"The Secrets of Mental Supremacy.."

"The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, the swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, the cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn no more shall rouse them from their lowly bed."

The Great Secret of Sense Training.

The great secret of a true development of the perceptions is discrimination--the realization of differences. To the savage a sound is a sound; to the musician it is excruciating discord or exquisite harmony. To the musician a little depression in the ground, a bent twig, a turned leaf--they are nothing; to the savage they mean food, an enemy, safety, or danger. In the printed pages the unlettered boor sees only foolish black marks on white paper; but in those black marks the man of education sees that which makes his heart beat faster, his eyes swim with tears--which tells him secrets of life the clodhopper will never, never know. The differences are in the trained or untrained perceptions.

Most of the exercises which I shall describe are quite simple--many, perhaps, will seem trivial. But remember, as a great educator has said: "The . . . point in education is the power to attend to things which may be in themselves indifferent by arousing an artificial feeling of interest."

So the first exercise is quite simple--simple, but not easy. Try it and see.

Take any object you like--a book, a pen, a pair of scissors. Lay it on the table before you. Then take pencil and paper and describe it. Simply tell what you see. Can you? I doubt it. Tell its dimensions, weight, color, form, markings, lettering, origin, uses, possibilities, shortcomings. See how fully you can write about the object. The result will probably not please you. You will find that you have not nearly the powers of expression which you supposed you possessed. But--it is good training; and with practice your powers will grow rapidly.

You can do the same thing out of doors. Look at a mountain peak, the ocean, a horse, a bird. If you think for a moment there is nothing to write about these things read up "Poem in the Valley of Chamouni," Byron's splendid passage beginning "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll," the superb poem in the book of Job describing the horse, Shelley's "Skylark," and so on.

10 of 52 pages. Go to page:	"Mental Efficiency - The Secrets of Mental Supremacy..."
	To Order The E-Book - Mental Supremacy