We are born to be neither slaves nor beggars, but to dominion and to plenty.  This is our rightful heritage, if we will but recognize and lay claim to it.  Many a man and many a woman is to-day longing for conditions better and higher than he or she is in, who might be using the same time now spent in vain, indefinite, spasmodic longings, in putting into operation forces which, accompanied by the right personal activity, would speedily bring the fullest realization of his or her fondest dreams.  The great universe is filled with an abundance of all things, filled to overflowing.  All there is, is in her, waiting only for the touch of the right forces to cast them forth.  She is no respecter of persons outside of the fact that she always responds to the demands of the man or the woman who knows and uses the forces and powers he or she is endowed with.  And to the demands of such she always opens her treasure-house, for the supply is always equal to the demand.  All things are in the hands of him who knows they are there.

Of all known forms of energy, thought is the most subtle, the most irresistible force.  It has always been operating; but, so far as the great masses of the people are concerned, it has been operating blindly, or, rather, they have been blind to its mighty power, except in the cases of a few here and there.  And these, as a consequence, have been our prophets, our seers, our sages, our saviors, our men of great and mighty power.  We are just beginning to grasp the tremendous truth that there is a science of thought, and that the laws governing it can be known and scientifically applied.  The man who understands and who appropriates this fact has literally all things under his control.  Heredity and its attendant circumstances and influences? you ask.  Most surely.  The barriers which heredity builds, the same as those environment erects, when the awakened interior forces are considered, are as mud walls standing within the range of a Krupp gun:  shattered and crumbled they are when the tremendous force is applied.

Thought needs direction to be effective, and upon this effective results depend as much as upon the force itself.  This brings us to the will.  Will is not as is so often thought, a force in itself; will is the directing power.  Thought is the force.  Will gives direction.  Thought scattered gives the weak, the uncertain, the vacillating, the aspiring, but the never-doing, the I-would-like-to, but the get-no-where, the attain-to-nothing man or woman.  Thought steadily directed by the will, gives the strong, the firm, the never-yielding, the never-know-defeat man or woman, the man or woman who uses the very difficulties and hindrances that would dishearten the ordinary person, as stones with which he paves a way over which he triumphantly walks, who, by the very force he carries with him, so neutralizes and transmutes the very obstacles that would bar his way that they fall before him, and