Right And Wrong Thinking And Their Results
	Three Notable Examples <  Previous Contents Next  >

Napoleon Bonaparte possessed most remarkable control of his thinking, which enabled him to exclude from his mind completely all those thoughts which he chose, and thus not only devote his entire attention to the one subject in hand, but even seemingly to make himself over into another personage.

It is claimed that he was naturally humane, generous, and sympathetic. If this be true, then he could effectually dismiss all such thoughts from his mind, because he could become as hard as steel. At one time he seemed dominated by one set of ideas, and by another set at another time. He was, in- deed, so changeable as to puzzle not only his biographers, but the world. So complete were his changes that his admirers are uncertain which was the real man.

The probability is that one was as real as the other, because his own statements indicate that these peculiarities were the result of in- tended change of thinking as the circumstances of his judgment dictated. "He compared his mind to a chest of drawers, where each subject occupied its separate space. In turn he opened each drawer. No one subject got mixed with another. When all the drawers were shut he fell asleep. Of course this was not literally true, but during his best years it came as near being literally true as is possible to the human brain."

In his life there were many instances of this perfect control of his own thinking. When his preparations had been made and his troops were engaged in battle, if all was going as he had planned, he could slumber peacefully while the most horrible carnage was in progress. He did this repeatedly. At Jena he slept on the ground while the battle raged. At Austerlitz, after his arrangements had been completed, he slept in the straw of a hut as peacefully as an infant. These things were possible only through his great mental control; and though there is much in his career that cannot be commended and should not be emulated, yet his mental control was most admirable. He is one of the great examples of what can be accomplished by this means, and every one may profitably pattern after him in this respect.

George W. Smalley, writing of Gladstone, says: "If Mr. Gladstone had one mental characteristic more distinctly marked than another, it was his power of absolutely excluding any given subject from his mind and concentrating his whole intellectual energy on some other subject. Always, what- ever it was, one at a time. In the same way he could and would exclude all subjects when the time came for rest."

In the same article he quotes what Mr. Gladstone says of himself: "Of course it has been an anxious life. I have had to make many decisions of the highest importance in public affairs. I have given weighed arguments and facts, and made up my mind as best I could, and then dismissed the subject. I have had to make a great many speeches, and have made them as well as I knew how, and then an end. But if, after I had taken a decision or made a speech, I had begun to worry over it and to say to myself, 'Perhaps I ought to have given greater weight to this or that fact, or did not fully consider this or that argument, or might have put this consideration more fully in my speech, or turned this sentence better, or made a stronger appeal to my audience' -- if I had done this instead of doing my best while I could and then totally dismissing the matter from my mind, I should have been in my grave twenty years ago."

Jacob Riis says in his story of President Roosevelt: "The faculty of forgetting all else but the topic in hand is one of the great secrets of his success in whatever he has undertaken as an official. It is the faculty of getting things done. They tell stories yet, that go around the board of class dinners, of how he would come into a fellow-student's room for a visit, and, picking up a book, would become immediately and wholly absorbed in its contents, then wake up with a guilty start to confess that his whole hour was gone, and hurry away. In all the wild excitement of the closing hours of the convention that set him in the vice-president's chair, he, alone, in an inner room, was reading Thucydides, says Albert Shaw, who was with him. He was resting. I saw him pick up a book in a lull in the talk the other day, and instantly forget all things else."