The condition of the human body is revealed to the wise physician by symptoms. There are signs also which indicate the condition of the business organism. Certain phenomena are invariably followed by cer tain others. The Alexander Hamilton Institute wants its subscribers to be able to trace the connec tion of cause and effect between tvents in the business world. It would have them scientific as well as prac tical.
3. Duty of the teacher Ims met the student who expects the teacher somehow to in ject knowledge and understanding into him. Such a student unconsciously thinks of his intellect as a bucket and of the teacher as a man of such skill that he can fill the bucket with knowledge. He does not want to make .any effort himself and is rather in credulous when told that he has got to do the work, the teacher merely telling him what to do.
Tbe first duty of a subscriber to the Modern Busi ness Course and Service is to resolve that he will read, carefully and with an open mind, all the Texts and other literature which he receives from the Institute.
His second duty is to give the Institute every possi ble chance to help him. If he has tried his best to un derstand a principle or to solve a problem and is still perplexed, he should seek the advice of the Institute.
Finally, the subscriber should not let himself get discouraged. Most of his study should be a joy to him, for the human mind is fortunately so constituted that it loves to understand things. Curiosity is a man ifestation of that love; if that quality had been left out of man, the human race would still be in a state of savagery. Instinctively a man wants to know why certain things take place. Too often men are satis fied with a reason that does not really explain. For thousands of years men were content merely to know that rain and sunshine made the crops grow; only in recent years have they discovered that many other things are essential, and why different kinds of soil are best for different crops.
The scientist always takes keen. pleasure in the dis covery of a new truth. I doubt, indeed, if tbere is any higher or finer kind of pleasure. So the student should take pleasure, as a rule, in the rolling away of a curtain which has hidden from him an important truth. Even tho it be a truth well known to many others, to him it will be a discovery.
But the subscriber must not expect always to be entertained and delighted. Let him bear in mind that the Modern Business Course and Service has been carefully planned by men who have had much experi ence as teachers and that they have sought to give him the benefit of their thinking and kr- lowledge in the best possible manner. The subscriber who "sticks to the end" will be an enthusiast in the study of business problems in general and of' his own in particular.
4. Read with the mind.—Books, magazines and newspapers are so cheap that there is danger lest reading become a lost art. A few centuries ago, when books were scarce, much real reading was done. Now we skim the newspapers, dash thru the maga zines, and hastily leap film many books—and pride ourselves on the fact that we have read much.
But reading is an art, and it must be learned by con scious effort. Just as many a student is likely to think that a teacher can pour information into him, so the average reader of a book has an idea, that the author is going to g,ive him something without any effort on his part. That cannot be done.
No one can get anything worth while out of a book unless while reading it with his eyes his mind works just as did the author's mind when he wrote the book.
The eyes must be thought of merely as windows thru which the mind looks and grasps and reproduces the author's thoughts. Any other kind of reading is casual, desultory, profitless. Novels and stories may be read with the intellect half-asleep, the imag ination and memory alone being really awake, but the reading done for the purpose of training the under standing must be done by the mind itself. The entire mind must be awake.
A man may read a chapter in psychology or political economy a dozen times and have no understanding of its contents. If he has an unusually retentive mem ory, he may be able to recite parts of the chapter and yet have no real knowledge of what the author in tended to convey. IIe reads merely with his eyes. But if lie makes his mind work, and if the author is not obscure in his style, a single reading of the same chap.ter will make him master of all the author has to sa:y.