The influence of thought on health, wealth, and happiness

Preface

This little book represents an attempt to point out in simple and even prosaic manner the way in which thought is at work in the lives of all. It does not profess to be a volume for the scientist, its aim is rather, to reach our dear friend the man-in-thestreet, and to open his eyes to the fact that opportunity is knocking at his door. His salvation surely lies in his capacity to order his individual thinking, and certainly not in Government Departments.

H. ERNEST HUNT.

Contents

[AP. PAGE

I. THOUGHT AND ITS INFLUENCE—

1. The Impress of Thought . . 1

CHAPTER I The Impress of Thought

Those of us who have not yet quite forgotten the days of youth will probably recall the fable of the fairy who had three wishes to offer, wishes that would surely come true. We may recall, too, the sense of power and almost omnipotence with which that trio of possible blessings endowed us in advance, so that the only difficulty lay in selecting the most desirable for our own. How fine it was to feel that such things as we dreamed were to be obtained for the wishing ! So imagination wove its patterns in the fabric of our thoughts, and we were happy in our world of fantasy and glad with the giant confidence of youth. Though now, may be, the glamour of childhood be gone and we find ourselves soberer of dream and less sanguine of glories and greatness, yet to our thinking minds the prospect and the promise of those three wishes was not so very far from the mark of truth. It dawns upon us that it is often life's way that the thing the heart dwells upon, and round which the thoughts linger, at length comes into being ; the dream comes true, the object is achieved, or the pictured circumstance becomes reality. So we fall a-wishing, the one for this and the other for that, playing the child game over again ; and deluding ourselves with the idea that now we have become grown men and women we have for ever put away childish things. Indeed we have not : and, pray Heaven, we never shall.

Everybody wishes — even those washed-out folk who explain that they have given up hoping for anything and are now resigned to whatever an unkind fate may send them — even they are still wishing ; but they have simply packed those inconveniently active desires away in the inmost chambers of the mind, locking the door, and ostentatiously throwing away the key.

Those imprisoned desires keep up incessant hammering on the door and wildly struggle against their confinement, and the undermind of the most confirmed pessimist is still a field of conflict and a battle-ground of contending desires ; for everybody wishes. But while the wish and the desire are instinctive and universal, while all of us seek happiness, even if it be but to touch the hem of her garment, yet the realisation of how the quest is to be accomplished seems to be vouchsafed to comparatively few. Thought, the wonder-working power by which seeming miracles are compassed, is overlooked by the majority ; its forces are unrealised and its possibilities unconjectured. Of all the royal gifts showered on humanity irrespective of wealth, rank, pursuit, or pedigree, this fine potency of thought is perhaps most overlooked of all. Could we be called upon to pay one penny each for thoughts at the Post Office there would be no getting near the counter. As it is, God gives us our thoughts free to think them as we will, and (forgive the trespasses of our commercial souls !) we value them at the price we pay.

Thoughts and wishes break us, or make us, according as their directions lie ; they fetter us in life -long shackles, or they set us free ; they grip the mind of the miser and pack his soul away in his own money bags, or they liberate the spirit of the Saint and Saviour, to love in fine freedom the whole pulsing heart of humanity. They work incessantly for or against us, to our upbuilding or our undoing, and we cannot say them nay : we can no more prevent thoughts playing their vital part in our life than we can disown the law of gravity or proclaim our independence of oxygen. But there is the greatest difference between these latter and thought, inasmuch as thoughts can be controlled. It is of the utmost importance that it should be recognised that not only is this so, but that it is " meet, right, and our bounden duty " that thought should be so controlled. It is a force that produces its effects according to its direction ; if we allow it to work at haphazard the results will naturally be of an in-and-out nature, sometimes good and sometimes bad, and — like the well-known little girl's character — " when they are good they are very, very good ; but when they are bad they are horrid." Ignorance is certainly not bliss with reference to the power of thought, and it is largely due to non-realisation of the subtle and sometimes insidious ways in which thought works in the mind that the results in so many lives show themselves to be horrid. It is therefore very much to the point that we should exercise our wits over this most important topic, and, after examining some of the workings of the machine and learning which buttons to push and which levers to pull, take charge ourselves and drive for the land of heart's desire.

To some folks it comes as a surprise to realise that the thoughts we entertain do really matter and have a permanent effect. It is so easy to dismiss a thought from the mind and to think that we have finished with it, but in so imagining we have disregarded the faculty of memory. Directly we think, it becomes obvious that though the thought vanishes it leaves behind it some trace of its passage, like a footprint in the sand. We recognise a thought on its repetition as a previous acquaintance, and if it recurs often we get to know it as an old friend, and presently we find ourselves actually expecting it as a matter of course since its presence has become more or less habitual. But just as memory makes an acquaintance grow into a friend and merge into a crony, so does it deepen the impress of a thought repeated. We need no psychology to know that actions grow easier with repetition, until they pass into habits and are performed without conscious thought or attention. We see how an unfamiliar tune quickly lodges in the mind and gradually becomes insistent until perhaps we are unable to get it out of our heads. These and countless other instances merely go to show that memory stores up some record of the fleeting thought; were it otherwise, a thought passing from the mind and leaving no trace would not be recognised anew, nor would actions become gradually easier, nor melodies be learnt. Experience, then, gives the lie direct to the idea that the thought in passing makes no difference ; it shows, on the contrary, that thoughts do really and truly matter, and this is a first point of much importance.

As a rough and ready simile to the action of the impress of thought upon the mind, we may take the case of the engraver upon metal. One touch with his graving tool leaves its mark upon the plate, and so much of the metal has been removed. Let him repeat the touch and the cut is cleaner and deeper, while with repeated strokes the impress grows until the record is bold, strong, and ineffaceable. So with the mind, it is as if a first thought leaves its trace and, like to like, the repetition of that thought engraves the impress deeper ; and so the mark upon the mind scores itself into the fabric, a channel and a groove through winch passes the current of thought with ever-increasing ease. Thus, on this simile, upon our minds are graven the impress of past thoughts — all types, all kinds, and all degrees of intensity. What we do know is that the mind remembers, but what no man has been able to demonstrate is that this mind forgets. We may not be able to bring an idea back into consciousness, as when we try to recall a forgotten name ; but over and over again such ideas will prove by their spontaneous return that the memorj^ record was perfect and only the machinery of recall defective.

It would take too long, and occupy valuable space much needed, to develop this point of perfect memory ; it must suffice to say that practically all modern scientific writers agree that while time and lack of recall may dim the record of an item in memory, and while such may be overlaid by the continuous rush of new impressions, yet nothing that has so far been demonstrated has given us any grounds for believing that there is any " wiping out " process from the tablets of memory. On the contrary, hypnosis, psycho-analysis, and other lines of investigation incline us to the view that memory is perfect and absolute, and that its storehouse holds prodigious wealth or rubbish as the case may be, of which but the veriest fragment can at any one time be within the ken of consciousness.

If everything of our past thought-experience be engraved upon the surface of memory, then our minds must be as maps of our past thinking : here the mountainpeaks of exaltation and aspiration, there the valleys of shadow and depression, yonder the streams of desire, the dark places of failure, and the chasms of despair. In ourselves is our life's record written by none other than the hand of self ; self -recorded, self-accused, and self-judged are we. This, be it remembered, is no fancy picture ;

although the simile is but an illustration, yet its import is in consonance with the facts. Memory, of course, is not a tablet, but in ourselves are the writings, as we shall show in some detail later. The mind in its record is our history, from which there have been no erasures, and whose authenticity it were idle for us to deny. We are wise if we recognise the facts and seek to profit thereby.

To turn again to everyday experience, we see the early thoughts of youth grow into the strong ideas of adult life, and later solidify into the dogmatic bigotry of old age. The crusted Tory was not of necessity born either crusted or Tory, but by long use and development his brain tracks grew to paths, and finally to grooves so deep that the thoughts and opinions could run in no other channel. By that time progress was finished, and he had become the hard-and-fast opinionated individual unable to see eye to eye with anyone else, impatient of contradiction and absolutely impervious to reason or argument. This, of course, is the logical outcome of a one-pointed concentration of ideas ; it means lack of mental elasticity and demonstrates a rigidity and stiffness which approximates to mental death. Yet we are all " groovy," and happy are we if the grooves be good ones so that the rivers of sympathetic thought run fresh and free in us from sweet charity's springs ; and woe if the waters of kindness be soured or stagnant and poison our thinking.

The mere fact that thoughts are continually passing through the mind and leaving their mark assures us that building of some sort is continually in process ; and our experience, both with ourselves and other people, corroborates the view. Obviously, then, since the mind grows by accretion of thought, we cannot stay still — we must either be marching or marking time. Marching is progress, marking time means that we are scoring the old grooves deeper and developing into creatures of habit — we are being mastered by our thoughts instead of proving ourselves their masters. Fresh thoughts and ideas are food to the mind upon which it can feed and grow, it can no more thrive without sustenance than can the body. The mind introverted or turned in upon itself, as in solitary confinement, becomes diseased or distorted and often completely unhinged. It is the stream of consciouness flowing laden with fresh ideas, varied impressions, and happy thoughts that keeps us sweetly sane. But the outstanding facts to which these considerations testify are that thoughts matter most completely in the mind, that every thought leaves behind it some trace, and that thoughts repeated score their impress the deeper according to their frequency and intensity.

Thought, Habit, and Character

We speak at times of some people we come across as " thoughtless," but the term is a misnomer, and it would be more correct to say that their thinking was ill-directed. A thoughtless person is generally lacking in thought for others, but by no means so towards himself. Everybody entertains thoughts of one type or another all day long, but naturally some kinds are entertained with greater frequency or stronger interest and intensity than others, and these give their special bias or inclination — their " bent " to the mind. These are the channels along which the thoughts flow the more freely, and in the automatic record of their passing engrave themselves the deeper.

Without entering into the abstruse question of whence thoughts first come or how they originate, we may safely assert, on the basis of universal experience, that present thinking is intimately influenced by past thought. We know that a thought once entertained tends to recur when recalled by some association, and we recognise how closely wedded become hymn tune and the parodied words, so that they can henceforth no more be set asunder in our mind. We find ourselves falling into " habits " of thought which run with increasing ease until the train of ideas seems at length to have laid bare the secret of perpetual motion, and to be capable of travelling by itself. Thus we are still on safe ground when arguing that the thoughts we sow in our mind are the seeds of future thoughts, and these again the seeds of others. This automatic multiplication of thoughts, with their attendant record in mind, explains how types of thought become habitual ; there are habits of thought in each of us of all varying degrees of intensity, and according to the rapiditj^ of their multiplication so does the mind in its thinking gravitate towards one or other direction. Thus grow our likes and dislikes, our hopes and our fears, our inclinations and tendencies ; none of them spring, Minervalike, full-grown into being, but each has developed by a process of accumulation, thought upon thought to its present strength.

We need not overlook the fact that we inherit predispositions and have inscribed within the nervous system at birth special adaptations ; so much we may accord to Nature. But to nurture, with all its possibilities of rebuilding and transforming, we would attribute the vastly greater power. The road of our inborn tendencies often lies downhill, and were we just unthinking machines we needs must follow it ; but, gifted as we are with at any rate some freedom to say Yes or No, it is possible for us to turn our steps up hill and climb to nobler destinies. The word " heredity " is to some a veritable fate which holds their very thoughts in check from fear and awe, to others it is a vastly convenient excuse by which they may explain their vices and palliate their offence. There are thousands of otherwise intelligent folk who are content to mutter, " Oh, I was born so," in extenuation of traits which, truth to tell, they are too lazy to take the trouble to alter. They may have been born so indeed, but why, with the stream of conscious thought ever flowing fresh through their lives, should they remain so ? The sewing machine may start with a squeak, but why allow it to continue squeaking ? It certainly cannot do its best work perpetually uttering its noisy protest against wrong conditions. So also, instead of giving utterance to these misjudged remarks, those worthy folk would be more wisely employed in rectifying the things that are wrong.

What we find ourselves, then, to-day is very largely the outcome of our past thinking ; we have cultivated, indulged, or at least allowed the various types of thought to become familiar and then more or less habitual in the mind, and the aggregate result is our character. This cannot in the nature of things contain anything that has not been previously implanted by thought, though, with regard to our equipment at birth, the thoughts may have been operative in the lives of our parents or other relatives ;

also when we were in the practically defenceless state of childhood we may have had impressions fastened upon us by the thoughts of others. But even when we make allowances for heredity and early influences we may still advance the broad statement that for the things that now hold sway and dominance in the character the individual must himself take chief responsibility. Character, far from being the product of a moment, is built up by longcontinued habits of thought. The impatient character is compounded of a horde of hasty thoughts which have dug so deep a channel in the mind that the flood of impatience sweeps aside the gentler influences of calm and patience. The fearless character fashions itself from strong and courageous thinking ; nourishment of heroic stuff breeds heroes, and fear- thoughts mould the timid, shrinking, and distrustful mind.

Trite as these observations are, it is nevertheless wholly necessary to emphasise them, for even if the majority of people recognise these elementary truths, they give the lie to such recognition by their actions. Character is always an unfinished thing, never finite, never complete, for ever being

16 THE INFLUENCE OP THOUGHT

augmented or modified by the current thought. It is like a newspaper, its record in its past, but a record always being modified and its reputation being increased or diminished by each successive daily issue. What journal would dare stand upon its inception and appeal to its readers on the ground that it was " founded on this or that " ? It is its present valuation that counts ; and so it is with character. Thus it is merely commonsense and elementary wit to note what type of seed we plant in the garden of the mind — to cultivate the more worthy blossoms of thought, and to allow the noxious to fade for lack of sustenance. The touchstone of life itself is character, and it is in this simple process of thought accumulation that the formation of character lies.

Dominant Ideas and Action

Action is the step that follows naturally upon thought, it is its normal discharge. Looking at it the reverse way we observe that action is always preceded by thought, though it by no means follows that the thought enters into consciouness. When we do a thing " without thinking " we mean without conscious attention, but the act is nevertheless performed by virtue of stored-up thought in the form of habit. We do not think about the thousand-and-one vegetative processes which are always in operation in the body, the beating of the heart, the maintenance of the bodily temperature, the rhythm of breathing, or the process of digestion ; but these again are carried on instinctively under the direction of stored-up race habits which, we may well believe, are formed by some process analogous to that of the acquisition of habit in the individual. So thought in some form or other lies at the basis of action.

Thought tends naturally to pass into action, but quite obviously it is not every thought that succeeds in doing so. Practically speaking, we never get a single thought as a unit — a hermit, so to say, in the wilderness of mind. The mind, far from being a wilderness, is more like a battle-ground of contending hosts. Thoughts have relations of all degrees of proximity : father, mother, sisters, aunts, cousins, and possibly motherin-law, and step-children also. Family-like, too, these thoughts possess individuality, some have strength, some persuasiveness, some insistence, and others may be shy and retiring — we may indeed credit thoughts with all the varied characteristics that we ourselves display. Amid this medley of thought there is the usual pushing and elbowing that obtains in the ordinary crowd, and with much the same result — the strongest come to the front. In the realm of thought " coming to the front " means earning the right to result in action, and it is the master-thought, the dominant motive that achieves it. A man may be approaching a mendicant by the side of the footpath, his first impulse is to give him sixpence, but then he remembers how completely he has been taken in on other occasions ; the usual pitched battle then takes place between generosity and caution. If generosity wins, the beggar gets his sixpence; but if caution prevails, he goes without — the battle is to the stronger, and the victor-motive is rewarded with the right to act. In this way it is always the dominant motive, the master-thought or series of thoughts which issue in action. Were a musician's master- thought to be the performance of a Bach fugue, and some rag-time ditty were to sally forth in its place, who would be more greatly astonished than the musician himself ? If a person's one aim and object were to go forth out of doors, and something put him to bed — if, in short, master-thoughts did not result in action, then our world would quickly be at sixes and sevens. But experience assures us otherwise.

Hesitation shows what happens when opposing thought forces are fairly evenly matched : we are in " two minds," and the appropriate action is delayed until one or the other idea is reinforced and secures assured dominance, then the action follows accordingly. Sometimes our present thinking is in conflict with long-graven habits of thought, and time and again the older forces may win and almost force us to do the things against which we strive valiantly enough in our consciouness. But we may take heart of grace and know that the perfect memory, which causes our present trouble by its faithfulness in recording the past thoughts that we would now disown, this same memory will with the same faithfulness record our present striving, and on the balance will assess us so much the higher on the scale of character. We are called upon to fight, but not of necessity are we held accountable for the issue — often enough fierce righting that ends in failure is finer than facile success.

Dominant ideas then prove their mastery by transition into action, and the action itself is first-hand evidence of the type of idea that held sway at the time in the mind. Here again the conclusions at which we arrive are perfectly plain and devoid of subtlety, but if everyone realised that they acted strictly according to their dominant ideas, and that these ideas themselves are mainly compounded of their past thoughts, how much simpler the machinery of life would look. Character building, then, assumes somewhat of the prosaic nature of the building of a house, brick by brick. But whereas the builder who cares for his handiwork is careful of the material which he selects to incorporate in his structure, the average man is supremely indifferent as to the ideas and thoughts which he allows to go to the making of his dominant ideas.

Anyone can build a dominant idea ; everyone does so, as our characters testify. More, indeed, than this, everyone is bound to do so. But while here and there an occasional man builds according to a predetermined plan and so makes the best use of skilfully chosen material, the general fashion seems to be to gather a heterogeneous collection of second-hand material, shoot it anywhere and anyhow, and trust to luck to its looking like a genuine edifice if the inspection be not too close, and the weather holds. Imagine ! That is the way in which we have grown ; what is there beyond our grasp if only we were to build on the saner plan ? The marvel is that we stand where we do ; and, badly as we have built, our position to-day is simply a commentary on how badly others must have built to secure a worse result.

For the moment let us be perfectly clear about this next step in our argument. Memory registers our every thought, and puts it on record by engraving it in the fabric of the mind ; repetition scores its impress the deeper ; and finally, in the growth, certain ideas, by their intensity or volume, tend to become dominant. These give the definite traits and points of character. Under appropriate circumstances these dominants issue into action. But apart from these characteristic permanent dominants, in the hundred and one daily circumstances there will be temporary dominants, first one and then another, which give rise to the countless actions of every day. Only dominant ideas can secure corresponding actions, and once an idea has gained the ascendancy in the mind it is certain that, as soon as opportunity offers, it will blossom into action.

Perverted Dominants

Looking round, with special reference to character, it is not difficult to discern how large a part of the shadows of life are due to what we may term perverted dominant ideas. We see people at cross purposes with the Universe, with everything going wrong, and their whole life a range of discord ; for the greater part of which wrong thinking is responsible. We have to meet the events of life as one force meets another, and in order that the resultant should follow the line of harmony it is necessary that we should meet events at a certain angle. This means that we must find that attitude towards life which produces the desired result, in short, that we should adapt ourselves to life and its great laws as a condition of harmony. Where we contend against vital principles we ourselves are damaged, not by any vindictive process, but just as automatically as if we were to try to push our head through the party wall instead of entering by way of the door.

A wrong attitude of life in general simply means that our dominant ideas are perverted, and this is as an inevitable consequence of the trend of our past thoughts. A rough and ready test of the correct adjustment of life is harmony, or the absence of friction. Where we find things going wrong and troubles coming thick and fast upon our devoted heads, we should eschew resignation and regrets, and suchlike un-Christian vices, and look at the events squarely and try to find their meaning. They have one ; they are the by-products of mal-adjustment and wrong conditions, just as much as pain is in the body. They are also, again like pain, invaluable for the purpose of diagnosis. Law and order hold throughout the Universe, for every effect there must have been an efficient cause — life works as if this were true, and we can indeed conceive of no other theory. Therefore, for the things that go wrong there must be a cause ; and, once we have got upon its track, a most exhilarating and engrossing pursuit ensues upon our endeavour to run it to ground. Having unearthed it and traced its workings up to the trouble manifestations, we shall find that most usually the difficulty or distress is due to wrong thinking. If, now, we reverse the current of our ideas and set to work to fashion another dominant, so that we meet life at another angle, the resultant will necessarily be different. But wherever undesirable results are a consequence of wrong thinking, nothing in the world will alter those results save remedying the thinking. Not all the prayers under Heaven will serve in place of better thinking, and, on the other hand, perhaps right thinking is not so far from that " praying without ceasing " to which we are so strongly recommended.

A youth with hazy ideas as to the difference between "mine" and "thine" is wrongly adjusted to life, his dominants are at any rate in some danger of perversion. Given the opportunity of theft, having no bias towards honesty to save him, he will probably succumb. Nature very possibly takes the shape of the policeman on the beat, lodges him in the dock, and makes things unpleasant for him. The theoretical idea of punishment is that it is remedial. But it is likely that our young friend will explain to himself that he has only suffered because the policeman happened to see him, and perhaps he will have better luck next time ; or because he was a little clumsy over the job — a fault which practice will remedy ; or because the fool of a shopkeeper was too careless over his goods ; or any one of a dozen things according to circumstances. We may be tolerably sure that the last thing he will fix upon as the cause will be the real reason — his faulty dominant ideas. Consequently, any future efforts he may make towards keeping out of the clutches of the law will in all likelihood be futile, because wrongly directed. His salvation therefore will be further delayed. A book pointing out a few obvious truths of this description might be specially commissioned for prison libraries ; it would be a good investment.