Faith is the torch that leads the way when the other faculties cannot see.It is doubting and facing the wrong way, facing toward the black, depressing, hopeless outlook that kills effort and paralyzes ambition.There is a divine current within us which would always flow Godward, always lead to our ultimate advantage, did we not obstruct it, or turn it aside by our doubts and fears.He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.James Allen.
Faith is the torch that leads the way when the other faculties cannot see.
It is doubting and facing the wrong way, facing toward the black, depressing, hopeless outlook that kills effort and paralyzes ambition.
There is a divine current within us which would always flow Godward, always lead to our ultimate advantage, did we not obstruct it, or turn it aside by our doubts and fears.
He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.
James Allen.
When David Hume, the agnostic, was twitted with his inconsistency in going to hear the orthodox Scotch minister, John Brown, preach, he replied, "I don't believe all that he says, buthedoes, and once a week I like to hear a man who believes what he says."
If you utter a lie with the conviction that you are speaking the truth people will believe what you say, whereas if you proclaim a truthin a weak, hesitating voice, in a doubting manner, no one will believe you. If you should take a tray of genuine gold pieces upon the street and try to sell them, while showing by your very expression that you did not believe in what you had for sale, you could not dispose of those gold pieces for a tithe of their value. Nobody would believe either in their genuineness or in your own. Your timid, doubting, hesitating manner would queer all your chances of doing what you wanted to do.
I used to go trout fishing with two men, one of whom was always saying that he never had any luck fishing, that he somehow didn't have the knack, and never expected to catch many fish. This doubt totally unfitted him for successful trout fishing. He didn't take enough interest in the sport to study the habits and the haunts of the trout. He did not know the likely places in streams and rivers to drop his hook. He did not know the best kinds of bait to use. His doubt of his ability led to indifference, and this made him a failure as a trout fisher. The other man never had a doubt of success. If there were any trout to be caught he felt sure he would catchthem. For years he had made a study of trout habits. He could tell which side of the big rocks to cast his hook, and he knew how to cast it in a way that would tempt the trout. Fishing in the same stream alongside the doubtful, indifferent fisherman he would catch ten times as many fish.
If there is a great big doubt in your self-faith, if you have left a bridge standing for your retreat in case of defeat, if you lack clean-cut, firm decision, if there is any interrogation point in your confidence in yourself, there will be a limp in your success gait, and you will not be able to rise out of mediocrity.
Our worst enemies are not outside but inside of us. Every human being harbors a traitor who is always on the watch to thwart his ambition, to turn him aside from his aim. That traitor is doubt. You must make up your mind at the very outset of your career that you will always be followed about by certain mental enemies, mental traitors, which will try to dissuade you from doing the highest or biggest thing possible to you. Doubt is one of the most insistent of these, and will dog your steps to your grave. The man orwoman who is not strong enough to resist its insidious attacks will never do what he or she is capable of doing, and was sent into the world by the Creator to do.
The person who is always fearful of consequences, who is in doubt as to the outcome of his acts, or whether he is really capable of doing what he undertakes, will always be a weakling. No one who is not bigger than his doubts can ever accomplish anything great or worth while, because this subtle enemy kills initiative and self-confidence, and without these dominant qualities no human being can measure up to his possibilities.
But for doubt, which strangles the very beginning of things, initiative instead of being so rare would be a common virtue among all classes. Nine out of ten average individuals are held back from testing their powers by the suggestions of doubt. If it were possible to drive from the human mind this specter which stands at the door of our hopes, of our resolution, which throws its baleful shadow across our vision, civilization would forge ahead by leaps and bounds. This miserable traitor, under the guise of a friend, is holding downmillions of men and women below the level of their powers, keeping them from beginning things which they are capable of doing, but which doubt warns them at their peril not to attempt.
Doubt is responsible for more suicides, more misery, more bankrupt lives, more failures, than any other one thing. It makes more people afraid to start out on a course they know they ought to pursue than any other thing. Standing right at the gateway of our choice, at the parting of the ways, when we have fully resolved to take the path that is best for us, a hard and forbidding one compared with the easy way along the line of least resistance, doubt calls a halt. It bids us pause and think once more, asks us to look again at the rugged path we have chosen and consider whether we really want to pay the price of our choice, to take that turning when the other looks so much brighter and pleasanter and is so very much easier.
This is the point of cleavage which marks the beginning of failure for the timid soul who is not bigger than his doubt. The suggestions pushed into his mind by his enemy makehim hesitate. He is moved to "stop, look, and listen." He begins to reconsider, to look again at the obstacles ahead, and the longer he looks the bigger they grow. He becomes frightened, fears he cannot do the thing that at first seemed possible, and finally turns aside to the easier path of mediocrity and commonness.
Doubt has killed more splendid projects, shattered more ambitious schemes, strangled more effective genius, neutralized more superb effort, blasted more fine intellects, thwarted more splendid ambitions than any other enemy of the race.
Talk about drug victims and slaves of drink! Doubt has more victims than even these terrible enemies of the race. We see them everywhere in menial and lowly positions, perpetual clerks, discontented drudges, hewers of wood and drawers of water, paralyzed at the very gateway of their career by that fatal trait which they have never learned how to strangle, to neutralize with its opposites, faith, hope, confidence, assurance.
How many thousands of employees plodding along in mediocrity to-day could havebeen in business for themselves but for this great enemy inside of them! How many splendid young men have been kept out of the pulpit, how many superb lawyers, in possibility, have been strangled by this traitor! How many men are to-day clerks, bookkeepers, or other subordinates, who might have been managers, superintendents or proprietors themselves but for the work of this damnable traitor!
When opportunity presented itself these doubters were afraid. They waited for certainty. They dared not take chances. They did not realize that opportunity is a maiden who admires the bold, courageous, self-confident suitor. They did not wake up in time to the fact that she will not trust herself to the timid, the hesitant, the over-cautious suitor. When too late they realized that while the doubter is wavering and hesitating, wondering if he dare try to win, the daring, intrepid wooer steps in and wins.
The great prizes of life are for the courageous, the dauntless, the self-confident. The timid, hesitating, vacillating man who listens to his doubts and fears stops to make up hismind, and—the opportunity has passed beyond his reach.
Doubt, uncertainty, or fear as to results, is the great discourager of the human race. It is the dire enemy of all achievement. It tells the poor boy and girl who long for an education that it is foolish for them to think of going through school and college without money or without somebody to help them. It tells them that there are many more poor boys and girls in every school and college who are trying to pay their way than will ever find opportunities to make their education available. It is always whispering to them that there is a big waiting list of men and women who were graduated years ago everywhere looking and waiting, trying in vain to get something to do to earn back the amount they spent on their education.
No matter what you attempt to do, what new enterprise you may undertake, what progressive plans you may make, the traitor doubt will bob up and call a halt, will try to dissuade you from your purpose. It will suggest to you how many others have undertaken similar things and have gone to the wall,have failed to accomplish what they expected. It will tell you that you had better go slow, that it is foolish to go into business in times like these, that you should wait until you are better prepared, until you have more capital; in short, that there are stumbling blocks in the way, and that you must consider the step very carefully before you venture to decide.
It does not matter what we plan to do, doubt is always there ready to knock our resolutions, and, if possible, to discourage us even from attempting to put our plans in execution. Who could ever estimate how many superb inventions and discoveries, which would have helped emancipate the race from drudgery and hard conditions, have been side-tracked by this traitor!
Doubt kills activity, discourages ambition and destroys or neutralizes the biggest brain power. It would make a pigmy of a Webster. By filling his mind full of doubt of his own creative power, a hypnotist could make a Shakespeare believe he was a fool. He could inject a doubt into the mind of a Napoleon that would cut his genius down to the mediocrity of a common soldier.
This arch traitor of mankind is so closely related to fear that it is almost impossible to draw a dividing line between the two. They are twins. Wherever doubt can get a foothold it introduces its brother fear, and fear brings with it all of its relatives, worry, anxiety, discouragement—the whole failure family. A single day of doubts, of fears, of unbeliefs, of the crime of self-depreciation, will drive away from a man all that he has attracted to himself in many months.
There are multitudes of people to-day suffering from the fatal disease of self-depreciation, the seeds of which were implanted in them by doubt. All the victims of discouragement, those who are suffering from despondency, those who are going through life disheartened, hopeless, despairing, are the authors of their own misery. They persist in killing the very thing they are pursuing, in queering their own quest by the poison of doubt.
The doubting Thomases never get anywhere, because they have no vision, and "without a vision the people perish." The man who would do anything worth while in thisworld must have a vision, and he must have courage to match it. Courage is the great leader in the mental realm. Whatever paralyzes it strangles the initiative, kills the ability to do things. Doubt is its greatest enemy. It suggests caution at the very moment when everything depends on boldness. If a general were to be over-cautious, to wait for absolute certainty in regard to results before putting his plan of campaign into action, he would never win a battle.
Caution is an admirable trait, but when carried to excess it ceases to be a virtue and comes perilously near being a vice. It may render ineffective many noble qualities. There are a great many people who seem to be courageous enough, but an excessive development of caution holds everything in abeyance to wait for certainty. I know men who wait and wait, never daring to undertake anything where there is risk, even though their judgment tells them they ought to go ahead.
We are creatures of habit, and the constant raising of doubts in our minds as to our ability to do what we want to do in time becomes a habit of thinking we can't, and when we thinkwe can't, we can't. When a man begins to listen to his doubts he is beginning to weaken.
Why delay beginning the thing that you know perfectly well you ought to do? What are you afraid of? Failure, even, in an honorable attempt, is preferable to forever postponing the thing that you ought to do. Is it the additional responsibility you shrink from, the extra work? Do you have a horror of possible failure? Do you shrink from the possible humiliation of losing out in your venture? What is it that enlarges your doubt and holds you back? Some handicap, some invisible thread? Are you carrying a great excess of baggage, clinging to unnecessary things which handicap you?
I have heard of a sailor who lost his life in that way. He was one of the crew of a ship that was carrying a large quantity of gold nuggets to a distant port. The ship ran upon a rock, and, when all hope of saving her or her precious cargo was gone, the captain ordered everybody to leave the sinking ship. The last boat was ready to push off, but this sailor refused to get into it until he had loaded himself with gold nuggets. He said he had been apoor man all his life, and now he was going to be rich at last. He would take away with him just as much of the sinking wealth as he could carry. Heedless of the warning of the captain and his companions that they would not wait for him, he loaded himself with gold. Then, the boats having pushed away, he jumped overboard and tried to save himself by clinging to pieces of the wreck. But, owing to the weight he carried, he could neither float nor swim, and so the wealth he felt he could not leave behind carried him down to death.
Your doubt of your success is probably your biggest handicap. But it would be a thousand times better to make mistakes by forging ahead too rapidly, by undertaking more than we can carry out, than to be forever hovering upon the edge of doubt, delaying, postponing, waiting for certainty, until we become slaves of a habit which we cannot break. And remember that the habit of putting off, of waiting to see how things are going to turn out, to see if something more certain, something with less of risk, will not turn up, is fatal to initiative, fatal to leadership, fatal to efficiency.
I know a man who has been resolving for a quarter of a century to start something in which he thoroughly believes. Every year during that long period he has told me that this was the year for him to start. He was really going to begin his great life work, but doubt has engendered the putting off habit, and this has such a grip upon him that he shrinks from undertaking anything new. He seems to have a great fear of getting out of his old rut, to try something different, a fear that things may not work out right, that it is not the psychological moment to strike. He has gray hairs now, the enthusiasm of youth is gone, and he never will begin to do the thing which everybody who knows him believes he is perfectly capable of doing.
All history shows that while experience increases wisdom, it does not always increase faith. The inexperienced youth will often undertake things which stagger the older and more experienced. Confidence is characteristic of youth; but after a few setbacks and disappointments, many begin to wonder whether, after all, their first confidence was based upon good judgment, whether their enthusiasm and faith were not the result of lack of experience, and then they begin to doubt and to fear that this voice of ambition which is ever beckoning them on and upward is not reliable. They say to themselves: "What if this should be merely a mirage to lure me on the rocks," and before they realize it they are weaving doubts and fears and over-caution into a habit that has ruined multitudes of careers, a habit that is responsible for a larger percentage of unused ability, of locked-up powers than any other one thing.
Haveyoudone the biggest thing you are capable of doing? Is it not possible that there is something within you, some unworked mental territory which, if cultivated, would lead you out into that wider field you dreamed of when a youth? Why do you go on year after year in the same old rut, expressing nothing, doing the same old thing in the same old way because doubt whispers it would be rash to try new ways, new ideas? How long have you been just an ordinary employee? Do you realize that habit is getting a tremendous grip upon you, and that before you realize it you may be a "perpetual clerk"?
The longer you remain in one position, doing the same thing without promotion, the stronger the inertia habit will grip you, the bigger will grow your doubt as to the wisdom of making a change. It is a dangerous thing to get into a rut. Bestir yourself before it is too late and begin to put into operation that plan which has so long haunted you, but which doubt has been telling you is not feasible, is not practicable.
If every human being to-day were doing what he has at least some time thoroughly believed he could do our whole civilization would be revolutionized. What has been accomplished is but a tithe of what might have been accomplished if every one had been true to his vision, had not allowed it to be blotted out by doubt. If I believed in a real devil I think it would be that unseen monitor, that mysterious something within us which whispers doubt, which tells us to hold on, to be careful, to go slow; which pulls us back when we are attempting to reach out, trying to do the thing we long to do.
Are you not tired of having your plans thwarted, your efforts blighted by the traitor,doubt? Has it not dwarfed your life long enough, has it not kept you out of your own long enough by forcing you to live on the husks when you might have had the kernel? Are you not about tired of being defrauded by this thief of the blessings and the good things which the Creator intended we all should have? Why not turn it out of your mental house? Neutralize it with a great splendid faith in yourself, in your mission, faith in your possible contribution to the world. Doubt has very little influence with the Saint Paul type of man, with the masterful type. It is only the weakling that doubt strangles, paralyzes. Be a man and not a weakling, a mere apology of a man.
You know that the devil which has followed you through life, which has blocked your progress, put out the lights in your path, tortured you and undermined your confidence in yourself, has been the devil of doubt. It has been the whispering fiend which told you that you could not do this and you could not do that, which stepped in and killed your initiative when you were about to begin to do that which your ambition had hoped to accomplish.
Don't let this enemy thwart and baffle you any longer. Have a good heart to heart talk with yourself and break the habit chain of unbelief in self with which it has bound you. Say to yourself, "I will not listen any longer to the voice of this fiend. I will not allow it to spoil God's plan for me. There is something inside of me which insists that I was planned for victory, not for defeat, for happiness, not for misery, for peace of mind, not for a life of worry, anxiety, and fear. I do not believe that I was placed here to be a mere puppet of circumstances. Faith, hope and confidence are my helpers. Doubt is a child of fear, and fear has the great majority of human beings hypnotized, so that they do not dare to forge ahead, do not dare to undertake the things they are perfectly capable of accomplishing. From henceforth it has no power over me. I will not listen to its treacherous voice."
If you would succeed, you must avoid rashness as well as over-caution. But when you have fully considered in all its bearings whatever project you are about to undertake, and have decided on your course, don't let anyfears or doubts enter your mind. Commit yourself to your undertaking, and don't look back to see if you could have done something else, or started in some other way. Push on, and don't be afraid.
After we have launched out in an enterprise, have committed ourselves before the world, pride steps into the situation and pushes us on through hardships which would have discouraged and turned us aside before we had fully committed ourselves. But when we have taken the plunge, made the venture, we have practically said to the world, "Now, watch me make good. I have made up my mind to put this thing through, and I am not going to turn back." Our confidence grows as we advance and then it is comparatively easy, even under difficulties, to keep forging ahead.
Every child, every youth should be taught the danger of this fatal human enemy, doubt. They should be so imbued with the philosophy of expecting success instead of failure that doubt would never get sufficient grip on them to strangle their capabilities and blight the fulfillment of their dreams. If every childwere reared with the conviction that he was born for happiness, that it was intended he should realize his vision, his mind would be turned towards the light, his whole mentality would be so firmly set toward success and happiness that doubt could not get hold of him. As it is the lives of multitudes of people are constantly filled with doubts and fears and uncertainty in regard to the future. Young impressionable minds are often stamped with the failure suggestion before they are out of their teens. Most of us are born with the doubt germ implanted in our brain.
There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country to-day who have splendid ambitions, who have made resolutions to carry out those ambitions, but who are cowering victims of doubt, which keeps them from making a start. They are just waiting. They are unable to make a beginning while this monster stands at the door of their resolution. They are afraid to burn their bridges behind them, to commit themselves to their purpose.
At the very outset of your career make up your mind that you are going to be a conqueror in life, that you are going to be theking of your mental realm, and not a slave to any treacherous enemy, that you will choose the wisest course, no matter how forbidding or formidable the difficulties in the way, that you will take the turning which points toward the goal of your ambition, no matter who or what may bar your onward path. Don't let doubt balk your efforts. Don't let it paralyze your beginning and make you a pigmy so that you will not half try to make good when you have a waiting giant in you. Confidence, self-assurance, self-faith—these are the great friends which will kill the traitor doubt.
"Every great soul of man has had its vision and pondered it, until the passion to make the dream come true has dominated his life.""You will bewhat you will to be;Let failure find its false contentIn that poor world 'environment,'But spirit scorns it, and is free.. . . . . . ."The human Will, that force unseen,The offspring of a deathless Soul,Can hew a way to any goal,Though walls of granite intervene."
"Every great soul of man has had its vision and pondered it, until the passion to make the dream come true has dominated his life."
"You will bewhat you will to be;Let failure find its false contentIn that poor world 'environment,'But spirit scorns it, and is free.. . . . . . ."The human Will, that force unseen,The offspring of a deathless Soul,Can hew a way to any goal,Though walls of granite intervene."
Washington, in a letter written when he was but twelve years old, said: "I shall marry a beautiful woman; I shall be one of the wealthiest men in the land; I shall lead the army of my colony; I shall rule the nation which I help to create."
General Grant, in his "Memoirs," says that as a boy at West Point, he saw General Scott seated on his horse, reviewing the cadets, andsomething within him said, "Ulysses, some day you will ride in his place and be general of the army."
Every one knows how those boyish visions were realized by the mature men.
The late J. Pierpont Morgan's fortune was built largely by the dynamic forcefulness of his thought, of his mental visualizing, the nursing of his youthful visions. He was a man of varied and æsthetic tastes, but he concentrated upon finance and he became the world's master in its science.
Ancient Greece concentrated on beauty and art, and she became the great beauty model and art teacher of the world. The Roman Empire concentrated upon power—and became mistress of the world. England concentrated on the control of the seas and commerce, and she has become the ruler of the seas and the greatest commercial nation in the world. We are a nation of money-makers because Americans have concentrated largely upon the dollar. They think in its terms; they dream dollars; they hate poverty and they long for wealth.
Whatever an individual or a people concentrates upon it tends to get, because concentration is just as much of a force as is electricity. The youth who concentrates upon law, thinks law, dreams law, reads everything he can get hold of relating to law, steals into courts, listens to trials at every chance he gets, is sure to become a lawyer.
It is the same with any other vocation or art,—medicine, engineering, literature, music; any of the arts or sciences. Those who concentrate upon an idea, who continue to visualize their dreams, to nurse them, who never lose sight of their goal, no matter how dark or forbidding the way, get what they concentrate on. They make their minds powerful magnets to attract the thing on which they have concentrated. Sooner or later they realize their dreams.
What could have kept Ole Bull from becoming a master musician? Who or what could keep back a boy who would brave his father's displeasure, steal out of his bed at night, and go into the attic to play his "little red violin," which haunted his dreams and would not let him sleep? What could keep a Faraday or an Edison, whom no hardshipsfrightened, from realizing the wonderful visions of boyhood?
If you can concentrate your thought and hold it persistently, work with it along the line of your greatest ambition, nothing can keep you from its realization. But spasmodic concentration, spasmodic enthusiasm, however intense, will peter out. Dreaming without effort will only waste your power. It is holding your vision, together with persistent, concentrated endeavor on the material plane, that wins.
There are thousands of devices in the patent office in Washington which have never been of any use to the world, simply because the inventors did not cling to their vision long enough to materialize it in perfection. They became discouraged. They ceased their efforts. They let their visions fade, and so became demagnetized and lost the power to realize them. Other inventors have taken up many such "near" successes, added the missing links in their completion and have made them real successes.
"Get thy spindle and distaff ready, and God will send the flax," saith the proverb.If we would only take God's promises to heart, and do our necessary part for their fulfillment no one would be unsuccessful or unhappy. If we were to send out our desires intensely; to visualize them until our very mentalities vibrated with the things we long for, and to work persistently in their direction, we would attract them.
Everywhere there are disappointed men and women who have soured on life because they could not get what they longed for,—a musical or art education, the necessary training for authorship, for law or medicine, for engineering, or for some other vocation to which they felt they had been called. They are struggling along in an uncongenial environment, railing at the fate which has robbed them of their own. They feel that life has cheated them, when the truth is they have cheated themselves. They never got the spindle and distaff ready that would have drawn to them the flax for the spinning of a happy and complete life web. They did not insistently and persistently send out their desires and longings; they did not nurse them and positively refuse to give them up; aboveall, they did not put forth their best efforts for their realization.
Three things we must do to make our dreams come true. Visualize our desire. Concentrate on our vision. Work to bring it into the actual. The implements necessary for this are inside of us, not outside. No matter what the accidents of birth or fortune, there is only one force by which we can fashion our life material—mind.
The bee and the snake draw material from the same plant. The one transmutes it into deadly poison; the other into delicious honey. The power that changes the stuff into a new substance is within the bee and the snake.
Of two boys or two girls in the same wretched environment, one picks up an education, trains himself or herself for place and power, while the other grows up a nobody. It is all in the boy or the girl. Each has similar material to work in. One transmutes it into gold; the other into lead.
Two sailors force the same breeze to send their boats in opposite directions. It is not the wind, but the set of the sail that determines the port.
The power that makes our desire, our vision, a reality is not in our environment or in any condition outside of us; it is within us.
There is some unseen, unknown, magnetic force developed by a long-continued concentration of the mind upon a cherished desire that draws to itself the reality which matches the desire. We cannot tell just what this force is that brings the thing we long for out of the cosmic ether and objectifies it, shapes it to correspond with our longing. We only know that it exists. The cosmic ether everywhere surrounding us is full of undreamed of potencies and the strong, concentrated mind reaches out into this ether, this sea of intelligence, attracts to it its own, and objectifies the desire.
All human achievements have been pulled out of the unseen by the brain, through the mind reaching out and fashioning the wealth of material at its disposal into the shapes which matched the wishes, the desires, of the achievers.
All the great discoveries, great inventions, great deeds that have lifted man up from his animal existence have been wrought out of theactual by the perpetual thinking of and visualizing these things by their authors. These grand characters clung to their vision, nursed it until they became mighty magnets that attracted out of the universal intelligence the realization of their dreams.
Most revolutionary inventions have evolved from a flash of thought. The sewing machine, for example, started with a simple idea, which the inventor held persistently in his mind until through his efforts the idea materialized into the concrete reality. Elias Howe used to watch his wife making garments, sewing, sewing far into the night, and it set him thinking, questioning whether such drudgery was really necessary. As he watched her busy needle fly back and forth, he began to wonder if this same work which it took his wife so long to do could not be done with less labor and in half the time by some sort of mechanical contrivance. He kept nursing his idea, thinking what a splendid thing it would be if some one could relieve millions of women from this toil, which frequently had to be done at night after a day of hard work. He began to experiment with crude devices, clinging to his visionthrough poverty and the denunciation of friends, who thought the man must be crazy to spend his time on "such a fool idea." But at last his vision materialized into a marvelous reality, a perfected machine which has emancipated the women of the world from infinite drudgery.
The idea of the telephone was flashed into the mind of Professor Alexander Bell by the drawing of a string through a hole in the bottom of a tin can, by means of which he found that the voice could be transmitted. The idea took such complete possession of the inventor that it robbed him of sleep and, for a time, made him poor. But nothing could rob him of his vision or prevent him from struggling to work it out of the visionary stage into the actual.
I lived near Professor Bell, in the next room, indeed, while he worked on his invention. I saw much of his struggle with poverty, heard the criticisms and denunciations of his friends, as he persisted in his visionary work until the telephone became a reality,—a reality without which modern business could not be conducted.
All of Edison's inventions, those of every inventor, have been wrought out on the same principle that gave us the sewing machine and the telephone. They all started in simple ideas, in dream visions which were nursed and worked into actualities.
According to Darwin, the desire to ascend into the heavens preceded the appearance and development of the eagle's wings. It is said our different organs and functions have been developed from a sense of need of them, just as the wings of the eagle developed from a desire to fly.
The brain cells grow in response to desire. Where there is no desire there is no growth. The brain develops most in the direction of the leading ambition, where the mental activities are the most pronounced. The desire for a musical career, for instance, develops the musical brain cells. Business ambition develops that part of the brain which has to do with business, the cells which are brought into action in executive management, in administering affairs, in money making. Wherever we make our demand upon the brain by desire that part responds in growth.
For years a poor country boy builds aircastles of his future. He visualizes the great mercantile establishment over which he is to preside. The ridicule of his family and of young companions cannot daunt him or blur the bright vision he sees away in the distance. He continues to nurse his vision, and behold, out of the unknown, unexpected resources come, and soon he finds himself an office boy in a great mercantile house in the city of his dreams. He watches everything with an eagle eye; he absorbs information and ideas; he is alert, active, energetic, resourceful, and in a few months he is promoted, and then again promoted. He attracts the attention of the head of the establishment, who calls him into his private office, tells him that he has had his eye on him for many months and that he believes he is the youth he has been looking for to manage the business. He gives him a little stock; the business prospers still further under his management, and in a few years the new manager is made a full partner in the house which he entered as an office boy. This is the flowering out of his dream, the objectifying of his vision, the matching with reality his youthful longings. His brain has been continuallydeveloping along the line of his vision, drawing to him the material to make it real.
A poor girl, the daughter of humble people in Maine who thought that to become a public singer was an unforgivable sin, could not in the beginning see any possible way to realize the dreams she held in secret, but she kept visualizing her dream, nursing her desire and doing the only thing for its realization her parents would allow,—singing in a little church choir. Gradually the way opened, and one step led to another until the little Maine girl became the famous Madame Nordica, one of the world's greatest singers.
No matter if you are a poor girl away back in the country, and see no possible way of leaving your poor old father and mother in order to prepare for your career, don't let go of your desire. Whether it be music, art, literature, business or a profession, hold to it. No matter how dark the outlook, keep on visualizing your desire and light and opportunity will come to enable you to make it a reality. Whatever the Creator has fitted you to do He will give you a chance to do, if you cling to your vision and struggle as best you can for its attainment.
Think of the Lillian Nordicas, the Lucy Stones, the Louisa Alcotts, the Mary Lyons, the Dr. Anna Howard Shaws, the thousands of women who were hedged in just as you are, by poverty or forbidding circumstances of some sort, yet succeeded in spite of everything in doing what they desired to do, in being what they longed to be. Take heart and believe that God has given you also "all implements divine to shape the way" to your soul's desire.
If you are a boy on a farm and feel that you are a born engineer, yet see no possible way to get a technical education, don't lose heart or hope. Get what books you can on your specialty. Cling to your vision. Push out in every direction that is possible to you. It may take years, but if you are true to yourself your concentration on your desire, your pushing toward it, will open a door into the light, and before you know it you will be on the road to your goal.
The Washingtons, the Lincolns, the Faradays, the Edisons, the men who have done most for their country and for humanity have had to struggle as hard as you are struggling to attain their heart's desire. The opportunities for boys and girls to bring out whatever the Creator has implanted in them are ten to one to-day to what they were one hundred, or fifty, or even twenty-five years ago. The great danger in our time is not lack of chance or opportunity but of losing our vision, of letting our ambition die.
Most of us instead of treating our desires seriously trifle with them as though they were only to be played with, as though they never could be realities. We do not believe in their divinity. We regard our heart longings, our soul yearnings as fanciful vagaries, romances of the imagination. Yet we know that every invention, every discovery or achievement that has blessed the world began in a desire, in a longing to produce or to do a certain thing, and that the persistent longing was accompanied by a struggle to make the mental picture a reality.
It is difficult for us to grasp the fact that ambition, accompanied by effort, is actually a creative power which tends to realize itself. Our minds are like that of the doubting disciple, who would not believe that his Lord had risen until he had actually thrust his fingerinto the side which had been pierced by a cruel spear. Only the things that we see seem real to us when, as a matter of fact, the most real things in the world are the unseen.
We never doubt the existence of the force that brings the bud out of the seed, the foliage and the flower out of the bud, the fruits, the vegetables from the flower. It is invisible. We cannot sense it, but we know that it is mightier than anything we see. No one can see or hear or feel gravitation, or the forces which balance the earth and whirl it with lightning speed through space, bringing it round its orbit without a variation of the tenth of a second in a century, yet who can doubt their reality? Does any one question the mighty power of electricity because it cannot be seen or heard or smelled?
The potency of our desires, of our soul longings, when backed by the effort to make them realities, is just as real as is that of any of the unseen forces in Nature's great laboratory. The great cosmic ether is packed with invisible potentialities. Whatever comes out of it to you comes in response to your call. Everything you have accomplished in life has beena result of a psychic law which, consciously or unconsciously, you have obeyed.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the way will not open because you cannot now see any possible means of achieving that for which you long. The very intensity of your longing for a certain career, to do a certain thing, is the best evidence that you have the ability to match it, and that this ability was given you for a purpose, even to play a divine, a magnificent part in the great universal plan. The longing is merely the forerunner of achievement. It is the seed that will germinate if nurtured by effort.
If, however, you stop at sowing the seed you will get just about as much harvest as a farmer would get if he should sow his seeds without preparing the soil, without fertilizing or cultivating it or keeping down the weeds. It is the blending of the practical with the ideal that brings the harvest from the seed thought. You must keep on struggling toward your ideal. No matter how black and forbidding the way ahead of you, just imagine you are carrying a lantern which will advance with you and give light enough for the nextstep. It is not necessary to see to the end of the road. All the light you need is for the next step. Faith in your vision and persistent endeavor will do the rest. There is no doubt that if we do our part, the Divinity that has created us, given us an appointed place and a work in the plan of the universe, will bring things out better than we can plan or even imagine.
Send out your wishes, cherish your desires, force out your yearnings, your heart longings with all the intensity and persistency you can muster, and you will be surprised to see how soon they will begin to attract their affinities, how they will grow and take tangible shape, and ultimately become actual things. Fling out your desires into the cosmic ether boldly, with the utmost confidence. Therein you will gather the material which shall build into reality the castle of your dreams.
The trouble with us is that we are afraid to do this. We fear that fate will mock us, cast back to us our mental visions empty of fruition. We do not understand the laws governing our thought forces any more than we understand the laws governing the universe.If we had faith in their power, our earnest thoughts and efforts would germinate and bud and flower just as does the tiny seed we put into the earth.
Think how the seed must be tended and nurtured before it will give forth the new life. See how the delicate bud has to be coaxed by the sun and air for many months before it pushes its head up through the tough sod to the light. Suppose it were afraid to make the attempt and should say: "It is impossible for me to get out of this dark earth. There is no light here. I am so tender the slightest pressure will break me and stop my growth forever. The only way out of my prison is to push up through this tough sod, and it would take a tremendous force to do that. I would be crushed, strangled, before I got half way through."
But the sun beckons, coaxes, encourages. The bud is moved into attempting the "impossible," and behold, in a few days it rears its tender head above what it considered the great enemy of its progress. The dark sod, the very thing which it thought was going to make its future impossible, becomes its support andstrength. The very struggle to get up through the soil has strengthened its fiber and fitted it to cope with the elements above, with the storms it must meet.
Just like this tender plant, you may be hemmed in by seemingly insurmountable obstacles; you may not see a ray of light through the sod of hard, forbidding circumstances, but hold your vision and keep pushing. In your struggle you will develop strength, you will find sunshine and air, growth and life. You may be shut in by an uncongenial occupation and tempted to lose heart and give up your dreams because you can see no way to better yourself. This is just the time to cling to them, and to insist that they shall come true. Without knowing it you may be just in the middle of the sod, and if you keep pushing where you are, in season and out of season, you will come to the sunlight and the air, to freedom.
There is no human being who doesn't have some sort of a chance. If your present position cramps you; if it does not give you room to express yourself, you can make room by filling it to overflowing, by doing your work as well as it can be done, by keeping yourmind steadfastly fixed on the ladder of your ascent. In your mind you make the stairs by which you ascend or descend. Nobody else can do it for you. The master key which will unlock that cruel door that keeps you back is not in the hand of fate. You are fashioning it by your thoughts.
Your next step is right where you are, in the thing you are doing to-day. The door to something better is always in the duty of the moment. The spirit in which you do your work, the energy which you throw into it, the determination with which you back up your ambition—these, no matter what opposes, are the forces that unlock the door to something better. If you hold to your vision and are honest, earnest and true, there is nothing that can stand in the way of its realization.
I have never known a person who was dead-in-earnest in his efforts to gain his heart's desire who has not finally reached his goal. No great, insistent, persistent, honest longing backed by downright hard, conscientious work ever comes back empty-handed.
Desire is at the bottom of every achievement. We are the product of our desires.What we long for, strive for, the vision we nurse, is our great life shaper, our character molder.
Very few can realize the close coördination which exists between their visions, their mind pictures, and the actual accomplishments of their career. If I were asked to name the principal cause of the majority of failures in life I should say it was the failure to understand this, to grasp the relation of thought to accomplishment. The gradual fading out of one's dreams, the losing of one's vision, may be traced to this cause.
When we first start out in life we are enthusiasts. Our vision is bright and alluring, and we feel confident we are going to win out, that we shall do something distinctive, something individual, unusual. But after a few setbacks and failures we lose heart, and faith in our vision dies. Then we gradually awaken to the fact that our ambition is beginning to deteriorate. It is not quite as sharply defined as formerly. Our ideals are a trifle dimmed, our longings a trifle less insistent. We try to find reasons and excuses for our lagging efforts and waning enthusiasm. We think it may be due to over-work; because we are tired and need a rest, or because our health is not quite up to standard, and that by and by our former intense desire to realize our dreams will return. But the whole process is so insidious that before we realize it our fires, for lack of fuel, are quite burned out. Our grip on our vision was not strong enough. We did not half understand its mighty power, when firmly and persistently kept in mind, to help us to our goal.
What we get out of life depends very largely on fidelity to our visions. If we believe in them we will not let them die for lack of nursing. If we really have ability to match them, and are not self-deceived by egotism, petty vanity and conceit, no misfortunes, no failure of plans, no discouragements, no obstacles, nothing in the world can separate us from them. We will cling to them to our dying day.
The man who believes in his life vision, who is not a mere egotist or idle dreamer, who sees in his desire a prophecy of something which he is perfectly able to make come true,—he is the man who has ever made the world move.He flings his life into his effort to match his vision with its reality.
The world stands aside for such a one, for one who believes in his vision, who consecrates himself without reserve to its fulfillment. People know there is something back of the dreamer who has such faith in his life dream that he will sacrifice everything to make it come true.
How much of a grip has your vision on you? Does it clutch you with a force that nothing but death can relax, or does it hold you so lightly that you are easily separated from it, discouraged from trying to make it real?
Constant discouragements are a great temptation to abandon one's life dreams, to drop one's standards. One's vision is apt to become blurred in passing through great crises, in periods of general depression, in times of financial stress, but this is really the test of a strong character,—that he does not allow obstacles to divert him from his one aim. The man who is made of the stuff that wins hangs on to his vision, even to the point of starvation, for he knows that there is only one way ofbringing it down to earth, and that is by clinging to it through storm and stress, in spite of every obstacle and discouragement.
Never mind what discouragements, misfortunes or failures come to you, let nobody, no combination of unfortunate circumstances, destroy your faith in your dream of what you believe you were made to do. Never mind how the actual facts seem to contradict the results you are after. No matter who may oppose you or how much others may abuse and condemn you, cling to your vision, because it is sacred. It is the God-urge in you. You have no right to allow it to fade or to become dim. Your final success will be measured by your ability to cling to your vision through discouragement. It will depend largely upon your stick-to-it-ive-ness, your bull dog tenacity. If you shrink before criticism and opposition you will demagnetize your mind and lose all the momentum which you have gained in your previous endeavor. No matter how black or threatening the outlook, keep working, keep visualizing your life dream, and some unexpected way will surely open for its fulfillment.
Put out of your mind forever any thought that you can possibly fail in reaching the goal of your longing. Set your face toward it; keep looking steadfastly in the direction of your ambition, whatever it may be; resolve never to recognize defeat, and you will by your mental attitude, your resolution, create a tremendous force for the drawing of your own to you. If you have the grit and stamina to stick, to persevere to the end, if you persistently maintain the victorious attitude toward your vision victory will crown your efforts.