Your brain"s activity is divided into the conscious and sub-conscious departments. The conscious side of your mentality puts you into communication with the world, enables you to meet and to cope with conditions and individuals.
If you are to succeed materially the conscious mind must control, direct and limit the activities of the sub-conscious mind with which the imagination does its work.
If your sub-conscious brain, in the departments of abstract thought, imagination and dreaming, be allowed to run away with the practical side, you may be a very great man in the far-distant future, but you may be sure that you will not succeed now. ----
THE EARTH"S GREATEST MEN ARE DREAMERS.
The world never recognizes these dreamers. The successful man admits limitations. He accepts conditions as they are. He uses his imagination only as long as it can carry him to individual success and comfort.
But the very greatest spirits among men are the spirits of dreamers.
These are the men who refuse to acknowledge any limitations save the limitations of absolute truth and of absolute possibility.
When nine-tenths of human beings were slaves, these dreamers refused to recognize slavery, and they died for their belief.
Every man who led a great moral reform ahead of his time was a dreamer. And these dreamers, whose lives are scattered through history, each a tragedy and each a milestone on the path of civilization, did for civilization what a frontiersman does for a new country.
Jesus Christ was a dreamer. He saw the truth and preached it, although it meant death, and He knew that it meant death. The brotherhood that He preached nineteen hundred years ago has not yet been realized, but it WILL be realized in His name, and His teachings and His death will be eternal factors in its realization.
Slowly through the centuries the men of imagination who do not dream are working and striving, each doing his little part to realize the prophecies of the Great Dreamer.
Each compared to Him is as a tiny tallow dip compared to the noonday sun, but each is necessary.
THE ONE WHO NEEDS NO STATUE
A movement is started in Italy to celebrate religiously the close of the nineteenth century.
The idea is to erect at different points on the Peninsula nineteen colossal statues of Christ. The statues, one for each century, are to be of cast-iron, gilded, heroic in size.
There can be no objection to the idea, since it gives expression to proper religious feeling. But should it fail of execution, that would be quite as well. ----
For one Man only in all the history of the world no statue is needed. To the glory of one Man we can add nothing save through obedience to the laws which He brought on earth. ----
Where a weak woman is kindly treated, where children are received with tenderness, where the hungry are fed and the old cared for, there is a monument to Christ--such a monument as He would ask to have built.
The wisdom of Confucius, the self-abnegation of Gautama, the lofty idealism of Zoroaster, may be fitly commemorated and perhaps magnified by human monuments or human praise.
But men can build nothing that shall add to the glory of that life which is the basis of good among all men.
THE VAST IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP
MIschievous stories are told about the ability of great men to do without sleep.
The foolish young man reads that Napoleon slept only three or four hours at night--and he cuts down his hours of sleep. He might better open a vein and lose a pint of blood than lose the sleep, which is life itself.
Most of the stories told about great men doing without sleep are mere lies. Some of them are true. For instance, it is undoubtedly true that Napoleon--an inconceivably foolish, reckless man in matters affecting his physical welfare--did deprive himself of sleep in his early years. But he paid for it dearly. In his last battles his power of resistance was so slight that he actually went to sleep during the fighting.
Chronic drowsiness weakened his brain, weakened his force of character. The foundation of his final ruin was laid in Russia, when lack of sleep, and unwise living generally, had taken away his mental elasticity and deprived him of the power to form and carry out resolutions. ----
It is mainly the young man who needs the lecture on sleep, for the experience of years soon proves to every human being the folly of cheating nature by adding a few hours of drowsy consciousness to the day.
You begin life with a certain amount of vitality, a certain initial vital VELOCITY, which carries you through life and makes possible certain accomplishments. When you deprive yourself of sleep you squander this original capital. Just as surely as the young spendthrift ruins himself financially when he throws away his money, just so surely you bring irreparable loss upon yourself when you go without sleep.
THE FOOD WHICH YOU EAT IS DIGESTED AND TRANSFORMED INTO NEW TISSUE, INTO BLOOD, NERVE, MUSCLES AND BRAIN WHILE YOU ARE SLEEPING.
Look at the men who engage in the atrocious six-day walks and bicycle races. They eat enormously, absorbing in one day five times as much as the ordinary man can possibly swallow. But the end of their task finds them extremely emaciated. Lack of sleep has made it impossible for them to TRANSFORM THE FOOD INTO NEW TISSUE.
Any man or woman who has suffered from insomnia will confirm this statement, that lack of sleep decreases weight and diminishes vitality more quickly than anything else. ----
Remember this when you brag foolishly about going without sleep!
A man can go forty days without solid food. He can live seven days, or even longer, without food or water. He cannot live seven days without sleep. The Chinese, ingenious in torments, discovered no worse death than killing their victims by depriving them of sleep.
Of course, every young man can go without sleep for a whole night occasionally and go on with his work. He can do this because, from his father and mother, he has inherited a certain amount of vitality, which, if he knows no better, he can squander stupidly, just as he can squander, if he will, what money is left to him.
But no man can deprive himself of sleep, or sleep irregularly, without suffering permanently, without diminishing his chances of success in the world. ----
Many a woman among those called "fashionable" looks at the healthy child of a gardener, and wonders that her child is so different.
The reason is simple. The gardener"s wife did not cheat her child by giving to b.a.l.l.s and late hours the vitality needed by her babies.
The woman who loses sleep will make a failure of her children.
The man who loses sleep will make a failure of his life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of success.
WOMAN SUSTAINS, GUIDES AND CONTROLS THE WORLD
Of all events here on earth, the greatest is the birth of a baby.
Great battles are fought, won and lost. Nations and religions rise and fall. Great cities flourish to-day, and to-morrow the sand lies heavy over them. And of all these events the eternal Niagara of new babies is the first and essential foundation.
He knows little of real life, its greatest happiness, deepest devotion, intensest suffering, who has never witnessed the arrival of a new human being in this life of progress and struggle.
There lies the new baby at last, its black face gradually turning pink, its first gasping breaths changing the color of its blood, its tiny fists opening and closing--reaching out for nourishment already, its face tying itself into the first philosophical, cosmos-interrogating knot. Its feet turn inward and its legs are crooked. Its head is so shapeless as to discourage any one but a mother; it has three years of gurgling, ten years of childhood, ten years of foolishness, ten years of vanity--and possibly a few years of real usefulness ahead of it.
Some one must be patient, hopeful, interested, proud, never discouraged, always devoted, through all these years.
That "some one," the mother, lies there weak and white on the bed.
Her forehead and all her body are wet with agony--but she thinks no longer of that.
She has heard her baby"s first cry, and whether it be her first or her tenth, the feeling is the same. Her feeble, outstretched arms and her hollow, loving eyes are turned toward the helpless little creature.
Those arms and that love will never desert it as long as the mother shall live.