Evening star., 1929-12-20

plain as the noses on their ugly faces.
He cannot be very original in thought
Che admits it,, but he hopes to be
honest with himself. This does not
mean that he must say things which
offend others or threaten to overturn
the Government. Here again his sense
of humor stands him in good stead.
ALI that he wants to do Is to think
what he thinks! And If any one be-
lieves this to be easy, let him make
careful note of the random thoughts
of friends and acquaintance for so
little as one day.
He will hear every last one of them
say things which he knows they do not
belle : and which he knows they know
they 90 not believe, and which they yet
expect him to swallow without comment,
knowing full well that he will not dare
say word in reply.
To our theoretically tonest-minded
man this is the greatest and at the
same time the Saddest joke in the whole
world, material, mental, spiritual. To
be there in command of his precious
mind, the instrument with which he
graSpS life, if he graspS 1t at all, and
yet not to be able to use it in the way
he knows he ought to use it, what fate
can be worse than that?
And, again, let it be stated that this
man often does not realize what is the
matter with him. He goes right ahead
repeating old thought as his own, Sc
cured maybe out of books, when what
he should do is to cut loose and say
what he thinks, let the chips fall where
they may.
One never realizes the difficulty of
honest thought until he confronts him
self with pen and paper, on which he
is expected to write. After he has de-
cided what to write, there comes the
problem of what to say. Immediately
there crowd forward thoughts, but with
them comes host of human beings,
too; for there really are no original
thoughts, but only different phrasings
of old ideas-different placements Of
accents, as it were.
Behind these old-new thoughts stand
great shades and little shades. In their
hands they hold flowers or weapons,
and on their faces are smiles or frownS.
And as the writer possesses in himself
good qualities or bad qualities, decency
of heart or hardness of heart, so will
he find himself responding to these
shades of thought.
Almost unknown to himself, he will
modify a thought, because not for the
world would he hurt the Sensibiiities
of some one who may never read what
he writesi This is but one of thousands
of variations. ANY one who writes can
think of hundreds. ANY one who speaks
can think of scores.
The average man on the street" who
neither writes nor speaks, in the pro-
feSSional sense, can think of many
thoughts uttered which were not ex-
actly what he thought in his inner
mind, in that tight compartment which
every man keeps under lock and key.
So we find men everywhere, as Emer-
son said, talking from their memories
instead of from their understandings
Their very understandings are made up
Of memoriesl Yet even their memory
is faulty, so that few men can say to
themselves that they are more than an
approach to that rational intelligence
which every man would like to be and
which most pretend that they are.
1t is a sensible objection which the
great Ralph Waldo brings up, if one
faces it with the same good humor and
understanding with which he jotted it
down in his commonplace book. Books
are apt to turn reason out of Doors
If we let them. 1t is the duty of every
book lover to prevent his books from
taking the place of original thought, in
so far as he can. Let them help him to
think, as they can, but do not permit
them to do all the thinking. Thinking
is books business, but it Is mans
too,