Permit me, then, to present to you a few suggestions concerning the proper method of study. We do nothing well except what we do with system and order. Set apart, therefore, stated times for the improvement of your minds, and suffer not a slight circumstance to interfere with this arrangement. And now I feel that I must be brief, when the subject which I am treating most requires development. How to study and what to study are problems which engage the attention of the profoundest thinkers of our age, the adequate solution of which can be found only in a perfect philosophy of education, which possibly has not yet been written. Without aiming, then, to be either deep or thorough, I shall strive to be practical. To study, as I have already intimated, means to work with the mind. The mind grows by union with truth, by the assimilation of knowledge, which never takes place except by direct application of the thinking subject to the object thought. This continued application—in other words, attention—is difficult; it wearies the mind, it fatigues the body. To read is not to study. Some of the most indolent men I have ever known, intellectually indolent, were passionately fond of reading. To read requires no mental effort, and demands merely that sort of attention necessary to form a vague notion of each sentence as it passes through the mind. A man may read all the books in the Astor Library, and acquire hardly more knowledge than there will remain water in a sieve through which a stream has been pouring. Indiscriminate, inattentive reading confuses the mind, and, if persevered in, begets a mental habit incompatible with clear and accurate thinking; and the important thing, from an educational point of view, is not so much to get knowledge as to strengthen and develop the intellect, that it may be prepared to grapple intelligently and successfully with the problems which greatly concern or interest us as rational beings. But you will readily understand that it is far from my thought to wish to dissuade you from cultivating a fondness for reading. On the contrary, this, if you have it not, you must acquire, if you hope to make progress in the work of self‐education. Read, then, but read intelligently, thoughtfully. One should read at his writing‐desk, pen in hand, taking note of new and striking thoughts, of graceful and forcible modes of expression; bringing the author’s ideas into the presence of higher truths, of principles that are fixed; rejecting what is false, assimilating what is just. Better still, write yourselves. Do not imagine that I have the faintest desire to encourage you to become authors; there would be fewer and better authors if men were in the habit of doing what I would have you do. Write, not that others may read your thoughts, but that they may become clear to your own minds.