work, and what
people can do to get them.

III

WHAT IS CALLED THINKING

The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common,
is that nobody wants them. The way people really act--even the best of
us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is
as if they had no place to put them.

The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are
rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely
what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other
people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.

In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few
special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I
call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours
each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his
other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational
being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.

The first fact is this:

Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to
the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of
ears--one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily
before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set
inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves
and really do their living with.

I first came on them--on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a
young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young
lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be
happening to my audiences--what they seemed to be doing to themselves,
but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were
doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.

I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence
shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their
outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them--on
outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel
hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.

As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth
about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could
help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all
made up of men