Think accurately.
You need not only a knowledge of words but of values. You must follow the right methods as well as possess the power of expression.
Stream of Thought
Ask yourself this question: “Do my continually changing thoughts and feelings follow each other at random?” Chart yourself and your actions for an hour and you will likely see that there is a pattern to your actions even if you fall off track. You see something that triggers another thought or action and then you get distracted from what you are doing and follow a new path.
Mind-Wanderer
Even a mind that wanders thinks according to the laws of association. The worst mind-wanderer in the world has thoughts which are intimately connected in this way, even though in a five minutes’ reverie he may begin with a thought about margarine and finish up with a speculation about the planet Mars. The mischief, however, is often serious. A person who uses thinking powers in this listless fashion becomes unable to fix attention on anything for long; memory develops deplorable weaknesses due to inattention; and, as a consequence, self-confidence decreases, in corresponding ratio. No doubt there are times when we should allow the mind to take its own course, or accept the drift in which we find ourselves. The mind must not be drilled unceasingly; it must on occasion “stand at ease,” as in the conversation of a social evening. But when business or study is before us, and we have a program to fill, hour by hour, the more consistently we follow the demands of attention, the better it is for our mental powers generally.
Connected and Unconnected Facts and Ideas
If you take an unordered list of words you find it rather difficult to recall them, because they are not so grouped as to. be an organic whole. Here is such a list: dome, a, glass, many, of, white, eternity, life, stains, radiance, of, colored, the, like. As a mere list of words it seems to convey no meaning—but when Shelley used them he wrote:
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
What a difference! The introduction of method by means of grammatical arrangement, and the infusion of exalted feeling, turns a seemingly unmeaning group of words into poetry of the highest order.
Do you arrange, according to a plan, all the new things you learn, or do you throw them on to a sort of general heap? For instance, if you pick up a popular paper and read that a certain burglar wrote a book whilst serving a term of penal servitude, do you simply say “He must have been a unique burglar” and then forget the matter, or do you immediately place the fact in its proper association with other books, some of them famous which have been written in prisons? If you do, then, your powers work on the principles of mental connection; you classify your knowledge as it comes to you. If you do not, you will find that you forget half of what you read, because its associations are weak. You will also experience more difficulty in learning, and new ideas will be slow in coming.
Untidy Minds
Such are the evils of having an untidy mind, in which impressions, ideas, convictions, fancies, and all the phenomena of consciousness are so ill arranged that you never know where to find anything when you want it. Classification is the introduction of order into the mental life: a place for everything and everything in its place. Here’s how you can create order out of chaos:
In the first place don’t make a tremendous business of it. It is really quite a simple affair and not one to worry about. Life would not be worth living if, immediately you got out of bed in the morning you had to begin solemnly to classify the toilet soap, then the towel, then the breakfast, and so on throughout the livelong day. There is a time to classify these things, and it is done unconsciously by repeated use. Let these things happen and then start paying attention to what you do. If you read the morning paper, be alert and think as you read an article about the topic and whether you have heard about it before. Look for associations by way of similarity or contrast. You may have no other chance during the day of exercising your mind in this way; but if you form the habit you will classify ideas and information unconsciously and without effort. Start linking thoughts with other things you have heard about. This helps your general concentration and your judgment.
The Trained Mind
One mark of a trained mind is (a) its ability to classify experience and to deal with individual instances, (b) knowledge of the best standards. The reader is, therefore, urged to introduce more order into his or her thought-life. The process itself is often greatly illuminating; the sudden confrontation of one experience with a like experience, happening in different circumstances, may result in a flash of insight carrying the mind altogether beyond the limits of the classification itself.
It must not be forgotten that all our ordered schemes of knowledge are tentative arrangements; they stand for the best we know, but they are not final.
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