, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means.

The Habit of Flat-Thinking--of not thinking things out in four
dimensions.

The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have
to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea
out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for
instance, it would be evaporated thinking.

The Habit of Not Having any Habits--leaving out standardized elements in
things and not being machine-minded enough.

Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness.

These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end--in
their final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of
conscious control of the mind.

XIX

LOCO-MINDEDNESS

Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running the
Post Office for one kind of people--the kind of people he has noticed.

There are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a Post Office.

There are the people who write hundreds of letters a day--letters that
are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail--like telegrams.

There are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out
their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and
sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that
they have put off six months.

I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a
Post Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Even
if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail
one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether or
not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in
our Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in
their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if
they did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds
of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Office
that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are
hurt.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used to
receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a
letter three hundred miles away--a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to
it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on
after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon.

I do no