THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND
(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and
develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of
all men.)
Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to
acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn
things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be,
and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are
old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and
it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done,
and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old
men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and
compelled to deal with modern ideas.
But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of
curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained;
your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach
yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself
accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for
understanding.
First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your
mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods,
cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain
subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet,
never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not
willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it
should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and
serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter shells--yet I
see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look
at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions,
the lies deliberately maintained--and realize the waste of it all, the
pity of it all!
Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs to his bosom
and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those
delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she
has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and
never a week passes that there do not come to me letters from people who
tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are
grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions
of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three
pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their
hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct--but I fail to
understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired
religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the
"Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except
what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or
perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from
the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has
read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part
company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak
disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is
prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving
themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion
have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes,
and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled--there
will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!
Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your
thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more
deadly compulsions of its own making--from prejudices and superstitions.
The prejudices and superstitions of mankind are like those diseased
mental states which are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a
"complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center
of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each
group of men, each sect or class, have their precious dogmas, their
shibboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole
beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words
of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a
brain-storm.
At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."
You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the
police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and
fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better
place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his
idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of
terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you
find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal
impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more
irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are
better than the institutions and systems under which they live; you
realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem
of social reorganization.
Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of
humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school
readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is,
for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must
be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous
thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young
mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the
pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with
delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"--and never since the world
began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it
will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting
marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius.
Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to
realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her
own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before
there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child
is more wonderful than her child.
In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that
we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest
we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of
equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must
render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another,
and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that
we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of
power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which we draw. "The fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now
that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be
purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must
feel towards life and its miracles.
Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high,
marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a
limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite,
and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in
life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what
knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a
panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our
ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many
universes, and new ones continually discovered.
The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the
universe of outer space, the material world of infinity? Consider the
smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the
earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so
small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe
made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the
photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the
miracles of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the
Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here
to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the
spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by
the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars,
and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes
Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we
have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that
not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying
every which way through space!
Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the
material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the
universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation
to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to
the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of
millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then,
behold, in the atom there are millions of millions of electrons--tiny
particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute
things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley
cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them,
and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as
certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you
wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or
Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."
Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past
locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the
universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the
arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it,
he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the
physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out
what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and
spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.
Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found
in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor
beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and
treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places
we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and
all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it--he possesses
not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy
properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and
the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword
Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down
all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and
the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come
true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of
the spheres, and--who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St.
Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest
conversing!
PART TWO
THE BOOK OF THE BODY