to memory words, sentences, and rules, is not getting ideas. It is simply memorizing. It is simply using, exercising, and training that part of the mind which learns to remember sounds. If you commit to memory a great many words and sentences, you are simply overstraining a part or function of your mind. You are putting on it a burden to carry. As, if you gave every tack in your carpet a name, and thought it your duty to remember every tack by its name, would you have time or strength to think of much else?
Words are not ideas. They are only the signs by means of which, through the senses of sight or sound, a printed word or a spoken word may represent an idea to a mind. A word or sentence full of meaning or thought to one person may mean nothing to another.
The more that is committed to memory, the greater the burden placed on the department of memory. How many things of the hour can you easily recollect on going out to the day’s business? A dozen matters involving household cares, mixed with your own business, with strict injunctions from Mrs. A. “not to forget them,” is a load to carry. It frets, perplexes, and confuses you. So are children treated in our so-called modern system of education. They are burdened with a thousand “facts,” which they are told “may be useful for them to know.” This is like teaching you to shoot by strapping a load of rifles on your back. You may carry the rifles all your life without becoming a marksman.
The memory is useful only to hold what is grasped by the spirit. No amount of “book-learning” can teach a man to sail a boat well. He must educate himself. When he learns, through practice and many failures, that the rudder must be kept in a certain position to counteract the force of the wind against the sail, his memory at last holds what such practice has taught him. Committing all the proper directions to memory, will not help him a particle. On the contrary, if he endeavors, while learning this art, to recollect the directions, his mind and strength are put upon a sentence instead of the business in hand, and his learning will be retarded instead of advanced. The remembrance of what memory holds through exercise teaches people how to drive, to shoot, to row, to swim, to skate, to dance, to paint, to carve, to weave, to sew, to do all things. But nothing is learned when you are taught rules before practice. Did you learn to dance by first committing to memory the rules for the guidance of your steps, and trying to remember and follow them? No, you received first the idea from some one who could dance. You absorbed that idea or thought. Then, once having the thought, your mind, your invisible self, taught by degrees the body to move in accordance with the plan in the mind.
Every person, to learn quickly, must learn to throw himself in a certain mood of mind. That is the mood of serenity and repose. It is exactly the opposite to the mood in which children often “study” their lessons. To “study” hard, or to “study” in a hurry, is a vain attempt to force memory to do a certain work in a certain time.
If you would learn any art, learn it in your own way. Learn in the manner your inspiration suggests to you. Don’t mind what is said to you about the necessity of being “well grounded” in certain rules which must be taught you by others. It is true that you must so be “well grounded.” But that is exactly what your spirit can best and quickest teach you. The spirit will make its own rules. Left to itself, it will strike out new and original methods. Rules already-made never taught Shakspeare, Byron, Burns, or Napoleon. They trusted to their interior power, the interior suggestions concerning methods. When astonishing results are attained, men call it “genius,” and then go straightway to work to frame from the method adopted by genius a new set of shackles to impose on all successors in the same art. Genius may use a certain method as we may a crutch. When it has served a purpose, we throw it away for something better to walk by. The methods of genius are ever-changing. Napoleon revolutionized military science. His was a mind that could have re-revolutionized his own tactics. Genius alone can see the folly of always travelling the same path, even though it has itself made that path.
Don’t be over-anxious because you do not learn or advance in any art or calling as fast as you wish. Don’t fret in mind because attempt after attempt fails. Don’t hurry. When you feel in the mood of hurry and fret, stop! That is the state of mind most opposed to learning. That is the mood which wastes your strength.
You can learn any thing if your mind be persistently set upon it. Then wait in peace. The art will come to you.
If you will, for fifteen minutes or half an hour daily, sit down with a box of colors, and idly daub and make play of trying effects in color by painting one shade over another, you will, if you desire to paint, see skies, mountains, and forest coming in those alternations of light and shade, as one coating of color is placed over another. A rugged, splintered rock will suddenly start out from a splash of paint. You will have it suggested to you how easily tree-trunks can be simulated by a few straight or curved lines. A splash of blue will serve for a pond or lake, green markings on its edge will represent shrubbery; and, ere you know it, there is a landscape,—more beautiful to you with all its crudeness than the work of the greatest artist, because it is your own seemingly accidental creation, your own child.
This is the foundation of the art. In this it had its origin. From this it grew. A seeming accidental combination of light, shade, and color suggested to some mind ages ago the idea of so representing familiar things to the eye on a flat surface. From this was drawn the idea of perspective and of representing surface, round, flat, or indented, near or far; and every new pupil, teacher or no teacher, must begin where the first painter did, and tread in his footsteps. It is so in all art.
The more free the mind is left to follow its own teaching, its intuition, the guidance of the spirit, the greater the inspiration. If it is put into rules made for it by others, there are produced only imitators and copyists. A rule laid down, with strict injunction to the pupil never to transgress it, is a shackle, a bar to advance in new territory of thought and investigation.
The mood for study—that is, for finding out methods and remembering them—must be the mood of as perfect repose as you can attain. There must be no hurry, no excitement. If you grow too wild over a sudden success, a finding of something in your efforts you have long sought for, beware! or you will temporarily lose it. There must be no sudden startings of body or mind, nor impatience to hurry over any detail that is necessary. If a tool you are using breaks, or a chair is to be moved, or your pen needs cleaning, do it as though that was the only thing to be done for the day. Keep the body in as perfect a state of rest as possible. Be apathetic rather than strained or eager. When your body is in this state of repose, it is in the state best fitted to be used as the instrument of the mind, or spirit. It is then most ruled by your thought, your real self, your invisible self, your spirit.
Because when body and mind are in this condition,—when you suspend all faculties save those concentrated on the work, or when your mind is in the receiving state,—your spirit can best work for you. It can then reach out and bring back the idea, the effect, the method, the conception and means of carrying out that conception; and the more quiet the body, and more tranquil the mind, the sooner will it teach how what you wish to do shall be done. In schooling yourself to this condition, you become more and more the medium through whom new ideas can be transmitted. You then connect yourself with the more exalted regions of mind or currents of thought, and receive of their knowledge and inspiration. Your mind is then the tranquil lake, the clear well, reflecting every thing above.
You study every-day, often when you least think you are studying. You study as you walk the street in repose, and look into people’s faces, and are interested and amused by them. You are then learning more and more of the different varieties of human nature. Men and women then are books to you. You open and read them. You learn to recognize in an instant, by the look on people’s faces, how they feel and what are their dispositions. Involuntarily, you are classifying men and women, and putting them down in your mind according to their characters. One specimen so recognized serves as the type for one thousand, for a race. You set down this man as no gentleman, from the manner in which he looks at a lady. You see in this overdressed woman the low pride of mere money. You are studying human nature. Knowledge of human nature has a commercial value
