The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1899-09-13
ROTATION OF THOUGHT.
PAPER READ BY REV. II. W. HARVEY AT THE
MEETING OF THE PAW PAW AND ANTWERP
FARMERS ASSOCIATION.


Rotate means TO revolve like wheel.
In this sense, the universe is rotation.
The great wheels of the sky are always
turning.
You may go back of the farm then for
your law of rotation; it is the way the
worlds are made.
The first thing that would STRIKE a
new conner to this universe would be the
diversity, the ceaseless change. Worlds
rotate, sounds modulate, lights and shad-
ows alternate. Nowhere is there mono
tone in sound or monotint in.color; the
universe is kaleidoscope.
Our progress through the world is a
revolution. This planet does not any
more turn on its axis than do we turn
on the axis of crises and events.
The farmer has always had Ptolemaic
idea of the world he lives in. He thinks
it is fiat, and fiat it has been, and fiat it
is yet to multitudes. Not much curve or
sphere to its dull expanse; not much like
the round worlds of wonder and beauty
amid which God placed us.
We have been strangers to magma
ton. No one has thought that a ''plodder"
of the soil should use the telescope of the
mind to discover, like Copernicus, that
his world is round and rotates and has a
center and is an associated atom IN
magnificent system. If the farmers life
is dull and humdrum, it is because he
has not known that he is fashioned in
the similitude of this universe and must
conform TO its laws. So much in general,
now in particular.
A farmer does not need fancy to teach
him that he must not SOW wheat six
years in succession, on the same patch OF
ground. Experiment teaches him that.
He sees that there is some law and sci
ence about it, He may not trace it to its
origin: may not care that it is way the
universe has of acting in intelligence, as
well as in wheat fields and the sweep of
worlds. He has had it beaten into him
by actual experience that he must slip
in crops of corn and grass somewhere be-
tween the crops of wheat
He may never have heard of Ptolemy
or Copernicus: may not know whether
the world and human life are round or fiat,
and may not care, but rotation of crops
he has heard of and believes in; he has
demonstrated it for himself So much
for the crop.
Now for the law that reaches out to
the man himself and lays his brain along
side of his field
You have heard of overcropped brains;
they are common enough.
You know Of men who think of only
one thing, talk only one thing, act
only one thing and live only one
thing. Such men are common enough.
When you find such men you find
sterility Their brains have run up to
the very mulleins of human thought:
their conversation suggests sorrel. Why?
Because there has been no rotation; they
have plowed and dragged and sown that
one little patch of human interest that
concerns them till the humus and the nj
trates and the phosphates have been ex-
hausted. He may haul in few loads of
outside fertilizer now and then, from the
farmers meeting or farmers paper, but
what he needs is let-up on that one ex
haustive crop that he has raised all his
life, to the exclusion of everything else.
A farmer should know something be-
side his one theory of agriculture. There
are moments when he ought to let the
farm lie still in his brain and sleep as it
sleeps in the night or in the winter,
gathering force and fertility for future
growth.
know the argument there is for the
man of one idea; Il farmer ought to he
a specialist; ought to bend his energies
to his work: ought to concenter his
thought like the blaze of heated iron and
not scatter it like the shower of sparks
But iron will burn if heated too hot and
too long. Besides all that, farmers are
not iron and ought not to be blazing hot
all the time. But when they are at a
white heat and burn their way into their
work you will find that they have gather
ed their intensity from wide range
Specialist Man of one idea! Where
did you ever know such an one-unless
he were a crank-who had not at his
command the laws and resources of this
universe. The inventor, the reformer,
the hero, the ruler they pour amazing
energy into their life work, but that energy
was taken from heaven and earth, the
absolute laws and the history of men.
The lberator, who hurls one irresistible
shot at the tyranny, has spent his life
gathering the moral force into his mag
azines.
Say nothing to me of the man with one
idea unless he has a thousand other
ideas back of it pushing it on. What
every man needs, to be force in this
world, is power to think. Thought is
the power behind the implement, whether
it be pillow, or pen, or chisel, or steam
engine or 13 inch guns.
To be special, you must be universal.
To have one idea pointed and hot, there
must be thousand other ideas in the
forge with it.
Now, for the little let-ups and diver
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