There is an art of study. We were told in youth to study.
We were never told properly how
to study, or, in other words, how to get ideas. Committing to
memory words, sentences, and rules is not getting ideas. It is
simply memorizing. It is simply using, exercising and training
that part of the mind which learns to remember sounds.
If you commit to memory a great
many words and sentences, you are simply overstraining a part or
function of your mind. You are putting on it a burden to carry.
As, if you gave every tack in your carpet a name, and thought it
your duty to remember every tack by its name, would you have the
time or strength to think of much else?
Words are not ideas. They are
only the signs by means of which, through the senses of sight or
sound, a printed word or a spoken word may represent an idea to
a mind. A world or sentence full of meaning or though to one
person may mean nothing to another.
The memory is useful only to
hold what is grasped by the spirit. No amount of 'book-learning'
can teach a man to sail a boat well. He must educate himself.
When he learns, through practice and many failures, that the
rudder must be kept in a certain position to counteract the
force of the wind against the sail, his memory at last holds
what such practice has taught him.
Committing all the proper
directions to memory, will not help him a particle. On the
contrary, if he endeavors, while learning this art, to recollect
the directions, his mind and strength are put upon a sentence
instead of the business in hand, and his learning will be
retarded instead of advanced.
The remembrance of what memory
holds through exercise teaches people how to drive, to shoot, to
row, to swim, to skate, to dance, to paint, to carve, to weave,
to sew, to do all things. But nothing is learned when you are
taught rules before practice.
If you would learn any art,
learn it your own way. Learn in the manner your inspiration
suggests to you. don't mind what is said to you about the
necessity of being 'well grounded' in certain rules which must
be taught you by others. It is true that you must so be 'well
grounded'. But that is exactly what your spirit can best and
quickest teach you.
The spirit will make its own
rules. Left to itself, it will strike out new and original
methods. Rules already made never taught Shakespeare, Byron or
Burns. They trusted to their interior power, the interior
suggestions concerning methods.
When astonishing results are
attained, men call it 'genius', and then go straightway to work
to frame from the method adopted by genius a new set of shackles
to impose on all successors in the same art. Genius may use a
certain method as we may a crutch. When it has served a purpose,
we throw it away for something better to walk by. The methods of
genius are ever changing.
Prentice
Mulford
