The thing that pays, and that makes for a well balanced, useful, and happy life, is not necessarily and is not generally a somber, pious morality, or any standard of life that keeps us from a free, happy, spontaneous use and enjoyment of all normal and healthy faculties, functions, and powers, the enjoyment of all innocent pleasures--use, but not abuse, enjoyment, but enjoyment through self-mastery and not through license or perverted use, for it can never come that way. Look where we will, in or out and around us, we will find that it is the middle ground--neither poverty nor excessive riches, good wholesome use without license, a turning into the bye-ways along the main road where innocent and healthy God-sent and God-intended pleasures and enjoyments are to be found; but never getting far enough away to lose sight of the road itself. The middle ground it is that the wise man or woman plants foot upon.

And in a sense love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world. Live only in the thought of love for all and you will draw love to you from all. Live in the thought of malice or hatred, and malice and hatred will come back to you.

The kind of a man for you and me!
He faces the world unflinchingly,
And smiles as long as the world exists,
With a knuckled faith and force like fists:
He lives the life he is preaching of,
And loves where most is the need of love;
And feeling still, with a grief half glad,
That the bad are as good as the good are bad,
He strikes straight out for the right--and he
Is the kind of a man for you and me!

_James Whitcomb Riley_

We need periods of being by ourselves--_alone_. Sometimes a fortnight or even a week will do wonders for one, unless he or she has drawn too heavily upon the account. The simple custom, moreover, of taking an hour, or even a half hour, _alone in the quiet_, in the midst of the daily routine of life, would be the source of _inestimable gain_ for countless numbers.

Even if the youth of the period, as a live, human, reading being (on the principles to be laid down in the following pages), is so fortunate as to succeed in escaping the dangers and temptations of the home--even if he contrives to run the gauntlet of the grammar school and the academy--even if, in the last, longest, and hardest pull of all, he succeeds in keeping a spontaneous habit with books in spite of a college course, the story is not over. Civilisation waits for him--all-enfolding, all-instructing civilisation, and he stands face to face--book in hand--with his last chance.

 One almost wonders sometimes, why it is that the sun keeps on year after year and day after day turning the globe around and around, heating it and lighting it and keeping things growing on it, when after all, when all is said and done (crowded with wonder and with things to live with, as it is), it is a comparatively empty globe. No one seems to be using it very much, or paying very much attention to it, or getting very much out of it. There are never more than a very few men on it at a time, who can be said to be really living on it. They are engaged in getting a living and in hoping that they are going to live sometime. They are also going to read sometime.

When one thinks of the wasted sunrises and sunsets--the great free show of heaven--the door open every night--of the little groups of people straggling into it--of the swarms of people hurrying back and forth before it, jostling their getting-a-living lives up and down before it, not knowing it is there,--one wonders why it is there. Why does it not fall upon us, or its lights go suddenly out upon us? We stand in the days and the nights like stalls--suns flying over our heads, stars singing through space beneath our feet. But we do not see. Every man's head in a pocket,--boring for his living in a pocket--or being bored for his living in a pocket,--why should he see? True we are not without a philosophy for this--to look over the edge of our stalls with. "Getting a living is living," we say. We whisper it to ourselves--in our pockets. Then we try to get it. When we get it, we try to believe it--and when we get it we do not believe anything.

The man is not allowed to peep in civilisation. He is too busy in being ordered around by it to know that he would like to. It does not occur to him that he ought to be allowed time in it to know who he is, before he dies. The typical civilised man is an exhausted, spiritually hysterical man because he has no idea of what it means, or can be made to mean to a  man, to face calmly with his whole life a great book, a few minutes every day, to rest back on his ideals in it, to keep office hours with his own soul.

Whatever the remedy may be said to be, one thing is certainly true with regard to our reading habits in modern times. Men who are habitually shamefaced or absent-minded before the ideal--that is, before the actual nature of things--cannot expect to be real readers of books. They can only be what most men are nowadays, merely busy and effeminate, running-and-reading sort of men--rushing about propping up the universe. Men who cannot trust the ideal--the nature of things,--and who think they can do better, are naturally kept very busy, and as they take no time to rest back on their ideals they are naturally very tired.

 If fulness and leisure and power of living are no more with us, nothing shall save us. Walls of encyclopædias--not even walls of Bibles shall save us, nor miles of Carnegie-library. Empty and hasty and cowardly living does not get itself protected from the laws of nature by tons of paper and ink. The only way out for civilisation is through the practical men in it--men who grapple daily with ideals, who keep office hours with their souls, who keep hold of life with books, who take enough time out of hurrahing civilisation along--to live.

There seem to be but two fundamental characteristic sensibilities left alive in the typical, callously-civilised man. One of these sensibilities is the sense of motion and the other is the sense of mass. If he cannot be appealed to through one of these senses, it is of little use to appeal to him at all. In proportion as he is civilised, the civilised man can be depended on for two things. He can always be touched by a hurry of any kind, and he never fails to be moved by a crowd. If he can have hurry and crowd together, he is capable of The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee 6 almost anything. These two sensibilities, the sense of motion and the sense of mass, are all that is left of the original, lusty, tasting and seeing and feeling human being who took possession of the earth. And even in the case of comparatively rudimentary and somewhat stupid senses like these, the sense of motion, with the average civilised man, is so blunt that he needs to be rushed along at seventy miles an hour to have the feeling that he is moving, and his sense of mass is so degenerate that he needs to live with hundreds of thousands of people next door to know that he is not alone. He is seen in his most natural state,--this civilised being,--with most of his civilisation around him, in the seat of an elevated railway train, with a crowded newspaper before his eyes, and another crowded newspaper in his lap, and crowds of people reading crowded newspapers standing round him in the aisles; but he can never be said to be seen at his best, in a spectacle like this, until the spectacle moves, until it is felt rushing over the sky of the street, puffing through space; in which delectable pell-mell and carnival of hurry--hiss in front of it, shriek under it, and dust behind it--he finds, to all appearances at least, the meaning of this present world and the hope of the next. Hurry and crowd have kissed each other and his soul rests.

If a civilisation is founded on two senses--the sense of motion and the sense of mass,--one need not go far to find the essential traits of its literature and its daily reading habit. There are two things that such a civilisation makes sure of in all its concerns--hurry and crowd. Hence the spectacle before us--the literary rush and mobs of books.

The Mysterious Person: "There is no escaping from it. Reading-madness is a thing we all are breathing in to-day whether we will or no, and it is not only in the air, but it is worse than in the air. It is underneath the The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee 7 foundations of the things in which we live and on which we stand. It has infected the very character of the natural world, and the movement of the planets, and the whirl of the globe beneath our feet. Without its little paling of books about it, there is hardly a thing that is left in this modern world a man can go to for its own sake. Except by stepping off the globe, perhaps, now and then--practically arranging a world of one's own, and breaking with one's kind,--the life that a man must live to-day can only be described as a kind of eternal parting with himself. There is getting to be no possible way for a man to preserve his five spiritual senses--even his five physical ones--and be a member, in good and regular standing, of civilisation at the same time.

 "If civilisation and human nature are to continue to be allowed to exist together there is but one way out, apparently--an extra planet for all of us, one for a man to live on and the other for him to be civilised on."

"As long as we, who are the men and women of the world, are willing to continue our present fashion of giving up living in order to get a living, one planet will never be large enough for us. If we can only get our living in one place and have it to live with in another, the question is, To whom does this present planet belong--the people who spend their days in living into it and enjoying it, or the people who never take time to notice the planet, who do not seem to know that they are living on a planet at all?"

"We are forgetting to see. Looking is a lost art. With our poor, wistful, straining eyes, we hurry along the days that slowly, out of the rest of heaven, move their stillness across this little world. The more we hurry, the more we read. Night and noon and morning the panorama passes before our eyes. By tables, on cars, and in the street we see them--readers, readers everywhere, drinking their blindness in. Life is a blur of printed paper. We see no more the things themselves. We see about them. We lose the power to see the things themselves. We see in sentences. The linotype looks for us. We know the world in columns. The sounds of the street are muffled to us. In papers up to our ears, we whirl along our endless tracks. The faces that pass are phantoms. In our little woodcut head-line dream we go ceaseless on, turning leaves,--days and weeks and months of leaves,--wherever we go--years of leaves. Boys who never have seen the sky above them, young men who have never seen it in a face, old men who have never looked out at sea across a crowd, nor guessed the horizons there--dead men, the flicker of life in their hands, not yet beneath the roofs of graves--all turning leaves."


 I was born to read. I spent all my early years, as I remember them, with books,--peering softly about in them. My whole being was hushed and trustful and expectant at the sight of a printed page. I lived in the presence of books, with all my thoughts lying open about me; a kind of still, radiant mood of welcome seemed to lie upon them. When I looked at a shelf of books I felt the whole world flocking to me.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are. But now it is become: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, Teacher's told me what you are. Even babies won't wonder very soon. That is to say, they won't wonder out loud. Nobody does.

I have little left but the gift of being bored. That is something--but hardly a day passes without my slurring over a guilty place in conversation, without my hiding my ignorance under a bushel, where I can go later and take a look at it by myself. Then I know all about it next time and sink lower and lower. A man can do nothing alone. Of course, ignorance must be natural and not acquired in order to have the true ring and afford the most relief in the world; but every wide-awake village that has thoughtful people enough--people who are educated up to it--ought to organise an Ignoramus Club to defend the town from papers and books----.

I have always kept on hoping that I would be allowed, in spite of being somewhat mixed up with civilisation, to be a normal man sometime. It has always seemed to me that the normal man--the highly organised man in all ages, is the man who takes the universe primarily as a spectacle. This is his main use for it. The object of his life is to get a good look at it before he dies--to be the kind of man who can get a good look at it. How any one can go through a whole life--sixty or seventy years of it--with a splendour like this arching over him morning, noon, and night, flying beneath his feet, blooming out at him on every side, and not spend nearly all his time (after the bare necessaries of life) in taking it in, listening and tasting and looking in it, is one of the seven wonders of the world. I never look out of my factory window in civilisation, see a sunset or shore of the universe,--am reminded again that there is a universe--but I wonder at myself and wonder at It. I try to put civilisation and the universe together. I cannot do it. It's as if we were afraid to be caught looking at it--most of us--spending the time to look at it, or as if we were ashamed before the universe itself--running furiously to and fro in it, lest it should look at us.

But we do not want knowledge in our civilisation to fit people as their clothes fit them. We do not even want their clothes to fit them. The people themselves do not want it. Our modern life is an elaborate and organised endeavour, on the part of almost every person in it, to escape from being fitted, either in knowledge or in anything else. The first symptom of civilisation--of the fact that a man is becoming civilised--is that he wishes to appear to belong where he does not. It is looked upon as the spirit of the age. He wishes to be learned, that no one may find out how little he knows. He wishes to be religious, that no one may see how wicked he is. He wishes to be respectable, that no one may know that he does not respect himself. The result mocks at us from every corner in life. Society is a struggle to get into the wrong clothes. Culture is a struggle to learn the things that belong to some one else.

In the meantime, as long as the industry of being well informed is the main ideal of living in the world, as long as every man's life, chasing the shadow of some other man's life, goes hurrying by, grasping at ignorance, there is nothing we can do--most of us--as educators, but to rescue a youth now and then from the rush and wait for results, both good and evil, to work themselves out. Those of us who respect every man's life, and delight in it and in the dignity of the things that belong to it, would like to do many things. We should be particularly glad to join hands in the "practical" things that are being hurried into the hurry around us. But they do not seem to us practical. The only practical thing we know of that can be done with a man who does not respect himself, is to get him to. It is true, no doubt, that we cannot respect another man's life for him, but we are profoundly convinced that we cannot do anything more practical for such a man's life than respecting it until he respects it himself, and we are convinced also that until he does respect it himself, respecting it for him is the only thing that any one else can do--the beginning and end of all action for him and of all knowledge.

When these principles are brought home to educators--when they are practised in some degree by the people, instead of merely, as they have always been before, by the leaders of the people, the world of knowledge shall be a new world. All knowledge shall be human, incarnate, expressive, artistic. Whole systems of knowledge shall come to us by seeing one another's faces on the street.

Trusting a boy to the weather in a library may have its momentary embarrassments, but it is immeasurably the shortest and most natural way to bring him into a vital connection with books. The first condition of a vital connection with books is that he shall make the connection for himself. The relation will be vital in proportion as he makes it himself.

There are times, it must be confessed, when Christ's command, that every man shall love his neighbour as himself, seems inconsiderate. There are some of us who cannot help feeling, when we see a man coming along toward us proposing to love us a little while the way he loves himself, that our permission might have been asked. If there is one inconvenience rather than another in our modern Christian society, it is the general unprotected sense one has in it, the number of people there are about in it (let loose by Sunday-school teachers and others) who are allowed to go around loving other people the way they love themselves. A codicil or at least an explanatory footnote to the Golden Rule, in the general interest of neighbours, would be widely appreciated. How shall a man dare to love his neighbour as himself, until he loves himself, has a self that he really loves, a self he can really love, and loves it? There is no more sad or constant spectacle that this modern world has to face than the spectacle of the man who has overlooked himself, bustling about in it, trying to give honour to other people,--the man who has never been able to help himself, hurrying anxious to and fro as if he could help some one else.

 All that seems to be left to him in a universe is a kind of keeping up appearances in it--a looking as if he lived--a hurrying, dishonest trying to forget. He dare not sit down and think. He spends his strength in racing with himself to get away from himself, and those greatest days of all in human life--the days when men grow old, world-gentle, and still and deep before their God, are the days he dreads the most.

This criticism, as a part of an estimate of Thomas Carlyle, is not only a criticism on itself and an autobiography besides, but it sums up, in a more or less characteristic fashion perhaps, what might be called the ultra-academic attitude in reading. The ultra-academic attitude may be defined as the attitude of sitting down and being told things, and of expecting all other persons to sit down and be told things, and of judging all authors, principles, men, and methods accordingly.

Faith is not an act of the imagination--to the man who knows it. It is infinite fact, the infinite crowding of facts, the drawing of the man-self upward and outward, where he is surrounded with the infinite man-self. Perhaps a man can make himself not believe. He can not make himself believe. He can only believe by letting himself go, by trusting the force of gravity and the law of space around him. Faith is the universe flowing silently, implacably, through his soul. He has given himself up to it. In the tiniest, noisiest noon his spirit is flooded with the stars. He is let out to the boundaries of heaven and the night-sky bears him up in the heat of the day.

 In the presence of a great work of art--a work of inspiration or faith, there is no such thing as appreciation, without letting one's self go.

People who always know what time it is, who always know exactly where they are, and exactly how they look, have it not in their power to read a great book. The book that comes to the reader as a great book is always one that shares with him the infinite and the eternal in himself.

 The orator and the listener, the writer and the reader, in proportion as they become alive to one another, come into the same spirit--the spirit of mutual listening and utterance. At the very best, and in the most inspired mood, the reader reads as if he were a reader and writer both, and the writer writes as if he were a writer and reader both.

. It means that another eighteenth century is coming to the world; and, as the analysis is deeper than before and more deadly-clever with the deeper things than before, it is going to be the longest eighteenth century the world has ever seen--generations with machines for hands and feet, machines for minds, machines outside their minds to enjoy the machines inside their minds with. Every man with his information-machine to be cultured with, his religious machine to be good with, and his private Analysis Machine to be beautiful with, shall take his place in the world--shall add his soul to the Machine we make a world with. For every man that is born on the earth one more joy shall be crowded out of it--one more analysis of joy shall take its place, go round and round under the stars--dew, dawn, and darkness--until it stops.

There are a great many men in the world to-day, faithfully doing their stint in it (they are commonly known as men of talent), who would have been men of genius if they had dared. Education has made cowards of us all, and the habit of examining the roots of one's instincts, before they come up, is an incurable habit.

The essential difference between a small mood and a large one is that in the small one we see each thing we look on, comparatively by itself, or with reference to one or two relations to persons and events. In our larger mood we see it less analytically. We see it as it is and as it lives and as a god would see it, playing its meaning through the whole created scheme into everything else.

 A sheet of water--making heaven out of nothing--is beautiful to the dullest man, because he cannot analyse it, could not--even if he would--contrive to see it by itself. Skies come crowding on it. There is enough poetry in the mere angle of a sinking sun to flood the prose of a continent with, because the gentle earthlong shadows that follow it lay their fingers upon all life and creep together innumerable separated things.

Four men stood before God at the end of The First Week, watching Him whirl His little globe.[2] The first man said to Him, "Tell me how you did it." The second man said, "Let me have it." The third man said, "What is it for?" The fourth man said nothing, and fell down and worshipped. Having worshipped he rose to his feet and made a world himself. [2] Recently discovered manuscript. These four men have been known in history as the Scientist, the Man of Affairs, the Philosopher, and the Artist. They stand for the four necessary points of view in reading books.

The impotence of the study of literature as practised in the schools and colleges of the present day turns largely on the fact that the principle of creative joy--of knowing through creative joy--is overlooked. The field of vision is the book and not the world. In the average course in literature the field is not even the book. It is still farther from the creative point of view. It is the book about the book.

 Otherwise the best course in literature that can be devised is the one that gives the masterpieces the most opportunity to teach themselves. The object of a course in literature is best served in proportion as the course is arranged and all associated studies are arranged in such a way as to secure sensitive and contagious conditions for the pupil's mind in the presence of the great masters, such conditions as give the pupil time, freedom, space, and atmosphere--the things out of which a masterpiece is written and with which alone it can be taught, or can teach itself.

There is no such thing possible as being a literary authority, a cultured or scholarly man, unless the permeating of the sense-perceptions with spiritual suggestion is a daily and unconscious habit of life. "Every man his own poet" is the underlying assumption of every genuine work of art, and a work of art cannot be taught to a pupil in any other way than by making this same pupil a poet, by getting him to discover himself. Continued and unfaltering disaster is all that can be expected of all methods of literary training that do not recognise this.

 The man of genius is the man who literally gives himself. He makes every man a man of genius for the time being. He exchanges souls with us and for one brief moment we are great, we are beautiful, we are immortal. We are visited with our possible selves. Literature is the transfiguring of the senses in which men are dwelling every day and of the thoughts of the mind in which they are living every day. It is the commingling of one's life in one vast network of sensibility, communion, and eternal comradeship with all the joy and sorrow, taste, odor, and sound, passion of men and love of women and worship of God, that ever has been on the earth, since the watching of the first night above the earth, or since the look of the first morning on it, when it was loved for the first time by a human life.

 If entrance examinations in joy were required at our representative colleges very few of the pupils who are prepared for college in the ordinary way would be admitted. What is more serious than this, the honour-pupils in the colleges themselves at commencement time--those who have submitted most fully to the college requirements--would take a lower stand in a final examination in joy, whether of sense or spirit, than any others in the class. Their education has not consisted in the acquiring of a state of being, a condition of organs, a capacity of tasting life, of creating and sharing the joys and meanings in it. Their learning has largely consisted in the fact that they have learned at last to let their joys go. They have become the most satisfactory of scholars, not because of their power of knowing, but because of their willingness to be powerless in knowing. When they have been drilled to know without joy, have become the day-labourers of learning, they are given diplomas for cheerlessness, and are sent forth into the world as teachers of the young. Almost any morning, in almost any town or city beneath the sun, you can see them.

When, for whatever reason, of whatever importance, men and women choose to be so close together, that it is not fitting they should have freedom, and when they choose to have so little room to live in that development is not fitting lest it should inconvenience others, the penalty follows. When grass-blades are crowded between walls and fences, the more they can be made to look alike the more pleasing they are, and when an acre of ground finds itself covered with a thousand people, or a teacher of culture finds himself mobbed with pupils, the law of nature is the same. Whenever crowding of any kind takes place, whether it be in grass, ideas, or human nature, the most pleasing as well as the most convenient and natural way of producing a beautiful effect is with the Lawn Mower. The dead level is the logic of crowded conditions. The city grades down its hills for the convenience of reducing its sewer problem. It makes its streets into blocks for the convenience of knowing where every home is, and how far it is, by a glance at a page, and, in order that the human beings in it (one set of innumerable nobodies hurrying to another set of innumerable nobodies) may never be made to turn out perchance for an elm on a sidewalk, it cuts down centuries of trees, and then, out of its modern improvements, its map of life, its woods in rows, its wheels on tracks, and its souls in pigeonholes--out of its huge Checker-board under the days and nights--it lifts its eyes to the smoke in heaven, at last, and thanks God it is civilised!

The intense study of human experience in a college course may be fairly said to involve three things that must be daily made possible to the pupil in college life. Everything that is given him to do, and everything that happens to him in college, should cultivate these three things in the pupil: (1) Personality--an intense first person singular, as a centre for having experience; (2) Imagination--the natural organ in the human soul for realising what an experience is and for combining and condensing it; (3) The habit of having time and room, for re-experiencing an experience at will in the imagination, until the experience becomes so powerful and vivid, so fully realises itself in the mind, that the owner of the mind is an artist with his mind. When he puts the experience of his mind down it becomes more real to other men on paper than their own experiences are to them in their own lives.

In the meantime the Manufacture of the Cultured Mind is going ruthlessly on, and thousands of young men and women who, left alone with the masters of literature, might be engaged in accumulating and multiplying inspiration, are engaged in analysing--dividing what inspiration they have; and, in the one natural, creative period of their lives, their time is entirely spent in learning how inspired work was done, or how it might have been done, or how it should have been done; in absorbing everything about it except its spirit--the power that did it--the power that makes being told how to do it uncalled for, the power that asks and answers its "Hows?" for itself. The serene powerlessness of it all, without courage or passion or conviction, without self-discovery in it, or self-forgetfulness or beauty in it, or for one moment the great contagion of the great, is one of the saddest sights in this modern day.

It is the first importance of a true book that a man can select his neighbours with it,--can overcome space, riches, poverty, and time with it,--and the grave, and break bread with the dead. A book is a portable miracle. It makes a man's native place all over for him, for a dollar and a quarter; and many a man in this somewhat hard and despairing world has been furnished with a new heaven and a new earth for twenty-five cents.

A library, on the whole, is the purest and most perfect form of power that exists, because it is a lever on the nature of things. If a man is born with the wrong neighbours it brings the right ones flocking to him. It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live--now one way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is a poet it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it.

 If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best a logical man could do, would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is, that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have (for all practical purposes), it furnishes him with better ones. It picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers, for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbours as often as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to.

Neither environment nor heredity--taken by itself--can give a man a determined spirit, but it is everything to know that, given a few books and the determined spirit both, a man can have any environment he wants for living his life, and his own assorted ancestors for living it. It is only by means of books that a man can keep from living a partitioned-off life in the world--can keep toned up to the divine sense of possibility in it. We hear great men every day, across space and time, halloaing to one another in books, and across all things, as we feel and read, is the call of our possible selves. Even the impossible has been achieved, books tell us, in history, again and again. It has been achieved by several men. This may not prove very much, but if it does not prove anything else, it proves that the possible, at least, is the privilege of the rest of us. It has its greeting for every man. The sense of the possible crowds around him, and not merely in his books nor merely in his life, but in the place where his life and books meet--in his soul. However or wherever a man may be placed, it is the great book that reminds him Who he is. It reminds him who his Neighbour is. It is his charter of possibility. Having seen, he acts on what he sees, and reads himself out and reads himself in accordingly.

 "The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more about a man than anything else in the world."

The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act, when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,--opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before IT,--and feels the books pulling on him? I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God's earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in Heaven's The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee 78 name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough--God forgive me!

 The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him; in relating his specialty to other specialties; that is, in making either him or his specialty worth while.

I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind.[3] I think a great many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems, when one looks at the condition of most college boys' minds, as if our colleges were becoming the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead-centres of modern life.

Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select it, most of it. But, in so far as we can select it,--in one's reading, for instance,--it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the experience he has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his experience as it is worth.

I'd rather be alone with myself, I think, than with anybody. It's a deal better than being lonely the way we all are nowadays--with such a lot of other people crowding round, that one has to be lonely with, and books and newspapers and things besides. One has to be lonely so much in civilisation, there are so many things and persons that insist on one's coming over and being lonely with them, that being lonely in a perfectly plain way, all by one's self--the very thought of it seems to me, comparatively speaking, a relief.

Originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things, the power of being interested in other people's minds and the power of being more interested in one's own.

 A man who really reads a book and reads it well, reads it for moral muscle, spiritual skill, for far-sightedness, for catholicity--above all for a kind of limberness and suppleness, a swift sure strength through his whole being. He faces the world with a new face when he has truly read a true book, and as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, he rejoices as a strong man to run a race.

 The indications are that the more a man spends, makes himself able to spend, a large part of his time, as Whitman did, in standing still and looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a man's life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guide-board to the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it, who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the universe human to us--companionable,--such a man may not be able to fix a latch on a kitchen door, but I can only say for one that if there is a man who can lift a universe bodily, and set it down in my front yard where I can feel it helping me do my work all day and guarding my sleep at night, that man is practical. Who can say he does not "come to anything"? To have heard it rumoured that such a man has lived, can live, is a result--the most practical result of all to most of the workers of the world. A bare fact about such a man is a gospel. Why work for nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe where you can play for nothing--and by playing earn everything?

It is like that when Something is lifted and one sees faces. Faces are worlds to me. However hard I try, I cannot get a man, somehow, any smaller than a world. He is a world to himself, and God helping me, when I deal with him, he shall be a world to me. The dignity of a world rests upon him. His face is a sum-total of the universe.

It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that the most immediate and important short-cut in knowledge that the comprehensive or educated man can take comes to him through his human and personal relations. There is no better way of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out valuable and practical laws or generalisations, than the habit of trying things on to people in one's mind.

 It is a great waste of time to read a book alone. One needs room for rows of one's friends in a book. One book read through the eyes of ten people has more reading matter in it than ten books read in a common, lazy, lonesome fashion. One likes to do it, not only because one finds one's self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten people's worth out of it, but because it makes a kind of sitting-room of one's mind, puts a fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people enjoying one another.

  No one knows anybody nowadays. He merely knows everybody. He falls before The Reception Room. A reception room is a place where we set people up in rows like pickets on a fence to know them. Then like the small boy with a stick, one tap per picket, we run along knowing people. No one comes in touch with any one. It is getting so that there is hardly any possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by marrying them. One cannot even be sure of that, when one thinks how married people are being driven about by books and by other people. Society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up, and the law seems to be either selection or annihilation, whether in reading or living. The only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick out a few in it, delegates of everybody, and use these few to read with, and to love and understand the world with, and to keep close to it, all one's days.

 The shortest way for an immortal soul to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and get them to help. Any system of education which like our present prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the knowledge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and trivial and impotent scholars as a matter of course.

 To know a few men, to turn them into one's books, to turn them into one another, into one's self, to study history with their hearts, to know all men that live with them, to put them all together and guess at God with them--it seems to me that knowledge that is as convenient and penetrating, as easily turned on and off, as much like a light as this, is well worth having. It would be like taking away a whole world, if it were taken away from me--the little row of people I do my reading with. And some of them are supposed to be dead--hundreds of years.

 When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life, social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another, it is very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.

The test of civilisation is what it produces--its man, if only because he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete with specialists, for the right of living, or getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The specialist's view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race of nonentities for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a nothing to a nonentity. And if it is the one business of the specialist to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it. One wonders how long ruling such a world will be worth while, a world which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide, the spending of manhood on things which only by being men we can enjoy--the method of forging boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of having elevated railways for dead men, wireless telegraphs for clods, gigantic printing-presses for men who have forgotten how to read.

 The modern reader is a skimmer, a starer at pictures, like a child, while he reads, never thinking a whole thought, a lover of peeks and paragraphs, as a matter of course. Except in his money-making, or perhaps in the upper levels of science, the typical modern man is all paragraphs, not only in the way he reads, but in the way he lives and thinks. Outside of his specialty he is not interested in anything more than one paragraph's worth. He is as helpless as a bit of protoplasm before the sight of a great many very different things being honestly put together. Putting things together tires him. He has no imagination, because he has the daily habit of contentedly seeing a great many things which he never puts together. He is neither artistic nor original nor far-sighted nor powerful, because he has a paragraph way of thinking, a scrap-bag of a soul, because he cannot concentrate separate things, cannot put things together. He has no personality because he cannot put himself together.

It is not necessary to deny, in the present emphasis of Things, that we are making and inspiring all Things except ourselves in a way that would make the Things glad. The trouble is that Things are getting too glad. They are turning around and making us. Nearly every man in college is being made over, mind and body, into a sort of machine. When the college has finished him, and put him on the market, and one wonders what he is for, one learns he is to do some very little part, of some very little thing, and nothing else.

 Whether it is true or not that the universe is most swiftly known, most naturally enjoyed as related to one Creator or Person, as the self-expression of one Being who loved all these things enough to gather them together, it is generally admitted that the natural man seems to have been created to enjoy a universe as related to himself. His most natural and powerful way of enjoying it is to enjoy it in its relation to persons. A Person may not have created it, but it seems for the time being at least, and so far as persons are concerned, to have been created for persons. To know the persons and the things together, and particularly the things in relation to the persons, is the swiftest and simplest way of knowing the things. Persons are the nervous system of all knowledge. So far as man is concerned all truth is a sub-topic under his own soul, and the universe is the tool of his own life. Reading for different topics in it gives him a superficial knowledge of the men who write about them. Reading to know the men gives him a superficial knowledge, in the technical sense, of the things they write about. Let him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in the letter and superficial in the spirit. Outside of his specialty, however, being superficial in the letter will lead him to the most knowledge. Man is the greatest topic. All other knowledge is a sub-topic under a Man, and the stars themselves are as footnotes to the thoughts of his heart.

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, instead of being a kind of vast overseer-and-slave system for a man to lock himself up in, and throw away his key in, becomes free, fluent, daring, and glorious the moment it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons. Knowledge is not knowledge until it is conceived in relation to persons; that is, in relation to all the facts. Persons are facts also and on the whole the main facts, the facts which for seventy years, at least, or until the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are for.

Under existing educational conditions a child is more of a philosopher at six than he is at twenty-six.

If the world could be stopped short for ten years in its dull, sullen round of not believing in itself, if it could be allowed to have, all of it, all over, even for three days, the great solemn joy of letting itself go, it would not be caught falling back very soon, I think, into its stupor of cowardice. It would not be the same world for three hundred years. All that it is going to require to get all people to feel that they are inspired is some one who is strong enough to lift a few people off of themselves--get the idea started. Every man is so busy nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, properly smothered, that he has not the slightest idea of what is really inside him, or of what the thing that is really inside him would do with him, if he would give it a chance. Any man who has had the experience of not having inspiration and the experience of having it both knows that it is the sense of striking down through, of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills.

In theory this means that when a man is thirty years old and all possible habits of originality have been trained out of him, he should be allowed to be original.

I have said I will not have a faith that I have to get to with a trap-door. I have said that inspiration is for everybody. I have had inspiration myself and I will not clang down a door above my soul and believe that God has given to me or to any one else what only a few can have. I do not want anything, I will not have anything that any one cannot have. If there is one thing rather than another that inspiration is for, it is that when I have it I know that any man can have it. It is necessary to my selfishness that he shall have it. If a great wonder of a world like this is given to a man, and he is told to live on it and it is not furnished with men to live with, with men that go with it, what is it all for? If one could have one's choice in being damned there would be no way that would be quite so quick and effective as having inspirations that were so little inspired as to make one suppose they were merely for one's self or for a few others. The only way to save one's soul or to keep a corner for God in it is to believe that He is a kind of God who has put inspiration in every man. All that has to be done with it, is to get him to stop smothering it.

It is because a man of genius is more thorough with the genius he has, more spiritual and wilful with it than other men, that he grows great. A man's genius is always at bottom religious, at the point where it is genius, a worshipping toward something, a worshipping toward something until he gets it, a supreme covetousness for God, for being a God. It is a faith in him, a sense of identity and sharing with what seems to be above and outside, a sense of his own latent infinity. I have said that all that real teaching is for, is to say to a man, in countless ways, a countless "You can." And I have said that all real learning is for is to say "I can." When we have enough great "I can's," there will be a great society or nation, a glorious "We can" rising to heaven. This is the ideal that hovers over all real teaching and makes it deathless,--fertile for ever.

 The very essence of an average pupil is that he needs to be studied more, not less, than any one else in order to find his master-key, the master-passion to open his soul with. The essence of a genius is that almost any one of a dozen passions can be made the motive power of his learning. His soul is opening somewhere all the time.

  The organisation must be such as to make it possible for every teacher to study and serve each individual student as a special being by himself. In other words, if this last statement of Dr. Thwing's is to be acted on, it makes havoc with his first. It requires a somewhat new and practically revolutionary organisation in education.

The only difference between men of genius--men of genius who know it--and other men--men of genius who don't know it--is that the men of genius who know it have discovered themselves, have such a headlong habit of self-joy in them, have tasted their self-joys so deeply, that they are bound to get at them whether the conditions are favourable or not.

The fundamental heresy of modern education is that it does not believe this--does not believe in making deliberate arrangements for the originality of the average man. It does not see that the extraordinary man is simply the ordinary man keyed-up, writ large or moving more rapidly. What the average man is now, the great men were once. When we begin to understand that a man of genius is not supernatural, that he is simply more natural than the rest of us, that all the things that are true for him are true for us, except that they are true more slowly, the educational world will be a new world. The very essence of the creative power of a man of genius over other men, is that he believes in them more than they do. He writes, paints, or sings as if all other men were men of genius, and he keeps on doing it until they are. All modern human nature is annexed genius. The whole world is a great gallery of things, that men of genius have seen, until they make other men see them too, and prove that other men can see them. What one man sees with travail or by being born again, whole generations see at last without trying, and when they are born the first time. The great cosmic process is going on in the human spirit. Ages flow down from the stars upon it. No one man shall guess, now or ever, what a man is, what a man shall be.

Every man is so busy nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, properly smothered, that he has not the slightest idea of what is really inside him, or of what the thing that is really inside him would do with him, if he would give it a chance. Any man who has had the experience of not having inspiration and the experience of having it both knows that it is the sense of striking down through, of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval, underlying naturalness in him, rising to its rights. What he feels when he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws, have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is that a man shall have the freedom of himself. Most problems and worries are based on defective, uninvoked functions. Some organ, vision, taste, or feeling or instinct is not allowed its vent, its chance to qualify. Something needs lifting away. The common experience of sleeping things off, or walking or working them off, is the daily symbol of inspiration. More often than not a worry or trouble is moved entirely out of one's path by the simplest possible device, an intelligent or instinctive change of conditions.

 Recipe to make a great man (or a live small one): Let him be made like a great work of art. In general, follow the rule in Genesis i. 1. Chaos. 2. Enough Chaos; that is, enough kinds of Chaos. Pouring all the several parts of Chaos upon the other parts of Chaos. 3. Watch to see what emerges and what it is in the Chaos that most belongs to all the rest, what is the Unifying Principle. 4. Fertilise the Chaos. Let it be impregnated with desire, will, purpose, personality. 5. When the Unifying Principle is discovered, refrain from trying to force everything to attach itself to it. Let things attach themselves in their way as they are sure to do in due time and grow upon it. Let the mind be trusted. Let it not be always ordered around, thrust into, or meddled with. The making of a man, like the making of a work of art, consists in giving the nature of things a chance, keeping them open to the sun and air and the springs of thought. The first person who ever said to man, "You press the button and I will do the rest," was God.

An Inclined Plane "This is a very pleasant and profitable ideal you have printed in this book, but teachers and pupils and institutions being what they are, it is not practical and nothing can be done about it," it is objected. RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

 1. There is nothing so practical as an ideal, for if through his personality and imagination a man can be made to see an ideal, the ideal does itself; that is, it takes hold of him and inspires him to do it and to find means for doing it. This is what has been aimed at in this book. 2. The first and most practical thing to do with an ideal is to believe it. 3. The next most practical thing is to act as if one believed it. This makes other people believe it. To act as if one believed an ideal is to be literal with it, to assume that it can be made real, that something--some next thing--can be done with it.

4. It is only people who believe an ideal who can make it practical. Educators who think that an ideal is true and who do not think it is practical do not think it is true, do not really know it. The process of knowing an ideal, of realising it with the mind, is the process of knowing that it can be made real. This is what makes it an ideal, that it is capable of becoming real, and if a man does not realise an ideal, cannot make it real in his mind, it is not accurate for him to say that it is not practical. It is accurate for him to say that it is not practical to him. The ideal presented in this book is not presented as practical except to teachers who believe it. 5. Every man has been given in this world, if he is allowed to get at them, two powers to make a man out of. These powers are Vision and Action. (1) Seeing, and (2) Being or Doing what one sees. What a man sees with, is quite generally called his imagination. What he does with what he sees, is called his character or personality. If it is true, as has been maintained in the whole trend of this book, that the most important means of education are imagination and personality, the power of seeing things and the power of living as if one saw them, imagination and personality must be accepted as the forces to teach with, and the things that must be taught. The persons who have imagination and personality in modern life must do the teaching.

 6. Parents and others who believe in imagination and personality as the supreme energies of human knowledge and the means of education, and who have children they wish taught in this way, are going to make connections with such teachers and call on them to do it. 7. Inasmuch as the best way to make an ideal that rests on persons practical is to find the persons, the next thing for persons who believe in an ideal to do is to find each other out. All persons, particularly teachers and parents, in their various communities and in the nation, who believe that the ideal is practical in education should be social with their ideal, group themselves together, make themselves known and felt.

The great characteristic enthusiasm of modern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very largely comes, it is not too much to say, from the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised human beings. It has come over us like a kind of moral anæmia. People cannot get interested enough in anything to be interested in it by themselves. Hence no great art--merely the art which is a trick or knack of appearance. We lack great art because we do not believe in great living.

 The emphasis which would seem to be most to the point in civilisation is that people must enjoy something, something of their very own, even if it is only their sins, if they can do no better, and they are their own. It would be a beginning. They could work out from that. They would get the idea. Some one has said that people repent of their sins because they didn't enjoy them as much as they expected to. Well, then, let them enjoy their repentance. The great point is, in this world, that men must get hold of reality somewhere, somehow, get the feel, the bare feel of living before they try dying. Most of us seem to think we ought to do them both up together. It is to be admitted that people might not do really better things for their own joy, than for other people's, but they would do them better. It is not the object of this book to reform people. Reformers are sinners enjoying their own sins, who try to keep other people from enjoying theirs. The object of this book is to inspire people to enjoy anything, to find a principle that underlies right and wrong both. Let people enjoy their sins, we say, if they really know how to enjoy. The more they get the idea of enjoying anything, the more vitally and sincerely they will run their course--turn around and enjoy something truer and more lasting. What we all feel, what every man feels is, that he has a personal need of daring and happy people around him, people that are selfish enough to be alive and worth while, people that have the habit and conviction of joy, whose joys whether they are wrong or right are real joys to them, not shadows or shows of joys, joys that melt away when no one is looking.

The main difficulty in the present juncture of the world in writing on the Lost Art of Reading is that all the other arts are lost, the great self-delights. As they have all been lost together, it has been necessary to go after them together, to seek some way of securing conditions for the artist, the enjoyer and prophet of human life, in our modern time. At the bottom of all great art, it is necessary to believe, there has been great, believing, free, beautiful living. This is not saying that inconsistency, contradiction, and insincerity have not played their part, but it is the benediction, the great Amen of the world, to say this,--that if there has been great constructive work there has been great radiant, unconquerable, constructive living behind it. There is but one way to recover the lost art of reading. It is to recover the lost art of living. The day we begin to take the liberty of living our own lives there will be artists and seers everywhere. We will all be artists and seers, and great arts, great books, and great readers of books will flock to us.

How to use your mind

"How to you use your mind", on hea raamat kõikidele, keda paelub mälu- ja teadmiste omandamise teema. Raamat räägib sellest, kuidas õppida efektiivsemalt õppima, mälu treenima ja enda mentaalseid võimeid täiel määral välja arendama.

Iga kord, kui me mingisuguseid uusi teadmisi omandame, toimuvad muudatused meie aju närvisüsteemis, kus neuronite vahel luuakse pidevalt uusi sidemeid. Uute sidemete loomine toimub väliskeskkonnast saadud stiimulite alusel. Need sidemed säilitatakse ajus teatud ajaks, kuid kui me neid mõnda aega ei kasutata, siis asendatakse nad uute sidemetega. Mida rohkem mingit sidet kasutatake, seda tugevam see on, ja seda kauem on sel eeldus püsida.  

Õppimine sisaldab endas selliste protsesside pidevat esile kutsumist, eesmärgiga tuua kaasa positiivseid tulemusi meie ajus. Uute teadmiste omandamise muudab raskeks just see, kuna sellega kaasneb närvisüsteemis kerkiva vastupanu ületamine. Vastupanu ületamiseks tuleb õpitut korrata. Näitena võib tuua autoga sõitmise, mis esmalt tundub algajale väga keeruline. Ta peab pidevalt mõtlema kõikide nende tegevuste peale, mida ta oma kehaga sooritab. Mida rohkem aga autoga sõitmist harjutada, seda automaatsemaks see muutub ning kogenud juht võib vabalt lahendada sõidu ajal peas matemaatikaülesandeid, ilma et see segaks liikluse samaaegset jälgimist. Iga tegevus ja informatsioon muutub kordamistel järjest rohkem harjumuspäraseks. Hariduse mõte siinkohal ongi eelkõige positiivsete harjumuste loomine. On ju teadatuntud tõde, et inimene on oma harjumuste ori. Meie igapäevane elutegevus seisnebki sisuliselt erinevate harjumuspäraste käitumiste ja mõttemustrite taasloomises. Seetõttu on nii raske näiteks loobuda suitsetamisest või depressioonis inimesel oma negatiivsetest mõtetest- need on harjumuspärased, rutiinsed ning saanud osaks inimese minapildist. Kuna erinevad harjumused on paratamatuks osaks meie elust, on tähtis omada selliseid harjumusi, mis on meile kasulikud ja ihaldusväärsed. Sageli vaimustuvad inimesed mõnest uuest hobist, on täis kirge ja soovi sellega tegelema hakata, kuid kui nad ei loo sellest tegevusest endale pidevate, rutiinsete kordamistega, distsipliini, siis löövad nad pärast esmase entusiasmi kadumist sellele käega. Meisterlikkus on alati pikaajalise ja pideva töötamise tulemus. Geeniuseks ei sünnita, geeniuseks saadakse. Seda fakti on inimestel raske aga enesele tunnistada, palju lihtsam on süüdistada oma geneetikat või halba keskkonda. Andekusest ilma tööta pole mingisugust kasu. 

Harjumuste loomine muudab meie elu lihtsamaks. See annab meie elule struktuuri. Lisaks, mida rohkem aega oma päevast me saame kulutada automatiseeritud käitumisele, seda rohkem vabaneb meil vaba energiat, mida saame kasutada mingite ihaldatud kõrgemate teadmiste või oskuste peale. Kui inimene peaks iga kord käsi pestes mõtlema pingsalt sellele kuidas käsi pestakse, võtaks see meilt palju energiat. Käte pesemise, nagu enamik igapäevaseid motoorseid tegevusi, õppisime me selgeks juba lapsepõlves ning see on meie jaoks lihtne. Samamoodi on ka teiste oskuste omandamisega- kui oleme mingisugusest tegevusest loonud endale harjumuse, väheneb sellele kuluv mentaalne energia ja see muutub järjest lihtsamaks. Näiteks jooksmine, mis algajale tundub raske ja ebamugav tegevus, muutub aja jooksul lihtsaks ja meeldivaks, sest meie keha on sellega harjunud ja see ei nõua meilt enam nii suurt pingutust. 

Kuidas saada elavat kujutlusvõimet? 

Selleks, et omada head kujutlusvõimet, tuleb olla tähelepanelikum end ümbritseva keskkonna suhtes. See tähendab seda, et igapäevastes olukordades kasutada rohkem oma meeli, keskenduda erinevatele meid ümbritsevatele lõhnadele, helidele, värvidele. Selleks tuleb olla olevikuhetkes, mil tähelepanu on keskendunud hetkeolukorrale, ning me oleme tähelepanelikumad erinevatele meelte poolt kogetud stiimulitele. Teiseks tuleks oma tähelepanu suunata erinevatele meid ümbritsevatele objektidele. Näiteks vaadelda hoolega toa keskel asetsevat lauda, selle värvi, suurust, kuju jne. Ja viimaseks oluliseks faktoriks on otsida pidevalt erinevaid aistingulisi kogemusi, elada vähem rutiinset elu, kuna erilised kogemused talletuvad meie mällu tugevamalt. Meie kujutlusvõime põhineb meie pool läbi kogetud kogemustel, mida me saame oma peas ümber tõsta, muuta jne. Aga selle rakendamiseks on vaja tõesti asju tähelepanelikult kogeda.

Mälu võib jagada neljaks faasiks- mulje saamine, säilitamine, esilekutsumine ja äratundmine. Mulje tekib alati läbi meeleorganite. On oluline, et uute teadmise omandamist alustataks aeglaselt. Loetud materjali tuleb täielikult süüvida, üritada igast lausest täielikult aru saada. Enamik mäluprobleeme tulenebki sellest, et inimesed suhtuvad oma esimestesse muljetesse hooletult. Teiseks oluliseks faktoriks on loetu kordamine. Kordamise käigus jäävad asjad paremini meelde. Kõige suurem osa materjalist unustatakse juba esimese päeva jooksul. Järgmine unustamiseprotsess toimub paari esimese nädala jooksul. Seega on oluline, et selle ajavahemiku sees õpitut korrataks. Tähtis on, et esimesed kordamised leiaks aset võrdlemisi lühikese ajaperioodi jooksul, ja hiljem võib ajavahemik kordamiste vahel suureneda. Efektiivse õppimisprotsessi jaoks on seega oluline, et esmased muljed saadaks võimalikult vara. Kolm päeva enne eksamit õppimisega alustamisest pole mälu seisukohast mingisugust mõtet- teadmised ei jõua mälus kinnistuda. Lisaks on ääretult oluline ka suhtumine õpitud materjali. Juba õppimise käigus peame suhtuma materjali sooviga kinnistada see meile tulevikuks. Kui õpime materjali ainult eksamiks, siis pole meil motivatsiooni õpitut ka kauem mäletada. Samuti kinnistuvad teadmised magamise ajal. On oluline võtta õpingute vahel pause. Kuid pausid ei tohi jääda liiga pikaks. Tegelikult alahindame oma võimeid pea alati- peame end väsinuks ja loobume, kuigi oleksime võimelised veel pikalt töötama. Oma keha äärmusteni viies saabub tegelikult teine energia-laine, mis on sisuliselt sarnane jooksjate "runner's high'ga". Kui me viime oma keha füüsilise väsimuse piirini, hakkab aju eritama endorfiine, naturaalseid valuvaigisteid. Lisaks ka veel erinevaid teisi neurotransmittereid, mille tõttu tekib füüsilise kurnatuse piiril inimesel tohutult energiat ning kõrgenenud meeleolu. Sarnane efekt kehtib ka vaimse töö puhul. Eriti esineb seda siis, kui inimestel on sügav huvi ja motivatsioon asjaga tegeleda. Aju hakkab eritama neurotransmitterite kombinatsiooni, mille käigus keskendumisvõime paraneb, energiatase tõuseb, loomingulisus suureneb, tekivad kergemini seosed ja inimest tabab võimas rahulolutunne. Enamasti me aga selle seisundini ei jõua, sest oleme harjunud kergelt loobuma ega pole piisavalt motiveeritud. Kõige sellegi poolest toimub enamik mäletamisese protsessist, ilma et oleksime sellest teadlikud. See protsess jaguneb kaheks- mehaanilisteks ja loogilisteks assotsiatsioonideks. Mehaaniline on lihtsalt õpitu pähe tuupimine. Kõige efektiivsem on aga just assotsiatsioonide läbi õppimine. Isegi võõrkeele õpingutel, kui puutume kokku uue, meile võõra sõnaga, üritame seda meelde jätta otsides selle sarnasusi juba meile emakeeles või mõnes muus tuntud keeles tuttava sõnaga. 

Mälu arendamisega kaasneb areng ka teistes mentaalsetes oskustes, parema mäluga kaasneb ka parem keskendumisvõime, kujutlusvõime ja assotsiatsioonide loomise ja arutlemisoskus. 

Hamilton Wright Mabie "Essays On Work And Culture"

So fixed has become the habit of confusing the use of manifold gifts with mere dexterity that men of quality and power often question the promptings which impel them to use different or diverse forms of expression; as if a man were born to use only one limb and enjoy only one resource in this many-sided universe!

A man of original power can never be confined within the limits of a single field of interest and activity, nor can he ever be content to bear the marks and use the skill of a single occupation. He cannot pour his whole force into one channel; there is always a reserve of power beyond the demands of the work which he has in hand at the moment. Wherever he may find his place and whatever work may come to his hand, he must always be aware of the larger movement of life which incloses his special task; and he must have the consciousness of direct relation with that central power of which all activities are inadequate manifestations. To a man of this temper the whole range of human interests must remain open, and such a man can never escape the conviction that life is a unity under all its complexities; that all activities stand vitally related to each other; that truth, beauty, knowledge, and character must be harmonised and blended in every real and adequate development of the human spirit. To the growth of every flower earth, sun, and atmosphere must contribute; in the making of a man all the rich forces of nature and civilisation must have place.

In such moments the quick emotion, the sudden thrill, bear eloquent witness to that deeper and diviner life in which we all share, but of which we rarely seem aware. This perception of the presence of a man's soul comes to us when we stand before a true work of art. We not only uncover our heads, but our hearts are uncovered as well. Here is one who through all his skill speaks to us in a language which we understand, but which we rarely hear. A great work of art not only liberates the imagination, but the heart as well; for it speaks to us more intimately than our friends are able to speak, and that reticence which holds us back from perfect intercourse when we look into each other's faces vanishes. A few lines read in the solitude of the woods, or before the open fire, often kindle the emotion and imagination which slumber within us; in companionship with the greatest minds our shyness vanishes; we not only take but give with unconscious freedom.

Uncertainty breeds impatience; and in youth, before the will is firmly seated and the goal clearly seen, impatience often manifests itself in the relaxation of all forms of restraint. The richer the nature the greater the reaction which sometimes sets in at this period; the more varied and powerful the elements to be harmonised in a man's character and life, the greater the ferment and agitation which often precede the final discernment and acceptance of one's work. If the pressure of uncertainty with regard to one's gifts and their uses ought to call out patience and sympathy, so ought that experience of spiritual and intellectual agitation which often intervenes between the training for life and the process of actual living. 

The "storm and stress" period is always interesting because it predicts the appearance of a new power; and men instinctively love every evidence of the greatness of the race, as they instinctively crave the disclosure of new truth. In the reaction against the monotony of formalism and of that deadly conventionalism which is the peril of every accepted method in religion, art, education, or politics, men are ready to welcome any revolt, however extravagant. Too much life is always better than too little, and the absurdities of young genius are nobler than the selfish prudence of aged sagacity. 

For work speedily turns inward power into outward achievement, and so makes it possible to take accurate account of what has hitherto lain wholly within the realm of the potential. In a very deep and true sense an artist faces his own soul when he looks at his finished work. He sees a bit of himself in every book, painting, statue, or other product of his energy and skill. What was once concealed in the mystery of his own nature is set in clear light in the work of his hands; the reality or unreality of his aspirations is finally settled; the question of the possession of original power or of mere facility is answered. The worker is no longer an unknown force; he has been developed, revealed, measured, and tested.

No man is free until he can dispose of himself; until he is sought after instead of seeking; until, in the noblest sense of the words, he commands his own price in the world. There are men in every generation who push this self-development and self-mastery so far, and who obtain such a large degree of freedom in consequence, that the keys of all doors are open to them. 

There is no real freedom save that which is based upon discipline. The chance to do as one pleases is not liberty, as so many people imagine; liberty involves knowledge, self-mastery, capacity for exertion, power of resistance. 

The necessity of working gives society steadiness and stability; when large populations are freed from this necessity, irresponsible mobs take the place of orderly citizens, and the crowd of idlers must be fed and amused to be kept out of mischief. A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been. 

n our time the chief peril for men of imagination and the artistic temperament comes from that aloofness of temper which separates its victim from his fellows, isolates him in the very heart of society, and turns his energy inward so that he preys upon himself. The root of a great deal of that pessimism which has found expression in modern literature is found in inactivity. He who contents himself with looking at life as a spectator sees its appalling contradictions and its baffling confusions, and misses the steadying power of the common toil, the comprehension through sympathy, the slow but deep unfolding and education which come from participation in the world's work. He who approaches life only through his feelings is bruised, hurt, and finally exhausted by a strain of emotion unrelieved by thought and action. No man is sound either in vision or in judgment who holds himself apart from the work of society. Participation in that work not only liberates the inward energy which preys upon itself if repressed; it also, through human fellowship, brings warmth and love to the solitary spirit; above all, it so identifies the man with outward activities that his personal force finds free access to the world, and he is delivered from the peril of self-consciousness. 

Creative men feel the necessity of many interests and of wide activities. Their natures require rich pasturage; they must be fed from many sources. They secure the skill of the specialist, but they never accept his limitations of interest and work. The clearer their vision of the unity of all forms of human action and expression, the deeper their need of studying at first hand these different forms of action and expression. 

A man is at his best only when he pours out his vital energy at full tide, without thought or care for anything save complete self-expression.

He who hopes to reach the highest level of activity in work will not aim, therefore, to gain specific ends or to touch external goals of any kind; he will aim at complete self-development. His ultimate aim will be not material but spiritual; he cannot rest short of the perfect self- expression. The rewards of work--money, influence, position, fame--will be the incidents, not the ends, of his toil. He has a right to look for them and count upon them; but if he be a true workman they will never be his inspirations, nor can they ever be his highest rewards. 

For a man's ultimate responsibility is met by what he is and does, not by what he gains. When he sets an exterior reward of any kind before him as the final goal of his endeavour, he breaks away from the divine order of life and destroys that deep interior harmony which ought to keep a man's spirit in time and tune with the creative element in the world.

The gifted young preacher must clearly discern the needs of his own nature or he will miss the one thing which he was probably sent into the world to accomplish, the one thing which all men are sent into the world to secure,--free and noble self-development. He must be wiser than his parish or the community; he must recognise the peril which comes from the too close pressure of near duties at the start. The community will thoughtlessly rob him of the time, the quiet, and the repose necessary for the unfolding of his spirit; it will drain him in a few years of the energy which ought to be spread over a long period of time; and at the end of a decade it will begin to say, under its breath, that its victim has not fulfilled the promise of his youth. It will fail to discern that it has blighted that promise by its own urgent demands. The young preacher who is eager to give the community the very greatest service in his power will protect it and himself by locking his study door and resolutely keeping it locked.

There are no men so interesting as those who are quietly and steadfastly following some distant aim which is invisible to others. One recognises them because they seem to be moving silently but surely onward. Skill, insight, and power steadily flow to them; and, apparently without effort, they climb step by step the steep acclivity where influence and fame abide. They are supremely interesting because, through absorption in their work, they are largely free from self-consciousness, and because they bring with them the air and stir of growth and movement. They rarely obtrude their interests or pursuits upon others, but they give the impression of a definiteness of aim which cannot be obscured or blurred, and a concentration of energy which steadily reacts in increase of power. 


Mr. Gladstone's astonishing range of interests and occupations was made possible by his power of concentration. He gave himself completely to the work in hand; all his knowledge, energy, and ability were focussed on that work, so that his whole personality was brought to a point of intense light and heat, as the rays of the sun are brought to a point in a burning-glass. When the power of concentration reaches this stage of development, it liberates a man from dependence upon times, places, and conditions; it makes privacy possible in crowds, and silence accessible in tumults of sound; it withdraws a man so completely from his surroundings that he secures complete isolation as readily as if the magic carpet of the "Arabian Nights" were under him to bear him on the instant into the solitude of lonely deserts or inaccessible mountains.


The book which one reads with eyes which are continually lifted from the page may furnish entertainment for the moment, but cannot enrich the reader, because it cannot become part of his knowledge.

Here, as everywhere in the field of man's life, there enters that element of sacrifice without which no real achievement is possible. To secure a great end, one must be willing to pay a great price. The exact adjustment of achievement to sacrifice makes us aware, at every step, of the invisible spiritual order with which all men are in contact in every kind of endeavour. If the highest skill could be secured without long and painful effort it would be wasted through ignorance of its value, or misused through lack of education; but a man rarely attains great skill without undergoing a discipline of self-denial and work which gives him steadiness, restraint, and a certain kind of character. The giving up of pleasures which are wholesome, the turning aside from fields which are inviting, the steady refusal of invitations and claims which one would be glad to accept or recognise, invest the power of concentration with moral quality, and throw a searching light on the nature of all genuine success. 

Work is energy intelligently put forth; and intelligence in work depends largely upon keeping the whole nature in close and constant relation with all the sources of power. To be always doing something is to be as useless for the higher purposes of growth and influence as to be always idle; one can do nothing with a great show of energy, and one can do much with very little apparent effort.

The more one can gain in his passive moods, the more will he have to give in his active moods; for the greater the range of one's thought, the truer one's insight, and the deeper one's force of imagination, the more will one's skill express and convey.  

Earlier thinkers and writers on education had seen that play is an important element in the unfolding of a child's nature, but Froebel discerned the psychology of play and showed how it may be utilised for educational purposes. His comments on this subject are full of significance: "The plays of the child contain the germ of the whole life that is to follow; for the man develops and manifests himself in play, and reveals the noblest aptitudes and the deepest elements of his being. ...The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life; for the whole man is developed and shown in these, in his tenderest dispositions, in his innermost tendencies." And one of Froebel's most intimate associates suggests another service of play, when he says: "It is like a fresh bath for the human soul when we dare to be children again with children." Play is the prelude to work, and stands in closest relation to it; it is the natural expression of the child's energy, as work is the natural expression of the man's energy. In play and through play the child develops the power that is in him, comes to knowledge of himself, and realises his relation with other children and with the world about him. In the free and unconscious pouring out of his vitality he secures for himself training, education, and growth.

Now, play is as much a need of the man's nature as of the boy's, and if work is to keep its freshness of interest, its spontaneity, and its productiveness, it must retain the characteristics of play; it must have variety, unconsciousness of self, joy. Activity it cannot lose, but joy too often goes out of it. The fatal tendency to deadness, born of routine and repetition, overtakes the worker long before his force is spent, and blights his work by sapping its vitality. Real work always sinks its roots deep in a man's nature, and derives its life from the life of the man; when the vitality of the worker begins to subside, through fatigue, exhaustion of impulse, or loss of interest, the work ceases to be original, vital, and genuine. Whatever impairs the worker's vitality impairs his work. 

The highest productivity will never be secured until the duty of recreation is set on the same plane with that of work, and the obligation to nourish one's life made as binding as the obligation to spend one's life.

Any pursuit or occupation which takes a man out of the atmosphere of his work-room and away from his work, gives him different interests, calls into activity different muscles or faculties, brings back the spirit of play, recalls the spontaneous and joyous mood, and re-creates through diversion, variety, and the appeal to another side of the nature. To work long and with cumulative power, one must play often and honestly; that is to say, one must play for the pure joy of it.

It is significant that the most original and capacious minds, like the most powerful bodies, often betray noticeable awkwardness at the start; they need prolonged exercise in order to secure freedom of movement; they must have time for growth. Minds of a certain superficial brilliancy, on the other hand, often mature early because they have so little depth and range. To be awkward in taking hold of one's work is not, therefore, a thing to be regretted; as a rule it is a piece of good fortune.

The development of one's personality cannot be accomplished in isolation or solitude; the process involves close and enduring association with one's fellows. If work were purely a matter of mechanical skill, each worker might have his cell and perform his task, as in a prison. But work involves the entire personality, and the personality finds its complete unfolding, not in detachment, but in association. Talent, says Goethe, thrives in solitude, but character grows in the stream of the world. It is a twofold discovery which a man must make before the highest kind of success lies within his grasp: the discovery of his own individual gift, force, or aptitude, and the discovery of his place in society.

Individual teachers have often understood the place and function of the imagination, and have sought to liberate and enrich it by intelligently planned study; but the schools of most, if not of all, times have treated it as a wayward and disorderly gift, not amenable to discipline and training, and of very doubtful value. There has always been, in every highly civilised society, a good deal that has appealed to this divinest of all the gifts with which men have been endowed; there have been periods in which the imagination has been stirred to its depths by the force of human energy and the play and splendour of human experience and achievement; but there has never yet been adequate recognition of its place in the life of the individual and of society, nor intelligent provision for its education.

We begin with the imagination; it holds its light over the play of childhood; it is the master of the revels, the enchantments, and the dreams of youth; it must be also the inspiration of all toil and the shaping genius of all work.

The first stage in the education of the true worker is self-conscious; the final stage is self-forgetful. No man can enter the final stage without passing through the initial stage; no man can enter the final stage without leaving the initial stage behind him. One must first develop intense self-consciousness, and then one must be able to forget and obliterate himself. One must first accept the most exacting discipline of the school, and then one must forget that schools exist. 

This ability to transform skill into character, to make instinct do the work of intelligence, to pass from intense self-consciousness into self- forgetfulness, is the supreme test to which every artist must subject himself let him sustain this test and his place is secure. To find one's life in the deepest sense, to bring out and express one's personality, a man must lose that life; that is to say, he must have the power of entire self-surrender. When the inspiration comes, as it does come to all creative spirits, a man must be able to surrender himself to it completely. When the hour of vision arrives the prophet has no time or thought to waste on himself; if he is to speak, he must listen with intense and utter stillness of soul.

That which is true of the master worker, the artist, is true of all lesser workers: the highest efficiency is conditioned on the ability to forget oneself. Self-consciousness is the most serious and painful limitation of many men and women of genuine capacity and power. It rests like a heavy load on shoulders which ought to be free; it is an impediment of speech when speech ought to have entire spontaneity, and freedom. This intense consciousness of self, although always revealing a certain amount of egoism, is often devoid of egotism; it is, in many cases, a sign of diffidence and essential modesty. It is the burden and limitation of those especially who have high aims and standards, but who distrust their own ability to do well the things they are eager to do. To be self-conscious is to waste a great deal of force which ought to go into work; it is to put into introspection the vitality which ought to issue in some form of expression. 

The master worker learns that the secret of happiness is the opportunity and the ability to express nobly whatever is deepest in his personality, and that supreme good fortune comes to him who can lose himself in some generous and adequate task.