VI 



HOW TO THINK 



A DISTINGUISHED editor, who had known 

 most of the celebrities of his generation, once 

 told me his impressions of Henry Ward 

 Beecher. "There," he said, "was a man who knew 

 more than all the others, yet who never seemed to work 

 to acquire his knowledge. Beecher seemed to know 

 things by intuition; to imbibe information by occult 

 processes." 



Impressed by the wonderful personality of the great 

 preacher, my informant was, I think, more than half 

 serious in this estimate. But of course no sober analyst 

 could accept the estimate at its face value. One haz- 

 ards nothing in asserting that Beecher, like all the rest 

 of mankind, could have no veritable knowledge that did 

 not come to him through the ordinary channels of sense. 

 To think the contrary would be to harbor a mischiev- 

 ous belief. Few things are more certain than that the 

 highest minds and the lowest are compounded of the 

 same elements and held subject to the same laws of 

 action. 



The illusion of intuitive knowledge, in a mind like that 

 of Beecher, grows out of the fact that such minds are 

 exquisitely sensitive to impressions, receiving sensations 

 as it were by an instantaneous process, and compound- 

 ing them into ideas with like rapidity; then associat- 

 ing these ideas into wide systems of comparison. 



