XII. Concentration

XII

CONCENTRATION

THUS far I have spoken of the breaking and forming of habits, and of the acquisition of will-power; but for the most part I have given only scattered hints on what to do with your will-power after you have it. Most of these hints have been negative; they have talked of the avoidance of certain acts; and where they have been positive, where they have talked of the performance of acts, they have been altogether lofty and abstract. We have now to descend from the empyrean of generalities to the forest of details.

Your ultimate ends and yearning I shall, for the moment, take for granted. I assume that you know what you want, that you have definite ideas on where the treasure of happiness is buried, and that you merely seek aid in securing the implements to dig for it. Your aim in life may be wealth, power, fame, or a partnership in the lime and cement business. Assuming its existence, whatever it may be, and the willingness also to pay the price for it, we have now to inquire how the price is to be paid.

Your effort of will is not thrown out all at once. You are not asked to pay cash down in full. You are permitted—nay, you are obliged—to pay for your end in installments, in relatively small efforts of will. But these efforts of will must be continuous and sustained. If you miss a payment, the penalty imposed will be exorbitant, and you will have to make a much greater total payment in the end. On the other hand, if your payments are made promptly, you will find the amount called for diminishing all the time.

With most ends, one of the requisites will be the acquisition of knowledge—whether one’s ultimate purpose be material success or the pure search for Truth. The acquisition of this knowledge will require thought and study, and thought and study will require concentration.

Now this concentration will be mainly of two kinds—what I shall call minute-to-minute concentration, and what I shall call night-after-night concentration. Minute-to-minute concentration is the ability to keep your mind upon a certain subject for a given period, say for ten minutes, one half hour or two hours without interruption. Night-after-night concentration is the ability to specialize in a certain subject or in a certain branch of that subject until you have mastered it thoroughly, before advancing to other subjects.

Ere I go further I may have to justify the consideration of this question by asserting that concentration is primarily an act of will. It need not necessarily be so, any more than any other good or noble or success-forwarding act need be an act of will. If you enjoy working, getting up early, remaining home nights, staying sober, you will do so without effort. If you are interested in a book or in a particular subject, you will read it or meditate upon it without effort. But you need will-power in action precisely because you do not enjoy doing these commendable things, and you need will-power in reading, thought or writing precisely because your mind will otherwise be distracted by lack or lapses of interest in the subject at hand or by greater interest in something else.

Now when you take up the sublime task of training the mind to concentrate, you must remember that the act of will involved is the same in principle as any other act of will. Before you begin, you must be certain in your own mind that the end is worth while. There is a price attached to concentration, as there is to anything of value. Concentration is not a beautifully abstract quality of mind. We cannot concentrate in general. The very word concentration implies specialization; it means concentrating on some particular thing, and when we devote all or most of our time and attention to one particular subject, we must necessarily have less time for other subjects. In other words, we must be content to remain somewhat ignorant of them, at least for a time.

This applies particularly to night-after-night concentration. If you devote one evening’s study to the quantity theory of money, the next evening to the problem of the freedom of the will, the next to incidents in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the next to historic types of lampshades, your mind may eventually become an interesting depository of stray bits of knowledge, arousing the same sort of quaint enjoyment in the minds of your associates as an old curiosity shop, or a second-hand bookstore in which yellow-backed novels of passion and intrigue rub shoulders with scientific treatises and religious sermons.

But such miscellaneous reading is not helping you in any ultimate purpose. You are getting nowhere. You will become neither an economist, nor an ethicist, nor a man versed in biography, nor anything else describable with a complimentary name. By trying to know something about everything, you will not only miss knowing everything about something, but you may miss really knowing anything about anything. Your mind my miss the one advantage of an old curiosity shop—that the pieces of furniture in it, though they may not match each other, are at least in themselves complete. If you give only one or two evenings to a subject, your knowledge of it may be as useless as a chair with two legs. But if you are willing to realize that any useful knowledge whatever requires specialization, that it means keeping evening after evening on the same subject; if you take pride in really knowing something about something, then you will be willing to remain ignorant of certain subjects, at least for a given time. Even if, like Bacon, you take all human knowledge as your province, you must remember that even a traveler who circles the globe can go to only one place at one time.

I have spoken here only of keeping to one subject on those evenings on which you do choose to study. I have not spoken of the evenings given to other things. It may not be advisable to give six or seven evenings a week to study. One needs one’s play to keep from going stale. But there are limits even to this principle. No man will become an Aristotle or a Dun Scotus on an evening a week. “Most careers,” remarked a newspaper writer recently, “are made or marred in the hours after supper.”

What applies to night-after-night concentration applies with much greater force to minute-to-minute concentration. If the mind is ever to accomplish anything useful, it must be able to keep itself for a reasonable time on a given subject. The very completion of a train of thought on any subject whatsoever depends upon it. And the rules are the same old rules. You must first be fully certain in your own mind that the end is worthwhile. For when you are upon any given train of thought, you will find new paths opening up on either side, pleasant paths, paths that seem to led to worthwhile destinations, paths you are tempted to explore. But you must force yourself to keep on the road that you began. You must first get to the end of that. You may make mental note of these potential digressions, to return to them at some later time; or if you fear you are going to forget them, you may make written note of them as they suggest themselves.

Concentration is not a virtue in itself. The value of concentration depends entirely on the value of the subject concentration depends entirely on the value of the subject concentrated upon. The only qualification to this remark is that it may often be better really to concentrate upon a less important subject that to play and dabble with a more important one; for the less important subject, if concentrated upon, will at least be mastered.

I have dealt with this subject of concentration rather extensively in a former book, Thinking as a Science. It was there treated mainly from the standpoint of the intellect; here it must be treated from the standpoint of the will; but as the two cannot really be kept separate, and as I would only be likely to repeat myself anyway, I take the liberty of doing so openly:

Much of our mind wandering is due to the fact that we are not fully convinced of the importance of the problem being attacked or that we regard other problems or ideas as more important. Concentration consists in devoting one’s mind to the solution of one problem. During our train of thought associations bring up new ideas or suggest problems which do not bear on the question at hand. Now when we wander, when we follow up these irrelevant ideas or suggested problems, or when we happen to glance at something or hear something and begin to think of that, we do so because of a half-conscious belief that the new idea, problem or fact needs attending to is important. I have already pointed out that if this new idea is important it will be so only by accident. If we were consciously to ask ourselves whether any of these irrelevant problems were as important as the one we were concentrating upon or even important at all, we should find, nine times out of ten, that they were not.

Mind-wandering is only a habit. It must be broken just like other bad habits. “But,” I hear you say, “all this is beyond my control. I can’t keep my mind on a book when somebody insists on talking in the same room. I can’t write anything when the family in the apartment upstairs plays the victrola. I can’t keep myself to a train of thought with constant interruptions!”

But, with all due respect to you and with full realization of the risk I run of losing your respect, I insist that you can. You have done it. Certain allowances must always be made for the unspeakable noises that other people make, but you can ignore them easily enough when the time comes. Can you not recall, when as a boy you read the adventures of Jack Harkaway and the Chinamen, so that you became unconscious of the very room in which you were sitting? Has the memory of the smile given you by a certain wonderful girl never come between you and a very prosaic ledger, obliterating the figures as completely as if they were the fancy and the smile of reality? Has your wife never had to ask you a question two or three times at dinner before you answered, simply because you were completely wrapped up in some thought of a business unpleasantry that day, and did not know that she had spoken? All these forms of involuntary concentration, of which you were not conscious, were possible because the interest in the subject was intense enough.

Poverty in freshness of idea and in varied expressions tempts me again to quote from myself:

Whenever a person is left alone for a short time, with no one to talk to and no “reading matter”; when for instance, he is standing at a station waiting for his train, or sitting at a restaurant table waiting for his order, or hanging on a subway strap when he has forgotten to buy a newspaper, his “thoughts” tend to run along the tracks they have habitually taken. If a young man usually allows a popular tune to float through his head, that will be most likely to happen; if he usually thinks of that young lady, he will most likely think of her then; if he has often imagined himself as some great political orator making a speech amid the plaudits of the multitude, he is likely to see a mental picture of himself swinging his arms, waving flags and gulping water.

The only way a man can put a stop to such pleasant but uneducative roamings, is to snap off his train of day-dreaming the first moment he becomes aware of it, and to address his mind to some useful serious subject. His thoughts will be almost sure to leak away again. They may do this as often as fifteen times in half an hour. But the second he becomes aware of it, he should dam up the stream and send his thoughts along the channel he has laid out for them. If he has never done this, he will find the effort great. But if he merely resolves now that the next time his mind wanders he shall stop it in this manner, his resolve will tend to make itself felt. If he succeeds in following this practice once, it will be much easier a second time. Every time he does this it will become increasingly easy, until he will have arrived at the point where his control over his thoughts will be almost absolute. Not only will it be increasingly easy for him to turn his mind to serious subjects. It will become constantly more pleasurable. Frivolous and petty trains of thought will become more and more intolerable.