Memory is a most useful servant and should not be neglected, but the man who makes all of his faculties work realizes that memory carries, as it were, only second-hand goods. He who uses memory merely as an aid to judgment and imagination concentrates, and he is the man who achieves real success in business.
It goes without saying that in reading the pages of this Introduction your mind should be in a state of concentration. Your judgment, that is, your intel lect, should be weighing the correctness and soundness of my statements. Your imagination should be plac ing on the screen many pictures, say of yourself or a friend seeking to get the heart out of a chapter, or of yourself as you will be five years hence when you will read like Immanuel Kant. Your memory may jog you now and then with a reminder that you have read something like this in another book, or that you yourself have had an experience which in some way confirms some of my statements.
8. On being order to get much benefit out of any study a man must really want to know, he must be curious ; the greater his curiosity the greater will be his zest in his study. Studying a subject in which we are not interested merely results in weariness.
A subscriber ambitious to make the most of him self in business, even tho in the past he has found study dull and books dreary, should not lose heart. The fact that he did not like study at school and was never interested in books, preferring always to learn everything by doing and by observation, is not evi dence that he will not be really interested in the think ing and reading which the Institute will strive to make him do. If he has taken up the task languidly, his first job must be to convince himself that he cannot get on in the world as he ought to unless he goes film the Modern Business Course conscientiously. Let him put behind him the notion that success of any kind ever comes as the result of luck or chance. If he follows the Course of the Institute, he will have no doubt upon that score. Success in business comes only to those who work hard and do clear thinking. If the subscriber is in earnest and is willing to pay the price, namely, that of work and concentration, he will find himself getting more_and more interested as lie pursues the Course.
9. Clear the foregoing pages I have occasionally made references to clear thinking, science, scientific training, knowledge and understanding. It is well for us at the outset to get the correct mean ing of these expressions.
I have frequently asked college seniors to define the words "think" and "cause," and I have rarely got a satisfactory reply. The answers are too often ex amples of muddled thinking. A man, to be sure, may think clearly and yet not be able to explain what he means by clear thinking. However, it helps us to keep our thinking clear if we know exactly what it is and some of the common difficulties in the way of it. The average man may suppose he is thinking when he is only dreaming or letting his fancy construct air castles. Others suppose they are thinking when they are just sitting idly while images of this and that thing seen and remembered pass thru consciousness. They are not thinking at all; they are enjoying a memory "movie." Thinking is not an idle, lazy, passive mental occu pation. It is strenuous work of the intellect. The aim of thinking is understanding. The mind is look ing for an explanation of something that it does not understand. It is seeking to throw- light into a dark place.
When do we understand anything? When are we able to explain it? Not until we know precisely what is its cause. If the price, of copper declines, we do not understand it and cannot explain it until we know the cause of the decline. We rna2,, learn that new copper mines have been discovered, and that the world's output of copper has been greatly increased. Then we are satisfied, for our mind has discovered a cause which explains the decline of price.
But our mind must not be too easily satisfied. We must be as sure as possible, if our thinking is to be clear, that we have found the real cause of the pile non-ienon we are studying. Nearly all phenomena in the world of nature, as w-ell as in the world of business, are the results of a combination of forces. We do not do clear thinking if we neglect any of them.