Excerpt from Self Education: An Address Given Before the Boston Architectural Club, April the Third, 1909 The alternation between a state of activity and a state of passivity, which is a law of our physical being, as it is a law of all nature, is characteristic of the action of the mind as well; observation and meditation are the two poles of thought. The tendency of mod ern life and of our active American tempera ment is towards a too exclusive functioning of the mind in its outgoing state, and this re sults in a great cleverness and a great shal lowness. It is only in moments of quietmeditation that the great synthetic, funda mental truths reveal themselves. Observe ceaselessly, weigh, judge, criticise - this order of intellectual activity is important and valu able - but the mind must be steadied and strengthened by another and a different pro cess. The power of attention, the ability to concentrate, is the measure of mental etfi ciency, and this power may be developed by a training exactly analogous to that by which a muscle is developed, for mind and muscle are alike the instruments of the silent Thinker who sits behind. The mind an instrument of something higher than the mind: here is a truth so fertile that in the language of Ori ental imagery, If you were to tell this to a dry stick, branches would grow, and leaves Sprout from it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.