Very much, however, of the management of character can only be accomplished by the individual himself acting in complete isolation upon his own nature and in the chamber of his own mind. The discipline of thought; the establishment of an ascendency of the will over our courses of thinking; the power of casting away morbid trains of reflection and turning resolutely to other subjects or aspects of life; the power of concentrating the mind vigorously on a serious subject and pursuing continuous trains of thought,--form perhaps the best fruits of judicious self-education. Its importance, indeed, is manifold. In the higher walks of intellect this power of mental concentration is of supreme value. Newton is said to have ascribed mainly to an unusual amount of it his achievements in philosophy, and it is probable that the same might be said by most other great thinkers. In the pursuit of happiness hardly anything in external circumstances is so really valuable as the power of casting off worry, turning in times of sorrow to healthy work, taking habitually the brighter view of things. It is in such exercises of will that we chiefly realise the truth of the lines of Tennyson: Oh, well for him whose will is strong, He suffers, but he will not suffer long. In moral culture it is not less important to acquire the power of discarding the demoralising thoughts and imaginations that haunt so many, and meeting temptation by calling up purer, higher and restraining thoughts. The faculty we possess of alternating and intensifying our own motives by bringing certain thoughts, or images, or subjects into the foreground and throwing others into the background, is one of our chief means of moral progress. The cultivation of this power is a far wiser thing than the cultivation of that introspective habit of mind which is perpetually occupied with self-analysis or self-examination, and which is constantly and remorsefully dwelling upon past faults or upon the morbid elements in our nature. In the morals which are called minor, though they affect deeply the happiness of mankind, the importance of the government of thought is not less apparent. The secret of good or bad temper is our habitual tendency to dwell upon or to fly from the irritating and the inevitable. Content or discontent, amiability or the reverse, depend mainly upon the disposition of our minds to turn specially to the good or to the evil sides of our own lot, to the merits or to the defects of those about us. A power of turning our thoughts from a given subject, though not the sole element in self-control, is at least one of its most important ingredients.