“Ruskin took a common rock-crystal and saw hidden within its stolid heart lessons which have not yet ceased to move men’s lives.  Beecher stood for hours before the window of a jewelry store thinking out analogies between jewels and the souls of men.  Gough saw in a single drop of water enough truth wherewith to quench the thirst of five thousand souls.  Thoreau sat so still in the shadowy woods that birds and insects came and opened up their secret lives to his eye.  Emerson observed the soul of a man so long that at length he could say, ’I cannot hear what you say, for seeing what you are.’  Preyer for three years studied the life of his babe and so became an authority upon the child mind.  Observation!  Most men are blind.  There are a thousand times as many hidden truths and undiscovered facts about us to-day as have made discoverers famous—­facts waiting for some one to ’pluck out the heart of their mystery.’  But so long as men go about the search with eyes that see not, so long will these hidden pearls lie in their shells.  Not an orator but who could more effectively point and feather his shafts were he to search nature rather than libraries.  Too few can see ‘sermons in stones’ and ‘books in the running brooks,’ because they are so used to seeing merely sermons in books and only stones in running brooks.  Sir Philip Sidney had a saying, ‘Look in thy heart and write;’ Massillon explained his astute knowledge of the human heart by saying, ‘I learned it by studying myself;’ Byron says of John Locke that ’all his knowledge of the human understanding was derived from studying his own mind.’  Since multiform nature is all about us, originality ought not to be so rare."[8]

The Thinking Mind

Thinking is doing mental arithmetic with facts.  Add this fact to that and you reach a certain conclusion.  Subtract this truth from another and you have a definite result.  Multiply this fact by another and have a precise product.  See how many times this occurrence happens in that space of time and you have reached a calculable dividend.  In thought-processes you perform every known problem of arithmetic and algebra.  That is why mathematics are such excellent mental gymnastics.  But by the same token, thinking is work.  Thinking takes energy.  Thinking requires time, and patience, and broad information, and clearheadedness.  Beyond a miserable little surface-scratching, few people really think at all—­only one in a thousand, according to the pundit already quoted.  So long as the present system of education prevails and children are taught through the ear rather than through the eye, so long as they are expected to remember thoughts of others rather than think for themselves, this proportion will continue—­one man in a million will be able to see, and one in a thousand to think.

But, however thought-less a mind has been, there is promise of better things so soon as the mind detects its own lack of thought-power.  The first step is to stop regarding thought as “the magic of the mind,” to use Byron’s expression, and see it as thought truly is—­a weighing of ideas and a placing of them in relationships to each other.  Ponder this definition and see if you have learned to think efficiently.