personally interesting fact. Try it!
Say your "tables of one" up to ten times one is ten, _thinking vitally_,
which means getting behind the statement of the relation to the relation
itself, behind the sign to the thing signified. Let your "one" stand
each time for something you desire--as a small boy might desire pieces
of candy, or a miser "pieces of eight"; now think vitally in this way
and say, "Ten times one is ten!" What has happened to the mathematical
fact? It has become a living expression!

This might be called _interpreting_ our mathematics. Why not? That is
the surest way to master them! It is the surest way to mastery of any
subject, of any art, of Life itself. It is the only real way. But we
have leaped from the part to the whole, from the study of a detail to an
application of the law governing the whole subject. Back we must go to
our special point. If we can turn the statement of a cold mathematical
fact into the expression of a living vital relation by thinking vitally,
so investing the fact with personal significance and making it our own,
what can we not do with the more easily appropriated thought which poets
and philosophers and play-writers have given us, and with which rests
our especial concern as interpreters? Let us see what we can do! But
first there is one other point to be considered in this question of
_vital thinking_. We have spoken of one aspect of the process of the
mind in thinking,--the _concentration_ upon an idea until it is one's
own. But there is the passing of the mind from idea to idea to be noted.
This phase the psychologists name "transition." This alternate
concentration and transition constitutes the "pulsing of the mind" in
reading, which Doctor Curry discusses so vitally in his _Lessons in
Vocal Expression_. Now transition is an inevitable result of
concentration and follows it as naturally as expiration follows
inspiration. This being true, we need only note, in our study of the
process of the mind in reading aloud, the question of transition,
letting it follow naturally the fundamental act of concentration which
is our chief concern. If the intense concentration is accomplished the
clean transition will follow. In choosing material which shall require
for adequate interpretation this intense concentration of the mind, we
find our source, of course, to be the literature of thought rather than
the literature of feeling. The literary form which seems to furnish the
best ex