Greater efficiency is the watchword of the hour. The pages of every
technical and even educational magazine bristle with it. One is driven
to wonder whether the principle does not require that in every printing
office the word "efficiency" be stereotyped to save the cost of setting.
We are told how one manager of a creamery saved annually the amount of
his own salary to the company by having the dents in the supply cans
pounded out and so getting more milk from the farmers. But though the
lengths to which the insistence on efficiency is carried may sometimes
provoke a smile, we have no inclination to disparage it; we realize that
efficiency has far more than a mere money value to society; it is rather
our purpose in the present paper to ask whether the efficiency man has
ever thought to turn his searchlight in upon himself and discover
whether he has not latent and unexpected powers that may be evoked to
the great increase of his own efficiency.
We have nothing historically new to offer, though the principle we are
to mention is practically unknown or at least unutilized. It is the
great, controlling principle of Forethought, the application of which is
far wider than thought itself, extending to all the functions of the
soul and even affecting bodily energy and health. The action of
Forethought is based on the fact that there is more to ourselves than we
are aware of. We are not ordinarily conscious of our past lives, for
instance, yet a supreme crisis, such as falling from a height, may make
a man's whole past in an instant flash before him in review. Under
sudden stress a man may develop powers of leadership or resolution that
nobody could have foreseen and that he himself cannot account for. Our
selves as we know them are, so to speak, only the top soil of our entire
natures. Every conscious personality is like a farm in an oil district.
It is underlain by an unrealized wealth that may never be brought to
light. Some accident may reveal the treasure, but if the owner suspects
its existence he may bore for it. To show how this boring may be done is
one of the purposes of the present paper. But let us first assure
ourselves further of the existence of this hidden fund of energy.
If in the early fifties of the last century a vote had been taken on the
two men in America who ten years later would stand head and shoulders
above their countrymen in position and recognized ability, it is
probable that not one single vote would have been cast for a slouchy
Missouri farmer or a shabby Illinois lawyer, certainly not for the
former. Grant and Lincoln themselves would not have expected a vote. Yet
their powers existed then, unrealized by their owners, and only needing
the proper stimulus to bring them out. That stimulus was responsibility;
and, great as their achievements were under this stimulus, neither man
appears to have reached his limit; each apparently had still a fund of
reserve power to be expended on yet greater occasions had they arisen.
This is not to say that all men have an equal fund of unrecognized
ability. The experiences of the great struggle out of which Lincoln and
Grant came supreme are alone sufficient to show how unequal are men's
endowments. A McClellan proves himself an unsurpassed organizer, but no
fighter; a Burnside displays marked ability in leading fifteen or
twenty thousand men, but beyond this number he fails disastrously.
Neither Foresight nor any other device can _create_ ability. A gallon
can will hold only a gallon, no matter how carefully its sides are
rounded. But in the case of any given man no one knows his capacity
until he has had a chance to show it. His nature may hold only a pint,
or, as with the men who have mastered great occasions with still
unexhausted powers, it may seem like the horn which the god Thor tried
to drain but could not, for its base was connected with the ocean
itself. Not every man can hope to be called to a responsibility that
shall bring out his latent powers; most of us, if we are ever to get the
call, will first have to show the ability.
How can a man tap the unknown resources, be they great or small, of his
unconscious self? The method here to be suggested has at least the merit
of great simplicity. I have called it Forethought; it might perhaps as
exactly be called Forewilling. The point is that this unconscious part
of a man's nature is not out of his control; he can send word to it and
direct it, even if he has to do so by a kind of wireless telegraphy.
However mysterious this may sound, there is nothing mystical about it,
neither is it something vague and indefinite, but a practice to be
applied to actual cases in hand. Suppose a business man is trying to get
an important contract, and is to have an interview on the morrow that
will decide the question. Let him, before he falls asleep at night, go
over the whole ground in his mind, set before himself clearly the thing
to be done with the particular difficulties to be met, and let him
_will_ himself to meet those difficulties, to carry his case. Let him
will that at that time he shall be cheerful and vigorous; and, having
given these instructions to his unconscious self--which has perhaps
been waiting years for just this chance to do its part in the common
endeavor--let him dismiss the whole matter from his conscious thought
and go to sleep. On awaking in the morning let him review the matter and
again dismiss it from his mind until the occasion arrives. If he will do
this faithfully, he may not succeed the first time in carrying his
point, but he will certainly feel a great increase of power, and
ultimately, if he persists in making his unconscious self an active
partner in his life, he will find himself far more successful than he
could have been while depending on a single side of his nature. The same
principle will hold, of course, in a myriad cases; if we have to-morrow,
or even at a later date, to plead a cause, to make an after-dinner
speech, to write a report or an article, to learn a lesson, to entertain
guests, to handle a difficult case of discipline, we have only to take
this counsel of our pillow, to reënforce it with our first morning
thought, and we shall find ourselves making a new record of success.
It is obvious that a principle so effective cannot be limited to the
active or the intellectual life. If a man has a fault or a besetting
weakness or sin, here is a way out of it. How long will a bad habit
stand such an assault upon itself as the evening and morning practice of
Forethought? One will actually feel the new force within him, like a
gyroscopic stabilizer, holding him to his predetermined course. There is
literally a world of hope for mankind in the application of this
principle on its moral side. But the business of our article is with
other applications and we must dismiss this, the greatest of all, with a
mere mention.
If anyone questions whether this principle is true or not, the best
answer will be to bid him test it. Though it be true universally, some
people may not easily apply it, and some may not have the patience to
subject themselves to such a discipline. But most will have no
difficulty, and many will succeed well enough to inspire themselves to
continue. Some, indeed, will say, and with perfect truth, that there is
nothing new in this doctrine, that they have long known and applied it.
The principle has doubtless been known for thousands of years, but it
has certainly not been widely taken up by our race, which is curiously
external in its notions of self-education and self-control. One American
writer, the late Charles Godfrey Leland, a man of the most varied powers
and accomplishments, has written in advocacy of it and gives us as his
own experience that after the age of seventy he was able to do a greater
amount of literary work, and with less fatigue, than ever before simply
by calling in the aid of his unconscious self. If one were to read the
lives and writings of eminent men with this principle of Forethought in
mind, one would find numberless instances of its more or less
unconscious practice. The best scholar in my own class, for instance,
applied it to his studies. Does anyone suppose that the old Puritan's
sweetening of his mind with a little Calvin before he went to bed was
without its effect on his devotion to Calvinism? Erasmus, the wittiest
of scholars, writing nearly four hundred years ago to his special
friend, Christian of Lubeck, recommends the practice both of the evening
instruction and the morning review as something that he himself has
followed from his childhood; and we cannot doubt that in it he reveals
one of the secrets of his world-wide influence. He says to his youthful
friend: "A little before you go to sleep read something choice and worth
remembering, and think it over until you fall asleep. When you awake in
the morning make yourself give an account of it." Though this is clearly
an application of the principle to study and the strengthening of the
memory, experiment will show that the potency of Forethought is not
limited to the memory or the intellect in general, but applies to man's
entire nature and equally to the least and the greatest of its
concerns.