• Sharpen your positive senses.

• Keep your memory always at work.

• Learn to control the direction of your thinking.

• Nourish your thoughts with the opinions of others.

• Trust your subconscious mind and do not neglect its intimations.

• Set no limits to your thinking.

The writer said: "I know a garage owner who can recall, with perfect ease, all the license numbers of the cars — numbering in the hundreds — that are under his supervision." And in the United States he saw an interpreter speaking four dif-ferent languages with four persons without stopping...

These dazzling feats appear miraculous to ordinary people, but the truth is that we are unable to grasp the extent of our mental powers. For psychologists have declared that man uses, throughout his life, only a part of his mental powers.

Here we ask: can we make our mental powers more effective than they are now? We can, without a doubt.

Here are some methods that will help each of us to supply his mental powers with renewal and vitality to the utmost of their capacity.

First: sharpen your positive senses. Do you remember how you felt as a child when you heard the rain falling at night on the roof above your head? And how the smell of the smoke of burning grasses affected you on certain autumn days? When the days carry us along on their wings and

we move on in the procession of life, we come to believe that the world is striding backward, and that the marks of gladness and joy are vanishing from it. But the fact is that it is we who change; for we have come to walk along seeing and hearing nothing of the marvels of this vast universe, which never change at all.

To avoid this dangerous neglect, we must always look closely at the familiar things around us. Notice the reflection of sunlight on the wing of some insect you come across. Look closely at the little birds gathered on the branches and consider how they manage their affairs. Close your eyes and try to catch all the sounds around you, and try to classify them. Try to think of what happens to the blind man and the deaf man when their lost senses are suddenly restored to them.

Our senses are, for us, the bridge of knowledge and a spur to the imagination. If they are not always ready to serve us precisely, our mental powers are affected adversely and sluggishness over-takes them. And so we are forced, all our lives long, to be dependent on others, and we gradually lose our personality.

Second: keep your memory always at work. One psychologist has said: "It has been established in psychological research that memory grows stronger with the abundance of the tasks it bears, and becomes a center of trust if you trust it." Conversely, memory is paralyzed if it is neglected. Every time we use the telephone without going back to the directory we strengthen the powers of our memory; and every time we go to market without a shopping list we enable ourselves to persevere in this plan, and thereby to reach our goal. Here is a practical example of this plan: one of President Roosevelt's aides trained his memory so remarkably that he was able to memorize 20,000 names of American polit-ical men, because by virtue of his position he was obliged to be in touch with these persons and others. Then there was an official on one of the express trains in America who memorized the names of all the great personalities he accompanied on his journeys — indeed, he could remember the names of hundreds of persons at the mere sight of them. We may well wonder how they performed this astonishing feat: one of them, asked the secret of his memory's strength, answered that he used to ask each of the travelers what pleased him and look into his requests; in this way he sorted his guests into individuals, each with his own particular stamp, and thus enabled his memory to retain the names of all these persons without arduous effort.