3.  Freely criticise any of the suggested methods.

4.  Give an original example of memory by association of ideas.

5.  List in order the chief ideas of any speech in this volume.

6.  Repeat them from memory.

7.  Expand them into a speech, using your own words.

8.  Illustrate practically what would you do, if in the midst of a speech on Progress, your memory failed you and you stopped suddenly on the following sentence:  “The last century saw marvelous progress in varied lines of activity.”

9.  How many quotations that fit well in the speaker’s tool chest can you recall from memory?

10.  Memorize the poem on page 42.  How much time does it require?

CHAPTER XXIX

RIGHT THINKING AND PERSONALITY

    Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it
    may be called.

    —­JOHN STUART MILL, On Liberty.

Right thinking fits for complete living by developing the power to appreciate the beautiful in nature and art, power to think the true and to will the good, power to live the life of thought, and faith, and hope, and love.

    —­N.C.  SCHAEFFER, Thinking and Learning to Think.

The speaker’s most valuable possession is personality—­that indefinable, imponderable something which sums up what we are, and makes us different from others; that distinctive force of self which operates appreciably on those whose lives we touch.  It is personality alone that makes us long for higher things.  Rob us of our sense of individual life, with its gains and losses, its duties and joys, and we grovel.  “Few human creatures,” says John Stuart Mill, “would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though he should be persuaded that the fool, or the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they with theirs....  It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.  And if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it is only because they know only their own side of the question.  The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”

Now it is precisely because the Socrates type of person lives on the plan of right thinking and restrained feeling and willing that he prefers his state to that of the animal.  All that a man is, all his happiness, his sorrow, his achievements, his failures, his magnetism, his weakness, all are in an amazingly large measure the direct results of his thinking.  Thought and heart combine to produce right thinking:  “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.”  As he does not think in his heart so he can never become.