CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Pres. C.W. Eliot.

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To Do a Thing Well

HE only way to learn to do a thing is to do it and then keep on doing it. For there needs no allegory to describe the brain as a bundle of habits.

If you could lift the top of your skull and look down into your own mind you would see these habits as a physical fact. Every time you think a new thought a tiny ray dot pushes up into the cortex of your cerebrum or upper brain, trailing behind it an insulated nerve wire connecting it with your nervous centers of thought and action.

Every time you re-think that thought you make it stronger and imperceptibly larger; increasing also the conductivity along the nerve wire which connects it up with your ego.

If you never re-think, nerve cell and nerve wire will atrophy, fading back into nothingness, just like unused muscle.

But when once you have builded it so strongly that it has become permanently hitched up with your association centers, you cannot forget to re-think it.

Thus are all habits of good and evil action formed, since all action originates in thought, and all thought originates in one or other of these cells in the cerebrum.

Until you have formed one thought-cell you are incapable of the thought.

The only way to do a thing well is to do it over and over again, because habits are not made in a minute, and all thoughts and actions, all arts and crafts, are founded upon habit; while facility is acquired only with constant repetition.

Charles H. McIntosh.