Now it is a great advantage to be eye-minded. There is no easier way of learning one’s lessons than by seeing books and maps and charts and diagrams, whenever you want them, right in front of your eyes, so that all you have to do is to look and see. The difference between boys and girls who get their lessons almost without effort, and those who get them only with the greatest labor, and then promptly forget them again, is often in just this power of making mental pictures. Some people can remember a page so clearly that they can actually read off the first or last words of each line, or read the printing backwards. Naturally, lessons come pretty easy to such lucky people.

Then too, to be eye-minded is a great source of happiness. One sees in the course of his lifetime, all sorts of beautiful and interesting things. If he can, whenever he wishes, recall these as mental pictures, almost as vivid as the reality, it is like seeing the reality all over again. He always has with him a collection of pictures, which though he cannot show to another, he can at any time enjoy for himself.

The eye-minded person, moreover, has still another string to his bow. Not only can he recall what he has seen; he can also imagine things which he has not seen, and so tell in advance how they are going to look. The engineer about to build a bridge, the architect planning a house, the housekeeper deciding how she shall arrange a room or set a table, the girl considering a new dress, the boy laying out a ball field, all can work to vastly better advantage if they can see exactly how everything is going to look, before they do anything. It is a great deal easier to change things in one’s mind, than after they get into wood and iron and cloth. No one can possibly succeed as engineer, architect, designer, dress-maker, milliner, and the like, unless he can make these pictures in his mind’s eye, and see how things are going to be, before he wastes time and material on the reality, Fortunately, this eye-mindedness is easily cultivated. One has only to attend to his mental pictures, and try to see all there is in them, to have them grow sharper and more complete. In fact, children usually have so much of this faculty that if they only kept what they have, instead of letting it waste away from lack of use, they would be far better off when they grew up than most grown-ups are. As we get older, we get to thinking more in words, and we lose the knack of making pictures. All is, we simply mustn’t.

XXXIV
Ear Minds and Others

Some persons are ear-minded. If you say to them

BREAKFAST TABLE.

they don’t see any breakfast table at all. Instead they hear in their mind’s ear the sound of dishes, the murmur of conversation, and the clatter of knives and forks. When they have learned their lessons, and stand up to recite, they hear an inner voice telling them what to say. They cannot easily remember how places look on the map; but they remember the songs of birds, the different whistles and bells of their neighborhood, they like lectures and readings, and when they have heard a tune once, they know it again. Such people may find it hard to learn to read a foreign language, but they make it up by learning easily to understand it when spoken.

Musicians are apt to be ear-minded. Mozart, for example, could listen to a long piece of music, then go home and hear it over again as many times as he liked in his mind’s ear, and so write it down at his leisure. Beethoven, after he became stone deaf, used still to write his magnificent symphonies, that took hours to perform, making them up in his head and hearing them in his soul’s ear—violins, and trumpets and cymbals and drums, each in its proper place, long after his bodily ears had ceased to hear any noise.

Not many people are ear-minded; not nearly so many are as eye-minded. Those that are, can always hear sweet music and pleasant sounds, whenever they will, and recall the words and voices of their friends. Surely there is much happiness in being ear-minded. Whatever ear-mindedness one has, is well worth hanging on to and improving.