MAKE THE BRAIN GLOW

Hokitika Guardian, 21 March 1930, Page 5

MAKE THE BRAIN GLOW

(International University Bureau.)

Reading some of the numerous biographies of the great which are such popular reading nowadays, we may notice one trait which seems common to them all. That is, at certain crises in their lives, powerful ideas come to them suddenly as a glow or flames of intellect. The problem .was solved, as it were, in lightning flash which illuminates the dark places and makes everything clear.

These sudden gleams are very valuable. They resemble radium particles in the brain, but to trust entirely to these sporadic flashes of insight would be most unwise. They only come to those who are beforehand ready to do a considerable amount of steady and concentrated thinking on the problems to be solved. This was the method of Napoleon and Foch, and from what we know of Shakespeare’s reading, we may assume that it was his also. Meditation to some active persons, seems akin to self-indulgence. As a fact it is not that, but rather self-dis-cipline. Much energy is often wasted in minor tasks which could be delegated, and by an aimless hurrying hither and thither which amounts to little in the end.

The power of concentrated thinking w valuable because it enables us to judge the thoughts of others, as well as to direct our own to the best advantage. The lack of practice in “thinking things out” is the source of those svmpton.s of perverse thought which we meet with in conversation and in books every day of our lives. One who has never troubled to undergo the discipline of logical thought will believe any nonsense he wishes to believe. A book now lies open before us which bears upon every page a clear sign that it is merelv a statement—put in a pseudointellectual form—of the theories the writer holds dear. And so long as we are content to think loosely we shall continue to write and talk in the .same way.

Tti Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the gibbering of an ape is interpreted as the sounds of three or four foreign languages by people who bad some little knowledge of them. Thev heard one or two characteristic sounds, and immediately, hv confused thinking, ilimped to false conclusions. We see how important clear thinking is when we realize that nothing in the world causes more irritation and general bad feeling than the confusion of facts with inferences,