The best way is to take advantage of the law, and get on the right side of it. How? Think hopeful things instead of hopeless things. Think success instead of failure. Why, the habit of thinking hopeless, disagreeable things is so confirmed up here in New England, that if you remark, “Its a fine day,” half of these grouty, croaking old shellbacks will growl, “Yes, but it is one of your—weather breeders.” Just so sure as the universe is governed by fixed and immutable law, just so sure will that law be found to read, “If you think bright things, you attract bright things to you. If you think dark things, you cut off the invisible wires with the bright things, and you make instantaneous connection with the ‘ground circuit’ attracting dark things.” Perhaps you say this is simple or childish. Now, what is simple in this universe? The sprouting of a seed is called by some a simple affair. But nobody knows the real cause of its sprouting. It is only known, if you put it in the ground, where it can have a certain amount of the sun’s warmth and some moisture, it will sprout. The rising and falling of a tea-kettle’s cover over the fire gave Watts his first idea of the mighty force of steam. That is, he got there his first hint of the power in steam, or rather behind steam. That is heat. But then there is a power behind heat. What’s that? Don’t know. Simplicity, indeed! What in the world is there so simple?
VIII.
THE ART OF STUDY.
Thoughts are Things. There is an art of study. We were told in youth to study. We were never told properly how to study, or, in other words, how to get ideas. Committing 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
