ing the control to the sturdy principle, Be sure you are right. This engenders a habit of self-rectification, of keeping one's head in the rush and onset of utterance, of falling back on sound sense and the plain appearance of things, which in the long run is the one guarantee of solid and surviving literary work.

In somewhat greater detail we may note here the following good effects of this verifying spirit.

In

1. It tempers and regulates the constructive faculty. the glow of discussion or creativeness a writer is often tempted to say a thing not because it is true but because it is striking. The observation has been made, and the result looks plausible, but it has not been subjected to the necessary verification. The writer thus, whether his thought is correct or not, is primarily seeking not to make a truth prevail but to gain attention to a performance, or perhaps to fill out an ingenious plan; and this motive of work, sooner or later, is sure to work harm. With the verifying impulse in control, however, the solid basis of appeal is the established fact; and whatever freedom of plan or utterance there is — and the impulse, rightly employed, is no check to this - obeys the fact as a structural and emotional law.

2. It keeps the work close to the first-hand and commonsense view of things, the natural color. Learning has a way, unless regulated by the touch of earth, of piling itself up in pedantic, bookish, top-heavy systems remote from human interests. It is a tendency to be guarded against in all specialized study. The corrective to this the verifying spirit has a large hand in supplying; for its appeal is not more to the highly sublimated than to the every-day and universal observing powers.1

1 "We heard Webster once, in a sentence and a look, crush an hour's argument of the curious workman; it was most intellectually wire-drawn and hair-splitting, with Grecian sophistry, and a subtlety the Leontine Gorgias might have envied. It

3. It creates the valuable ability to hold judgments in abeyance, to tolerate uncertainty on subjects wherein verification is not possible. The merit of youthful thinkers is vigor and directness; their fault, to be overcome by ripening and deepening judgment, is rash and one-sided conclusion, made on insufficient ground. To such minds it is a pain, and seems a sin, to be in want of decision or of definite opinions; it seems to indicate weakness and vacillation. But there are occasions where just this incertitude is strength; because there are questions that cannot be settled by the first look of things, or perhaps cannot be settled at all. The verifying, patient, testing spirit is tolerant of such questions and waits for the grounded answer, or failing this, is not afraid to say, I do not know.1

II.

Habits of Meditation. The ability to think out the design of an individual work of literature is based upon a previous training, deep and long continued, wherein the writer's mind has become disposed and steadied to that kind of work. name we give to this deeper and habitual mental activity is meditation; meaning thereby not only concentrated thought

The

was about two car-wheels, which to common eyes looked as like as two eggs; but Mr. Choate, by a fine line of argument between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, and a discourse on the 'fixation of points' so deep and fine as to lose itself in obscurity, showed the jury there was a heaven-wide difference between them. 'But,' said Mr. Webster, and his great eyes opened wide and black, as he stared at the big twin wheels before him, 'Gentlemen of the jury, there they are, — look at 'em '; and as he pronounced this answer, in tones of vast volume, the distorted wheels seemed to shrink back again into their original similarity, and the long argument on the 'fixation of points' died a natural death.” — PARKER, Golden Age of American Oratory, p. 221.

1 "During this training in accurate observation, the youth should learn how hard it is to determine with certainty even an apparently simple fact. He should learn to distrust the evidence of his own senses, to repeat, corroborate, and verify his observations, and to mark the profound distinction between the fact and any inference, however obvious, from the fact."- ELIOT, American Contributions to Civilization, p. 215.

but along with it a deliberate continuance of application until the subject has assumed a seasoned form and order in the mind. It may be called, in a word, the trained power of letting a thought grow. Meditation is just the opposite of revery, with which superficial thinking sometimes confounds it. In revery the mind, being passive, does not direct its course of thinking but is borne on vaguely by it. In meditation, while the course of thinking seems to be, and is, following its own evolution, the mind, intensely active, is all the while working it out in ordered process. The power to

do this has to be developed by self-culture, until the mind which to begin with was wayward and unsure, or more or less the prey of revery, has acquired by degrees a firm grasp, a penetrative and concentrative insight, a general sense of mastery over its workings.

Meditation, when itself a habit, has at its basis certain elemental habits which become a kind of exaction or necessity of the thinking mind. The following are the most practically operative of these.

The Habit of seeking Clearness. It is often remarked that the first presentation of a subject to the writer's thought is apt to be cloudy; a vague idea which must gradually be worked from haziness to clearness. This plight of the subject, at whatever stage of meditation, is by no means a necessity. The gist of the whole matter may flash upon the mind at once; and if the mind has formed a habit of seeking clearness it will. By this is meant a habit, applied to every acquisition of thought as it comes, of patiently thinking away its indistinctness and intricacy until its central significance stands out plain. The neglect to do this in any case does just so much to fasten a vague tendency on the mind. The stern holding one's self to it in every case does so much to make the effort superfluous; it establishes the exaction of clear thinking as a second nature. And when this is so it is

increasingly the fact that subjects of thought come to mind not cloudily but in clear-cut nucleus and outline.

One good effect of this habit is to keep the writer from being content with hasty or ill-considered work. The demand for clearness becomes to him a kind of conscience, forbidding him either to let his own mind be imposed upon by a show of profundity in the subject, or to let any half-ripened work leave his hands. It forbids lazy or sloppy or hurried thinking.

keep the writer

This is a fre-
Easily carried

A second good effect of this habit is to from attacking subjects that are beyond him. quently noted tendency of young writers. away by the surface-ideas of a great subject, they soon find themselves committed beyond their depth, and all they can do is merely to retail truisms. The grounded resolve to be clear, to subject every thought rigorously to the test of plainness, does much to keep thinkers in their own sphere.1

The Habit of seeking Order. — This is correlative to the habit just mentioned; being a distributive act while the other is concentrative. That is, it seeks to view subjects analytically; determining their parts and dependencies, noting what is principal and what subordinate, seeing them in a kind of perspective, wherein effect stretches out from cause and concrete details from central principles. This ability, like the other, has to be developed from individual effort to habit, by being applied to all subjects of thought, and not merely to the themes on which one is to write. And when by habit the mind is thoroughly set to tolerate no disorder, every subject that comes falls into spontaneous order, and all collateral thought, and memorized experience, and reading even the most casual, ranges in relation with it.

1 A suggestive indication of a clear-seeking mind is the note appended to Milton's unfinished poem on The Passion: "This subject the Author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."

Of good effects of this habit, one is, that the planning of material becomes less and less a drudgery or a seeming arbitrary process, and more and more a natural growth, wherein both the subject and the organizing mind are following the lines of their own self-movement. Not that planning becomes less work; it is likelier to be more; but the work is deeper and more central, less like shallow ingenuity, more like a necessary evolution.1

A second good result of this habit, is that the writer is thus guarded against the superficial tendencies of rapid writing. Rapid composition is not necessarily shallow, any more than careful and labored authorship is ipso facto thorough. Both qualities are really qualities not of the composition but of the mind. It is the trained intellect, intolerant of distorted or dislocated thought, that contributes most to permanent and satisfying work. With this antecedent culture once established the ability to write rapidly, which is easily enough acquired, has a sound basis to build upon, while its bad tendencies are forestalled and avoided.

The Habit of seeking Independent Conclusions. This habit it is which is the foundation of originality in writing. It may not lead to better views of truth than are already extant ; it may not lead to new conclusions, in the absolute sense; its virtue is that by it the writer does his own thinking and reaches his own conclusion. Whatever he gives to the world has become, for him, a discovery; it is vitalized by his mind, and takes form according to his vision and personality. This, and not the absolute new, is what is meant by origi

1 Of the essay whose plan is studied below, p. 438, the author writes: "My literary and critical essays are by-products of my desk, written for the most part to ease the strain of my regular and, so to say, professional writing. They are, therefore, not thought out by plan before being composed, but form themselves under my hand as I turn and return to them from time to time. I am the more pleased that this one should turn out to possess something so nearly like a systematic plan.” — Private letter from Professor Woodrow Wilson.