time to collect and print others, I do not suppose, as the sacred writer
says, "that all the world could contain the books that should be written."
Things quite as idiotic as these that I have reported are said and done in
every city and every hamlet of these United States every day in the year
and every hour in the day--except possibly between three and five A.M.,
and sometimes even then. Yet those who say and do these things are not
idiots. When your friend Brown is telling you his pet anecdote for the
thirty-fifth time, or when Smith insists that you listen to a recital of
the uninteresting accomplishments of his newly-arrived infant, you may
allow your thoughts to wander and make some inane remark, yet you are not
an idiot. You are simply not interested. You are using most of your mind
in another direction and it is only with what is left of it that you hear
Brown or Smith and talk to him. Brown or Smith is not dealing with your
personality as a whole, but with a residuum.

And this is what is the matter with the clubwomen who read foolishly and
ask foolish questions in libraries. They are residual personalities. Not
being at all interested in the matter in hand, they are devoting to it
only a minimum part of their brains; and what they do and say is
comparable with the act of the perambulating professor, who, absorbed in
mathematical calculation, lifted his hat to the cow.

The professor was perhaps pardonable, for his mind was not wandering--it
was suffering, on the contrary, from excessive concentration--but it was
not concentrated on the cow. In the case of the clubwomen, the role of the
cow is played by the papers that they are preparing, while, in lieu of the
mathematical problems, we have a variety of really absorbing subjects,
more or less important, over which their minds are wandering. What we must
do is to capture these wandering minds, and this we can accomplish only by
enlisting their own knowledge of what interests them.

If you would realise the difference between the mental processes of a mere
residue and those of the whole personality when its vigour is concentrated
on one subject, listen first to one of those perfunctory essays, culled
from a collection of cyclopaedias, and then hear a whole woman throw her
whole self into something. Hear her candid opinion of some person or thing
that has fallen below her standard! Hear her able analysis of the case at
law between her family and the neighbours! He