Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE METHODS OF BACON AND FRANKLIN There is always hope in the man who actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone there is per- petual despair. I Hope the reader will not assume, from my citing these strenuous workers, that I propose to make either a Bacon or a Franklin out of him. If his yearnings run to this length, he will have to consult some one whose philosophy is cast in a more heroic mold than mine. At the same time, even if we do not care to follow in the footsteps of such devotees of toil, it is always worth while to study the mental machinery of successful men, especially if they have not been afraid to let in the public to see the wheels go round. This Franklin did in his Autobiography to an amazing degree. Bacon did the same, but indirectly,through our knowledge that he was himself the first to follow the advice he gave others regarding industry, mind management, and the regulation of conduct. Tales of genius, by appealing to our sense of the marvellous, may be more attractive than the story of systematic endeavor, but the former may easily give rise to false ideals, ideals leading either to idle dreams, or to unwarranted discouragement over the fact that our equipment falls far short of genius. The earlier we learn that work is a more reliable attribute than genius, the sooner we shall lay a firm foundation for our own advancement. It is true that Bacon has been counted among the men of genius, but it is essentially to painstaking and unremitting toil that his high place in the land of letters and philosophy is due. The management of the mind he undertook, as he did everything else, somewhat on the lines of reducingcord wood to kindling. He put his back into it and sawed wood. A clue to the methods of this remarkable man may be obtained from hi...