"The Secrets of Mental Supremacy.."

Conscious Action Becomes Unconscious.

It is a beneficent law of the mind (and of the body, too, for that matter) that any act, after it has been repeated a certain number of times, tends to become automatic--to do itself without any sensation of effort, sometimes even without our knowledge. A few months of careful effort will in practically every case develop such a habit of associating apposite ideas, that the student will possess, without further care or drill, this most superb accomplishment of the mind--the power of association.

It requires both care and attention to form any desirable habit, either of mind or body; but, the habit once formed, no further care or attention is necessary. To learn to write, for instance, to form the letters, to combine them into words, to elaborate the words into sentences and paragraphs, the paragraphs into pages--all this takes time, a number of years. Once thoroughly learned, however, as by a trained writer, the practice of writing requires no special care or effort.

And so with this important matter of association. Few people have it to any great degree. In most people the ideas are separate, isolated. Cardinal Newman says of some seafaring men that they "find themselves now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of great cities and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce or in the islands of the south; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar or on the Andes; and nothing which meets them carries them forward or backward to any idea beyond itself. Nothing has . . . any relations; nothing has a history or a promise." All this means, in a word, that these men have not the power of association.

In order to arrange our ideas into clusters or groups, we must for a time give special attention to the matter. As a help to study along these lines, I can recommend the following exercises which have proven in my own personal experience and in that of others advised by me, of the greatest possible value.

Take any object you like--a rose, a pencil, a chair, a wheel, a knife. Having selected your object write out a list of its peculiarities. Say you have taken a knife--an ordinary table knife. Now, describe its form, color, size, shape, weight, material, and state its peculiarities--hard, cool, sharp, heavy, opaque, elastic.

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