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APPLETON'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XI

JUNE, 1908

DO YOUR OWN THINKING

N one of his essays Emerson asks why young men reading in libraries to-day should take on faith the ideas and opinions of young men who read in libraries a thousand years ago? Emerson was never such a young man. He took nothing on faith. He was a great man. If you do your own thinking you will not necessarily be a great man, but you will assuredly be a greater man than you otherwise could be. "For as he (any man) thinketh in his heart so is he." If a man thinketh nothing in his heart he is nothing.

There was a time when it was culpable for the average man to think for himself. His views on religion were supplied to him from without. The king did his thinking for him on matters political. Some great overlord did his thinking for him on matters social and even domestic. Then came along some common men with uncommon ability; men who thought for themselves and translated their thoughts red-hot into action-men like Martin Luther, Rousseau, Garibaldi, Oliver Cromwell, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. From the thoughts of these men came the Reformation, the French Revolution, the War of Italian Unity, the Civil War of England, and our American Revolution. And after all this vast amount of struggle and bloodshed the average men, over a large part of the earth's surface, found themselves free to do their own thinking.

And nowhere in the world was there such freedom of thought as in our country. Our ancestors came here to be free to think their own thoughts and to do as they though

Copyright, 1908, by D. Appleton & Co. All rights reserved.

NO. 6

best. The majority of those who have since come to our shores have come for much the same reason. We have a heritage of freedom. There can be no freedom without freedom of thought. For every man to think his own thoughts is, in our country, not only a privilege but a duty. Our ancestors did away with arbitrary authority. From such sources our freedom is not threatened.

Let us beware the more insidious dangers which do imperil our freedom of thought! Democracy breeds demagogues. Of demagogues we have our full share. They call themselves by different names some teachers, some preachers, some authors, some editors, and many politicians. They all fatten on the people who don't think for themselves. The people who don't think are a mob. Every mob has its demagogue. All these demagogues manufacture ready-made thoughts and ideas. That's their business. They manufacture them by means of articles, editorials, speeches, novels, tracts, and advertisements. It's a good business for the man who runs it. It's a bad business for his customers.

We have a Pure Food Law to prevent the adulteration of foods and drugs. This law was passed by Congress. Let us have a Pure Thought Law to prevent the adulteration of thoughts and ideas! Such a law cannot be enacted by Congress; it can only be enacted by public opinion. The public means you and it means us. The demagogue can't sell you his canned thoughts if you think your own thoughts. If you and your neighbor, and all the rest of us, did our own thinking, the demagogues would starve.

There are some people who are doing their own thinking in the wrong way. They are so occupied with their own thoughts that they have no time for what anyone else is thinking or for what anyone else ever did think. These people, too, try to do everyone else's thinking as well as their own. They know all that is worth knowing. Their minds are closed against new thoughts. When they say the Lord's Prayer they unconsciously substitute "My will be done" for "Thy will be done." They are strong believers in independence of thought and action. By independence of thought and action they mean that they should think as they please and do as they please. They mean that other people should think as they wish them to think and do as

they wish them to do. One of the favorite occupations of these people is to build stone walls out of their own prejudices and then bang their heads against them. This practice makes their heads sore, and then all the rest of us are in some unaccountable way responsible for their sore heads. Any one of these individuals would feel himself perfectly competent to run the universe during his absence should the Creator take a vacation. This particular brand of independence of thought we cannot recommend.

It is not only the demagogues who do our thinking for us; we press all sorts of other and better people into the service. An honest and industrious man makes a great fortune manufacturing collar buttons. We drag him from his self-respecting obscurity and catechise him on everything from the tariff to the nebular hypothesis. He may not know as much of these things even as the rest of us. He may be a little reluctant at first to express his opinions on matters which he knows little or nothing about. This reluctance wears off, however, when he finds we are perfectly willing to take his utterances on faith. After a time he even comes to think himself a universal authority -a living compendium of human wisdom. If one of the more daring of us questions his statements, we are indignantly reminded that he has sixty million dollars, one hundred blooded horses, sixty automobiles, and eight thousand employees. This crushes further skepticism. The farther he is removed from actual contact with the collar buttons the greater becomes this resplendent citizen in the eyes of the gaping crowd. This man was once an industrious and intelligent maker of collar buttons. We have dragged him into the lime light and made a fool of him. We did it because we wanted him to do for us some of the thinking which we should do for ourselves.

So, too, we get hold of learned men-scholars, professors, and college presidents and make them give us their thoughts on business. Some of them know little more of actual business than what they have learned from paying their rent and their washer-women. We hold up some poor scholar who is on the point of being evicted by his landlord and make him give us his views on the national debt. If anyone suggests that possibly he does not know much about it we indignantly point to his five degrees and

his reputation for vast learning. Our public men don't make fools of themselves: we make fools of them. We try to make them do our thinking when they have all they can manage to do their own.

The people who don't think for themselves are like sheep. The ram jumps over a certain stone in the wall and all the sheep jump over the same stone. That may be the best place to get over the wall, but whether it is or not the sheep do it just the same. Initiative is a rare quality. Sheep haven't much initiative. To have initiative you must do your own thinking. At the Harvard Law School some five years ago there occurred a striking example of initiative. One of the professors devised a system for improving the curriculum. He demonstrated that his method would double the efficiency of the instruction. He went over his plans exhaustively with his leading colleagues on the faculty. They all agreed that it was a great idea. Finally, there was called a mass meeting of faculty and students for the purpose of presenting and indorsing the new system. The professor described before the meeting the many and great advantages of his scheme. When he sat down, as a matter of form, the chairman called for remarks before taking a vote. A first-year man whom no one knew got up and began very quietly to point out objections-serious objections. All eyes were turned upon this presumptuous upstart. What did he know about it! Not much, perhaps, but he knew enough to do his own thinking. When he had finished speaking the new system was voted down, never to be heard of again.

It would be interesting to know how many of the officers of corporations of to-day were the office boys of yesterday. It is safe to say there are thousands of such men. Not one of them rose to his present position by letting anyone else do his thinking for him. That does not mean that he stopped to argue it out every time he received an order. That would be the fool's attempt to do the thinking of his superiors. The man who thinks for himself knows when to take the other fellow's thoughts on faith and when not to. Such a boy and such a man was Amos R. Eno-one of New York's first multimillionaires. His first large venture was the building of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Older and supposedly wiser men told him it was a wild scheme. He might as well throw his money into the East River. New

York would never amount to anything beyond Twenty-third Street. With this encouragement he started in. One Sunday he was looking at the hole the workmen had dug for the foundation. There came along two elderly merchants -prominent men he knew by sight. They had never heard of him. Said one elderly merchant to the other: "What poor fool is sinking his money 'way up town here?" "The poor fool" became a multimillionaire. The Fifth Avenue soon became and long remained New York's leading hotel. Its builder and owner had the habit of doing his own thinking.

In order to do your own thinking, in the right way, you must pay strict attention to what other people think and have thought. No man is sufficient unto himself. Pigheadedness is sometimes called independence, but it is not. The biggest lakes have the biggest fish. The biggest men have the biggest thoughts. A really big man is well worth listening to when he speaks. He is well worth reading when he writes. But if a little man has a big thought, that thought is no less big because expressed by a little man. If a big man has a small thought, that thought is no less small because expressed by a big man. Other people's thoughts taken with discrimination become our own thoughts. It is not the source of an idea, but the idea itself that helps us. One of the chief pleasures in reading is the coming upon one's own thoughts. They are no less your ideas because they happen also to be the ideas of the author.

Do your own thinking and let the other fellow do his. In that way we can preserve and perpetuate real democracy in America. Real democracy in distinction from the kind of democracy which is hardly more than a constitutional theory and a Fourth of July emotion.

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