"The Secrets of Mental Supremacy.."

Having written out this list of descriptive points, take them up one by one and think of what other objects have the same quality. For instance, in material the knife, being of steel with an ivory handle, resembles all cutlery and steel machinery, differing from them not in material but perhaps in the manner and degree of the tempering. The ivory handle will suggest a large number of articles made of that material.

The sharpness of the knife suggests lancets, swords, scissors, and so on, and may also be applied in a figurative way, as to the nature of a remark ("Her words were like a dagger thrust into his soul"); or the effect of a glance ("An eye like a bayonet thrust met mine") and so on. This treatment of the object "knife" if done exhaustively will prove a most valuable exercise.

Three or four hours over it will be time well spent. Not that you are specially interested in the subject "knife," its analysis or its relations, but that in going through the exercises with any object whatever, you are getting your mind into the habit of treating all subjects in the same analytical manner. By the time you have treated twenty different objects in accordance with this method, you will have gone far toward gaining the invaluable accomplishment of associating ideas.

VI.

IMAGINATION AND HOW TO CULTIVATE IT.

The mind can make substance and people planets of its own.--Byron.

The universe to man is but a projection of his own inner consciousness.-- Kant.

OF all the powers of the mind, imagination is the most picturesque, and, in many respects, the most interesting. Without it the world would be barren. Not merely would there be no pictures, no music, no books, but there would be no houses, no bridges, no ocean greyhounds, no great business enterprises -- nothing, in fact; for everything that man has made has been first conceived in the imagination before it was born into actual being.

We cannot think of a person being without any power of imagination; for that is an impossibility. But many, many people, I am sorry to say, are greatly deficient in imagination; and this lack of imagination alone is enough to render them commonplace, uninteresting, and of little use or significance in the world.

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