day. _Something
large and definite has to be dropped._ Some space in the rank jungle
of the day has to be cleared and swept up for the new operations.
Robbing yourself of sleep won't help you, nor trying to "squeeze in" a
time for study between two other times. Use the knife, and use it
freely. If you mean to read or think half an hour a day, arrange for
an hour. A hundred per cent. margin is not too much for a beginner. Do
you ask me where the knife is to be used? I should say that in nine
cases out of ten the rites of the cult of the body might be
abbreviated. I recently spent a week-end in a London suburb, and I was
staggered by the wholesale attention given to physical recreation in
all its forms. It was a gigantic debauch of the muscles on every side.
It shocked me. "Poor withering mind!" I thought. "Cricket, and
football, and boating, and golf, and tennis have their 'seasons,' but
not thou!" These considerations are general and prefatory. Now I must
come to detail.

MENTAL CALISTHENICS

I have dealt with the state of mind in which one should begin a
serious effort towards mental efficiency, and also with the probable
causes of failure in previous efforts. We come now to what I may call
the calisthenics of the business, exercises which may be roughly
compared to the technical exercises necessary in learning to play a
musical instrument. It is curious that a person studying a musical
instrument will have no false shame whatever in doing mere exercises
for the fingers and wrists while a person who is trying to get his
mind into order will almost certainly experience a false shame in
going through performances which are undoubtedly good for him. Herein
lies one of the great obstacles to mental efficiency. Tell a man that
he should join a memory class, and he will hum and haw, and say, as I
have already remarked, that memory isn't everything; and, in short, he
won't join the memory class, partly from indolence, I grant, but more
from false shame. (Is not this true?) He will even hesitate about
learning things by heart. Yet there are few mental exercises better
than learning great poetry or prose by heart. Twenty lines a week for
six months: what a "cure" for debility! The chief, but not the only,
merit of learning by heart as an exercise is that it compels the mind
to concentrate. And the most important preliminary to self-development
is the faculty of concentrating at will. Another excellent exercise is
to read a