Practical psychology

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ...walk the streets with normal senses, you see, hear, feel, and so on, without detail control of the organs. During the ordinary occupations of the day a vast amount of your thinking goes on without similar detail control. Now, if you regard yourself as the manager of the factory of physical sensations and mental activities which, when you start them, or when they are started by external influences, will run on hit or miss, one way or the other, because they belong to you as a human being, you will perceive that the question is up to you, whether the factory shall run the management or whether the management shall run the factory. Now the management must educate the establishment, look after the "hands," look after the machinery, look after the material coming in, and see that the daily output is up to standard. Of course, detailed directions in this matter would require another volume, such, for example, as any one of the Power Books. The main thing for you to do in this regime is to get hold of the idea that probably almost all of your physical and mental activities go of themselves under the influence of your will and of external influences, but that the efficiency of your life absolutely demands that you take in hand the education of what you may call your automatic self. In order to do this, you have to study that self and try to enumerate ways and means by which that education may be carried on. These questions may indicate what is here before us: Are you alert? When you attend to a thing do you really attend? Do you manage your mind-wandering? Are you running wild or have you a purpose? And so on. We may add: Do you remember or does it remember? Do you make plans or do they make themselves? Do you really perceive things or do they merely knoc...