A way of life : $b An address to Yale students Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913Osler, William, Sir
Philosophy
A way of life : $b An address to Yale students Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913
Osler, William, Sir
Conduct of life; Students -- Conduct of life
With a fresh, sweet body you can start aright without those feelings
of inertia that so often, as Goethe says, make the morning's lazy
leisure usher in a useless day. Control of the mind as a working
machine, the adaptation in it of habit, so that its action becomes
almost as automatic as walking, is the end of education--and yet how
rarely reached! It can be accomplished with deliberation and repose,
never with hurry and worry. Realise how much time there is, how long
the day is. Realise that you have sixteen waking hours, three or
four of which at least should be devoted to making a silent conquest
of your mental machinery. Concentration, by which is grown gradually
the power to wrestle successfully with any subject, is the secret of
successful study. No mind however dull can escape the brightness
that comes from steady application. There is an old saying, "Youth
enjoyeth not, for haste"; but worse than this, the failure to
cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single
cause of mental breakdown. Plato pities the young man who started at
such a pace that he never reached the goal. One of the saddest of
life's tragedies is the wreckage of the career of the young collegian
by hurry, hustle, bustle and tension--the human machine driven day
and night, as no sensible fellow would use his motor. Listen to the
words of a master in Israel, William James: "Neither the nature nor
the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity
of our breakdowns, but their cause lies rather in those absurd
feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and
tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that
lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which the work with us
is apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who would do the
same work would, nine out of ten times, be free." _Es bildet ein
Talent sich in der Stille_, but it need not be for all day. A few
hours out of the sixteen will suffice, only let them be hours of
daily dedication--in routine, in order and in system, and day by day
you will gain in power over the mental mechanism, just as the child
does over the spinal marrow in walking, or the musician over the
nerve centres. Aristotle somewhere says that the student who wins
out in the fight must be slow in his movements, with voice deep, and
slow speech, and he will not be worried over trifles which make
people speak in shrill tones and use rapid movements. Shut close in
hour-tight compartments, with the mind directed intensely upon the
subject in hand, you will acquire the capacity to do more and more,
you will get into training; and once the mental habit is established,
you are safe for life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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