The Master Mind

number have passed into the third class, becoming the Master Minds of their time and place.

A talented writer has said regarding this: “We moderns are unaccustomed to mastering our own inner thoughts and feelings. That a man should be a prey to any thought that happens to take possession of his mind is commonly assumed among us to be unavoidable. It may be a matter of regret that he should be kept awake all night by anxiety regarding the outcome of a lawsuit the next day, but that he should have the power to determine whether he remains awake or not seems an extravagant demand. The image of an impending calamity is no doubt hateful, but its very hatefulness (we say) makes it haunt the mind all the more persistently, and it is useless to try to expel it. Yet this is an absurd position for man, the heir of all the ages, to be in:

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Hag-ridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain. If a pebble in our boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and shake it out. And once the matter is truly understood, it is just as easy to
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expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. There should be no mistake about this, no difference of opinion. The thing is obvious, clear, and unmistakable. It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from the mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and until a man can do that, it is nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over nature. He is a mere slave, a prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain. Yet the weary and care-worn faces that we meet by the thousands, even among the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too
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clearly how seldom this mastery is obtained.”