The Master Mind

pounding away like a great engine, with giant power and perfect economy—no wear and tear, or friction, or dislocation of parts due to the working of different forces at the same time. Then, when the work is finished, if there is no more occasion for the use of the machine, it must stop equally, absolutely—stop entirely—no worrying (as if a group of boys were allowed to play their mischief with a locomotive as soon as it was in the shed)—and the man must retire into that region of his consciousness where his true self dwells.

“I say that the power of the thought-machine is enormously increased by this faculty of letting it alone on the one hand, and of using it singly and with concentration on the other. It becomes a true tool, which a master workman lays down when finished, but which only a bungler carries around with him all the time just to show that he possesses it. Beyond the work produced by the tool itself is the knowledge that comes to us apart from its use; when the noise of the workshop is over, and the mallet and plane are laid aside—the faint sounds coming through the open window from the valley and the far seashore; the dim fringe of deeper knowledge which begins to grow as soon as the eternal click-clack of thought is over—the extraordinary intuitions and perceptions, which, though partaking in some degree of the character of thought, spring from entirely different conditions and are the forerunners of a changed consciousness.

“The subjection of thought is closely related to the subjection of desire, and consequently has its specifically moral as well as its specifically intellectual relation to the question in hand. Nine-tenths of the