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III

S a man molds and develops his gray matter, he creates himself. To a great extent, life is

just what we will it; happiness is recompense for work well done, and misery generally follows in the wake of irresponsibility, erroneous ideals, slothfulness and the violation of nature's laws.

Life is motion, activity, work, and we accomplish and attain in life whatever we sincerely and earnestly want enough to strive and work for. Obstacles and resistance to progress and achievement develop mental power, stamina and the strength and courage of the will; a persistent and purposeful will admits of no defeat and is ever ready to pick up the gauntlet of fate in the battle for knowledge, truth and right. Sturgis Ingersoll has aptly said that "there is no one so lucky as to get the prizes of life without a fight, and no one so unlucky as to be without the desire, no matter how deeply it may be buried in his nature, to make that fight."

Success is realized by concentrated effort and hard work. The average man bemoans his luck, blames lack of opportunity for his failure or status of mediocrity and censures the Goddess Fate; the successful man makes his own opportunities, hurdles obstacles, overcomes barriers, ridicules the doctrine of chance, harnesses his innate forces and expends his efforts in achieving results,-not in de

vising excuses. In one case, the will has no virility, it is spineless and flabby; in the other, it is of finely tempered steel, bending but not breaking, undentable and uncompromising, with power, suppleness and purpose.

Many men with great inherent possibilities and wonderful mental endowment are not a success because they do not will it so; they may pretend or even think they do, but in reality they do not even comprehend the meaning of the word. Success in life comes with whole-hearted, steady and persistent devotion to purpose and as a result of intelligent selection and elimination. Those things which are worth while, upbuilding and developing are courted; those negative, worthless and perverting qualities, which are often attractively garbed and enticingly presented, are shunned.

The proper exercise of the will means persistent effort, at times great self-denial and, in early life, an abstinence from certain alluring pleasures for what may seem to be a somewhat chimerical joy of service; as life advances, however, realities become convincingly real to the philosophical mind and achievement the substantial satisfaction of the inner man. Life's battle is with oneself even more than with the world and the greatest fight to wage with oneself is not with what has been termed "inherent sin," but with a soul-destroying inertia, a lethargic indifference to the expenditure of misguided energy and to the appreciation of one's powers and possibilities for usefulness, service and achievement. The greatest blessing that could come to man would be a true inner vision which

would demand that he always see himself conspicuously and convincingly revealed in all his shortcomings, and with all his unimproved opportunities lying before him, each with its peculiar possible achievement portrayed.

Eliot has said, "Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarding who sees within the sphere of his own activity anything which he can help to remedy, or within himself a deficiency which he can hope to overcome." The trouble with the average man is that he will not voluntarily look within himself and if he is influenced to look, his vision is so blurred by bias and self-satisfaction that he will not see; at the same time he is quite willing to be critical of others and see much that is wrong in the world and in humanity about him. Looking at the shortcomings within himself, he is apt to look through the large lens of a telescope, but he reverses his position of vision quickly when he looks at others, and as a result, the errors of oneself are minimized and the errors of others are magnified. Confucius said, "The disease of men is this,— that they neglect their own fields and go to weed the fields of others and that what they require from others is great, while what they lay upon themselves is light.'

Men engaged in commercial or industrial life frequently take a carefully prepared and checked inventory of their stock; raw and manufactured materials are carefully measured, counted and weighed, and values placed thereon. In a well conducted manufacturing business the condition of the inventory and the nature and quality of the ma

terials in process are always known, and the mechanism of production is kept at a high degree of efficiency. Why should we not take a similar inventory of our gray matter, determine the efficiency of brain mechanism and study the output of our "Thought Factory"? The manufacturer or mer

chant knows whether he has ten or five cases of a commodity in his warehouse and he knows the grade and value of every item of his stock; the average man does not know whether his brain contains ten or one unit of a certain Thought Power and betrays no interest in regard to quality or value of the product of mental processes, or in the efficiency and scientific utilization of his apparatus for producing thought and acquiring knowledge.

In a well organized factory there should be creation, industry and power at work, with energy effectively expended in every department, all to produce a valuable product a perfect whole. It is futile to run one department of a factory, or one small section of the human brain, with extreme efficiency, and to its designed output, if other necessary departments are lagging behind or are closed down. because of lack of help, shortage of power, dearth of materials, inaccurate drawings, or absence of executive supervision. In a well conducted factory, production proceeds as a cycle or a flux, and this with machine-like precision. Coördination and team work must be in evidence, but the prime essential to success is that every shop, every department, and every machine must economically turn out its full quota of work of a certain prescribed quality within a predetermined time. If a man's

brain functioned as an efficient factory, operating under truly scientific management, with an organization of workers in complete harmony and with a skilled executive of vision and sympathy, who could estimate what power such a dominant, virile mentality would be in the world?

The efficient or superior man knows the art of living and makes the most out of what nature has given him; every phase of life must be considered, no section of gray matter can be ignored, and he is, therefore, not only a worker, industrious and thorough, but also intensely human, manly in the highest sense, sympathetic, reachable, lovable. Dresser has well said that "Efficiency is not a merely vocational idea but pertains to the whole of life. It is a human question." The efficient man must be adaptable and should not ignore any factor within or without himself. He is of necessity a man of thought, purpose and action. His brain was created for action, his gray matter is developed by action and his success lies in carrying the wisdom of the mental world into realization in the external world.

Greatness is all-round development. A brain abnormally developed in any one or more isolated parts and neglected elsewhere, is not great. Such unnatural growth or unusual and conspicuous overdevelopment of any one part or parts of the physical body supply the freaks for the circus-shows and the doers of stunts on the vaudeville stage. A great money-maker is not necessarily a great man; he may have a marked faculty for making money but may have no faculty for enjoying or properly