, if it were
consolidated into a more workable form. We are like some amateurs who
want to paint finished pictures before they have studied the elements of
Art, and when they see an artist do without difficulty what they vainly
attempt, they look upon him as a being specially favoured by Providence,
instead of putting it down to their own want of knowledge. The idea is
true. Thought _is_ the great power of the Universe. But to make it
practically available we must know something of the principles by which
it works--that it is not a mere vaporous indefinable influence floating
around and subject to no known laws, but that on the contrary, it
follows laws as uncompromising as those of mathematics, while at the
same time allowing unlimited freedom to the individual.

Now the purpose of the following pages, is to suggest to the reader the
lines on which to find his way out of this nebulous sort of thought into
something more solid and reliable. I do not profess, like a certain
Negro preacher, to "unscrew the inscrutable," for we can never reach a
point where we shall not find the inscrutable still ahead of us; but if
I can indicate the use of a screw-driver instead of a hatchet, and that
the screws should be turned from left to right, instead of from right to
left, it may enable us to unscrew some things which would otherwise
remain screwed down tight. We are all beginners, and indeed the
hopefulness of life is in realizing that there are such vistas of
unending possibilities before us, that however far we may advance, we
shall always be on the threshold of something greater. We must be like
Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up--heaven defend me from ever feeling
quite grown up, for then I should come to a standstill; so the reader
must take what I have to say simply as the talk of one boy to another in
the Great School, and not expect too much.

The first question then is, where to begin. Descartes commenced his book
with the words "Cogito, ergo sum." "I think, therefore I am," and we
cannot do better than follow his example. There are two things about
which we cannot have any doubt--our own existence, and that of the world
around us. But what is it in us that is aware of these two things, that
hopes and fears and plans regarding them? Certainly not our flesh and
bones. A man whose leg has been amputated is able to think just the
same. Therefore it is obvious that there is something in us which
receives impressions and fo