Book Description
The First of a Series of Twelve Volumes by Warren Hilton, founder of The Society of Applied Psychology, on the Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and Business Efficiency.

The world has been slow to acknowledge the mastery of mind over body. This is because the world long persisted in looking at the question from the point of view of the philosopher and religionist. It is because the thought of the world has been hampered by its own definitions of terms. In this book of scientific study the author demonstrates this mastery clearly and incontravertably using the testimonies of a number of leading experts - professors and doctors - in this field.

Contents

I. ATTAINMENT OF MIND CONTROL
THE MAN OF TOMORROW
THE DOLLARS AND CENTS OF MENTAL WASTE
THE MEANS TO NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT
A PROCESS FOR "MAKING GOOD"
 INADEQUACY OF BODY TRAINING
INADEQUACY OF BUSINESS SPECIALIZATION
FUTILITY OF ADVICE IN BUSINESS
THE WHY AND THE HOW
FUNDAMENTAL TRAINING FOR EFFICIENCY
THE VIRUS OF FAILURE
PRACTICAL FORMULAS FOR EVERY DAY
YOUR UNDISCOVERED RESOURCES
MAN'S MIND MACHINE
ABJURING MYSTICISMS
PSYCHOLOGY, PHYSIOLOGY AND RELATIONSHIPS
ABODE AND INSTRUMENT OF MIND
MANNER OF HANDLING MENTAL PROCESSES
FUNDAMENTAL LAWS AND PRACTICAL METHODS
SPECIAL BUSINESS TOPICS
A STEP BEYOND COLLEGIATE PSYCHOLOGY
THE ETERNAL LAWS OF INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT
HOW TO MASTER OUR METHODS

II. TWO LAWS OF SUCCESS-ACHIEVEMENT
THE ONE-MAN BUSINESS CORPORATION
BUSINESS AND BODILY ACTIVITY
THE ENSLAVED BRAIN
FIRST STEP TOWARD SELF-REALIZATION

III. RELATION OF MIND ACTIVITY TO BODILY ACTIVITY
SPECULATION AND PRACTICAL SCIENCE
PHILOSOPHIC RIDDLES AND PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS
WHAT WE WANT TO KNOW
SPIRITUALIST, MATERIALIST AND SCIENTIST
SCIENCE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
CAUSES AND "FIRST" CAUSES
A COMMON PLATFORM FOR ALL
THOUGHTS TREATED AS CAUSES
SCIENTIFIC METHOD WITH PRACTICAL PROBLEMS
USES OF SCIENTIFIC LAWS

IV. INTROSPECTIVE EVIDENCE OF MENTAL MASTERY
DOING THE THING YOU WANT TO DO
SOURCE OF POWER OF WILL
IMPELLENT ENERGY OF THOUGHT
BODILY EFFECTS OF MENTAL STATES
ILLUSTRATIVE EXPERIMENTS
SCOPE OF MIND POWER
BODILY EFFECTS OF EMOTION
BODILY EFFECTS OF PERCEPTION
EXPERIMENTS OF PAVLOV
TASTE AND DIGESTION
BODILY EFFECTS OF SENSATIONS
THE FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF EXPRESSION

V. PHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF MENTAL MASTERY
INTROSPECTIVE KNOWLEDGE
DISSECTION AND THE GOVERNING CONSCIOUSNESS
SUBORDINATE MENTAL UNITS
WHAT THE MICROSCOPE SHOWS
THE LITTLE UNIVERSE BEYOND
THE UNIT OF LIFE
CHARACTERISTICS OF LIVING CELLS
THE BRAIN OF THE CELL
MIND LIFE OF ONE CELL
THE WILL OF THE CELL
THE CELL AND ORGANIC EVOLUTION
EVOLUTIONARY DIFFERENTIATIONS
PLURALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
COMBINED CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE MILLIONS
EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN ORGANISM
THE CROWD-MAN
FUNCTIONS OF DIFFERENT HUMAN CELLS
CELL LIFE AFTER DEATH
EXPERIMENTS OF DR. ALEXIS CARRELL
MAN-FEDERATION OF INTELLIGENCES
CREATIVE POWER OF THE CELL
LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR PRACTICAL DOING
THREE NEW PROPOSITIONS
AN INSTRUMENT FOR MENTAL DOMINANCE
GATEWAYS OF EXPERIENCE
COURIERS OF ACTION
NERVE SYSTEMS
ORGANS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND SUBCONSCIOUSNESS
LOOKING INSIDE THE SKULL
DRUNKENNESS AND BRAIN EFFICIENCY
SECONDARY BRAINS
DEPENDENCE OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS
UNCONSCIOUSNESS AND SUBCONSCIOUSNESS
SYNTHESIS OF THE MAN-MACHINE
SUBSERVIENCY OF THE BODY

VI. THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
STRIKING OFF THE MENTAL SHACKLES
THE AWAKENING OF ENLIGHTENMENT
THE VITAL PURPOSE
YOUR RESERVOIR OF LATENT POWER

Chapter 1

ATTAINMENT OF MIND CONTROL

The Man of Tomorrow

The men of the nineteenth century have harnessed the forces of the outer world. The age is now at hand that shall harness the energies of mind, new-found in the psychological laboratory, and shall put them at the service of humanity.

Are you fully equipped to take a valiant part in the work of the coming years?

The Dollars and Cents of Mental Waste

The greatest of all eras is at hand! Are you increasing your fitness to appreciate it and take part in it, or are you merely passing your time away?

Take careful note for a week of the incidents of your daily life—your methods of work, habits of thought, modes of recreation. You will discover an appalling waste in your present random methods of operation.

How many foot-pounds of energy do you suppose you annually dump into the scrap-heap of wasted effort? What does this mean to you in dollars and cents? In conscious usefulness? In peace and happiness?

Individual mental efficiency is an absolute prerequisite to any notable personal achievement or any great individual success. Your mental energies are the forces with which you must wage your battles in this world.

The Means to Notable Achievement

Are you prepared to direct and deploy these forces with masterful control and strategic skill? Are you prepared to use all your reserves of mental energy in the crises of your career?

Individual mental efficiency is an absolute prerequisite to any notable personal achievement or any great individual success. Your mental energies are the forces with which you must wage your battles in this world. Are you prepared to direct and deploy these forces with masterful control and strategic skill? Are you prepared to use all your reserves of mental energy in the crises of your career?

A Mighty and Intelligent Power resides within you. Its marvelous resources are just now coming to be recognized.

Recent scientific research has revealed, beyond the world of the senses and beyond the domain of consciousness, a wide and hitherto hidden realm of human energies and resources.

A Process for "Making Good"

These are mental energies and resources. They are phases of the mind, not of the "mind" of fifty years ago, but of a "mind" of whose operations you are unconscious and whose marvelous breadth and depth and power have but recently been revealed to the world by scientific experiment.

Thus in many fairly independent ways we are brought around to this same idea of a common structure underlying all the many seeming diversities manifested by what we call matter.

In this Basic Course of Reading we shall lay before you in simple and clear-cut but scientific form the proof that you have at your command mental powers of which you have never before dreamed.

And we shall give you such specific directions for the use of these new-found powers, that whatever your environment, whatever your business, whatever your ambition, you need but follow our plain and simple instructions in order to do the thing you want to do, to be the man you want to be, or to get the thing you want to have.

Inadequacy of Body Training

If you have any thought that the control of your hidden mental energies is to be acquired by mere hygienic measures, put it from you. The idea that you may come into the fulness of your powers through mere wholesome living, outdoor sports and bodily exercise is an idea that belongs to an age that is past. Good health is not necessary to achievement. It is not even a positive influence for achievement. It is merely a negative blessing. With good health you may hope to reach your highest mental and spiritual development free from the harassment of soul-racking pain. But without good health men have reached the summit of Parnassus and have dragged their tortured bodies up behind them.

Inadequacy of Business Specialization

Nor does success necessarily follow or require long preparation in a particular field. The first occupation of the successful man is rarely the one in which he achieves his ultimate triumph. In the changing conditions of our day, one needs a better weapon than the mere knowledge of a particular trade, vocation or profession. He needs that mastery of himself and others that is the fundamental secret of success in all fields of endeavor.

Futility of Advice in Business

It is well to tell you beforehand that in this Basic Course of Reading we shall be content with no mere cataloguing of the factors that are commonly regarded as essential to success. We shall do no moralizing. You will find here no elaboration of the ancient aphorisms, "Honesty is the best policy," and "Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains."

The world has had its fill of mere exhortations to industry, frugality and perseverance. For some thousands of years men have preached to the lazy man, "Be industrious," and to the timid man, "Be bold." But such phrases never have solved and never can solve the problem for the man who feels himself lacking in both industry and courage.

The Why and the How

It is easy enough to tell the salesman that he must approach his "prospect" with tact and confidence. But tact and confidence are not qualities that can be assumed and discarded like a Sunday coat. Industry and courage and tact and confidence are well enough, but we must know the Why and the How of these things.

It is well enough to preach that the secret of achievement is to be found in "courage-faith" and "courage-confidence," and that the way to acquire these qualities is to assume that you have them. There is no denying the undoubted fact that men and women have been rescued from the deepest mire of poverty and despair and lifted to planes of happy abundance by what is known as "faith." But what is "faith"? And "faith" in What? And Why? And How?

Obviously we cannot achieve certain and definite results in this or any other field so long as we continue to deal with materials we do not understand.

Fundamental Training for Efficiency

Yet that is what all men are doing today. The elements of truth are befogged in vague and amateurish mysticism, and the subject of individual efficiency when we get beyond mere preaching and moralizing is a chaos of isms.

The time is ripe for a real analysis of these important problems,—a serious and scientific analysis with a clear and practical exposition of facts and principles and rules for conduct.

Men and women must be fundamentally trained so that they can look deep into their own minds and see where the screw is loose, where oil is needed, and so readjust themselves and their living for a greater efficiency.

The Virus of Failure

The embittered, the superstitious, the prejudiced, all those who scorpion-like sting themselves with the virus of failure, must be given an antidote of understanding that will repair their deranged mental machinery.

The conscientious but foolish business man who is worrying himself into failure and an early grave must be taught the physiological effects of ideas and given a new standard of values.

The profligate must be lured from his emotional excesses and debaucheries, not by moralizings, but by showing him just how these things fritter his energies and retard his progress.

Practical Formulas for Every Day

It must be made plain to the successful promoter, to the rich banker, how a man may be a financial success and yet a miserable failure so far as true happiness is concerned, and how by scientific self-development he can acquire greater riches within than all his vaults of steel will hold.

This Basic Course of Reading offers just such an analysis and exposition of fundamental principles. It furnishes definite and scientific answers to the problems of life. It will reveal to you unused or unintelligently used mental forces vastly greater than those now at your command.

Your Undiscovered Resources

We go even further, and say that this Basic Course of Reading provides a practicable formula for the everyday use of these vast resources. It will enable you to acquire the magical qualities and still more magical effects that spell success and happiness, without straining your will to the breaking point and making life a burden. It will give you a definite prescription like the physician's, "Take one before meals," and as easily compounded, which will enable you to be prosperous and happy.

In the development of one's innate resources, such as powers of observation, imagination, correct judgment, alertness, resourcefulness, application, concentration, and the faculty of taking prompt advantage of opportunities, the study of the mental machine is bound to be the first step. It must be the ultimate resource for self-training in efficiency for the promoter with his appeal to the cupidity and imaginations of men as surely as for the artist in his search for poetic inspiration.

Man's Mind Machine

No man can get the best results from any machine unless he understands its mechanism. We shall draw aside the curtain and show you the mind in operation.

The mastery of your own powers is worth more to you than all the knowledge of outside facts you can crowd into your head. Read and study and practice the teachings of this Basic Course, and they will make you in a new sense the master of yourself and of your future.

In this Basic Course of Reading we shall begin by giving you a thorough understanding of certain mental operations and processes.

Abjuring Mysticisms

We shall lead your interest away from "vague mysticisms" and emphasize such phases of scientific psychological theory as bear directly on practical achievement.

We shall give you a practical working knowledge of concentrative mental methods and devices. We shall clear away the mysteries and misapprehensions that now envelop this particular field.

In the present volume we shall begin with a discussion of certain aspects of the relation between the mind and the body.

Psychology, Physiology and Relationships

However we look at it, it is impossible to understand the mind without some knowledge of the bodily machine through which the mind works. The investigation of the mind and its conditions and problems is primarily the business of psychology, which seeks to describe and explain them. It would seem to be entirely distinct from physiology, which seeks to classify and explain the facts of bodily structure and operation. But all sciences overlap more or less. And this is particularly true of psychology, which deals with the mind, and physiology, which deals with the body.

It is the mind that we are primarily interested in. But every individual mind resides within, or at least expresses itself through, a body. Upon the preservation of that body and upon the orderly performance of its functions depend our health and comfort, our very lives.

Abode and instrument of Mind

Then, too, considered merely as part of the outside world of matter, man's body is the physical fact with which he is most in contact and most immediately concerned. It furnishes him with information concerning the existence and operations of other minds. It is in fact his only source of information about the outside world.

First of all, then, you must form definite and intelligent conclusions concerning the relations between the mind and the body.

Manner of Handling Mental Processes

This will be of value in a number of ways. In the first place, you will understand the bodily mechanism through which the mind operates, and a knowledge of this mechanism is bound to enlighten you as to the character of the mental processes themselves. In the second place, it is worth while to know the extent of the mind's influence over the body, because this knowledge is the first step toward obtaining bodily efficiency through the mental control of bodily functions. And, finally, a study of this bodily mechanism is of very great practical importance in itself, for the body is the instrument through which the mind acts in its relations with the world at large.

From a study of the bodily machine, we shall advance to a consideration of the mental processes themselves, not after the usual manner of works on psychology, but solely from the standpoint of practical utility and for the establishment of a scientific concept of the mind capable of everyday use.

Fundamental Laws and Practical Methods

The elucidation of every principle of mental operation will be accompanied by illustrative material pointing out just how that particular law may be employed for the attainment of specific practical ends. There will be numerous illustrative instances and methods that can be at once made use of by the merchant, the musician, the salesman, the advertiser, the employer of labor, the business executive.

Special Business Topics

In this way this Basic Course of Reading will lay a firm and broad foundation, first, for an understanding of the methods and devices whereby any man may acquire full control and direction of his mental energies and may develop his resources to the last degree; second, for an understanding of the psychological methods for success in any specific professional pursuit in which he may be particularly interested; and third, for an understanding of the methods of applying psychological knowledge to the industrial problems of office, store and factory.

The first of these—that is to say, instruction in methods for the attainment of any goal consistent with native ability—will follow right along as part of this Basic Course of Reading. The second and third—that is to say, the study of special commercial and industrial topics—are made the subject of special courses supplemental to this Basic Course and for which it can serve only as an introduction.

The conclusion which our minds are forced to draw from the facts presented in this chapter is not doubtful, nor is it difficult to state. Matter is not now being brought into existence by any means that we call "natural." And yet the facts of radioactivity very positively forbid the past eternity of matter. Hence, the conclusion is syllogistic: matter must have originated at some time in the past by methods or means which are equivalent to a real Creation.

A Step Beyond Collegiate Psychology

In this Basic Course of Reading we shall show you how you may acquire perfect individual efficiency. And, most remarkable of all, we shall show you how you may acquire it without that effort to obtain it, that straining of the will, that struggling with wasteful inclinations and desires, that is itself the essence of inefficiency.

The facts and principles set forth in this Basic Course are new and wonderful and inspiring. They have been established and attested by world-wide and exhaustive scientific research and experiment.

The Eternal Laws of Individual Achievement

You may be a college graduate. You may have had the advantage of a college course in psychology. But you have probably had no instruction in the practical application of your knowledge of mental operations. So far as we are aware, there are few universities in the world that embrace in their curricula a course in "applied" psychology. For the average college man this Basic Course of Reading will be, therefore, in the nature of a post-graduate course, teaching him how to make practical use of the psychology he learned at college, and in addition giving him facts about the mind unknown to the college psychology of a few years ago.

In these books you will probe deeply into the normal human mind.

You will see also the fantastic and distorted shape of its manifestations in disease.

You will learn the Eternal Laws of Individual Achievement.

How to Master Our Methods

And you will be taught how to apply them to your own business or profession.

But mark this word of warning. To comprehend the teachings of this Basic Course well enough to put them into practice demands from you careful study and reflection. It requires persistent application. Do not attempt to browse through the pages that follow. They are worth all the time that you can put upon them.

The mind is a complex mechanism. Each element is alone a fitting subject for a lifetime's study. Do not lose sight of the whole in the study of the parts.

All the books bear upon a central theme. They will lead you on step by step. Gradually your conception of your relations to the world will change. A new realization of power will come upon you. You will learn that you are in a new sense the master of your fate. You will find these books, like the petals of a flower, unfolding one by one until a great and vital truth stands revealed in full-blown beauty.

To derive full benefit from the Course it is necessary that you should do more than merely understand each sentence as you go along. You must grasp the underlying train of thought. You must perceive the continuity of the argument.

It is necessary, therefore, that you do but a limited amount of reading each day, taking ample time to reflect on what you have read.

If any book is not entirely clear to you at first, go over it again. Persistence will enable any man to acquire a thorough comprehension of our teachings and a profound mastery of our methods.