Page:Forging of Passion Into Power.djvu/27

Rh you are cut off from the great joy of delivering your message to your fellow-men and women.

Thoughts are facts; and they can pass through barriers impenetrable to human bodies.

Let me help you, if I can, to understand yourselves. If you once do that, believe me, you will somehow succeed in getting the world to understand you.

I want to help you, if you will allow me, to learn the art (for it is an art, quite as much so as music and painting) of the orderly arrangement of thought.

It is a common mistake to suppose that the Art of Thinking can be learned only by thinking of what are called "learned" topics. This is not the case. The finest music is made not by clashing together heavy masses of gems or of precious metals, but by "scraping the guts of a cat with hairs from the tail of a horse." But you must do the scraping according to the Laws of Music.

The Art of Thinking can be learned, and practised, with very homely and even unbeautiful material to think about. It is said that the finest poetry in the Yiddish language was written by a man who toiled seventeen hours a day in a factory and lived in a hideous tenement of New York.

A man in prison once wrote to a woman outside:—

People who are well-to-do, free and cultured, and who live in beautiful surroundings, admire those lines