The Book of Life - The Original Classic Edition. Sinclair Upton

There is no such thing as freedom without knowledge, and it must be the best knowledge, it must be new knowledge; he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with umbrellas over their heads.

       Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that knowledge is your priceless birth-right, and that you should repudiate all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it, or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at the same time be-ware of the modern spells which have been contrived to replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for your feet. Beware of cant--that paraphernalia of noble sentiments, artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in

       a world of class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?

       The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called "Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements lightly.

       This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry, but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and standardized. When the United States government had

       to have an army in a hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop, and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers. Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective. Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making buttons and buttonholes meet.

       This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child--which may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting separate schools for defective children--replacing the old-fashioned schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little wretches to learn what was beyond their power.

       In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and asks the person he is