And when you read, make what you read yours.  Think about it.  Absorb it.  Make it a part of your mental being.  Far more important than this, make every thought you read in books, every fact which the author furnishes you, the seed for new thoughts of your own.  Remember that no fact in the universe stands by itself, but that every fact is related to every other fact.  Trace out the connection of truth with truth, and you will soon confront that most amazing and important of all truths, the correlation of all force, all thought, all matter.

And thus, too will your mind acquire a trained and systematic strength which is the chief purpose of all the training which college and university give.  For, mind you, the principal purpose of going to college is not to acquire knowledge.  That is only secondary.  The chief reason for a college education is the making of a trained mind and the building of a sound character.

These suggestions as to reading apply to everything else:  to men, business, society, life.  Because you must compete with the college men, you cannot be careless with books—­in the selection of books, or in the use of them.  For the same reason, you cannot be indifferent with men and your relationship with them.  If other men are loose and inaccurate in reading the character of their fellows, most certainly you cannot be.

If the men who have battalions of friends to start with become negligent of their associations, welcoming all fish that come to their net, and frogs, too, you dare not take the risk of a dissolute companionship, or any other companionship that will weaken the daily discipline of yourself, or lower you in the esteem of the people.

Thus you become a careful student of human nature.  And never forget that he who has mastered this, the most abstruse of sciences, has a better equipment for practical success than all the abstract learning from the days of Socrates till now could give him.

Conscious from day to day of your limited resources, and understanding by the severe tuition of your daily life that the world now demands effectiveness, you will nurture your physical and nervous powers where the rich young man with a college training is apt to waste his.  He may smoke, but you dare not.  You cannot afford it, for one thing.

For another thing, it is a long race that you are running before you reach the point from which your fellow runner starts; so you have got to save your wind.  You need all your nerve.  You have got to keep “clean to the bone,” as Jack London expresses it.

You have got to take thought of the morrow.  You have got to do all those things which your employer, and all observers of you, will, consciously or unconsciously, approve; and refrain from doing anything that your employer, or his wife, or the world, or anybody who is watching you, will disapprove of, even subconsciously.

Thus your profound understanding that effectiveness is what counts will cut out every questionable habit, every association of idleness and sloth.  No social club for you; that institution is for the man of dollars and of Greek.  No evenings with gay parties for you; you must use those precious hours for reading, planning, sleep.