A. Loisette

“ What mistake does the impatient pupil make? Does this not convince you that the figure alphabet must be mastered before the attempt is made to deal with dates? What is the second requisite to becoming proficient in forming analytic date words? What should the pupil do if he lacks the knowledge indicated here? If the pupil fixes in mind the population of three States per day, how long will it take him to learn the population of all the American States? How long to deal in like manner with the population of all the countries of the globe? ”

“ To have obtained a lasting knowledge of this History by my method would probably have occupied him as long as he was formerly engaged in two or three of the sixteen fruitless perusals of it. There is, however, only one difference between this unfortunate student and the great majority of those who succeed in the examinations through cramming. He forgot all his historical knowledge before the examination—they usually forget‌ theirs shortly after. In fact, a student or a man in advanced years who has really mastered any book so that he never has to refer to it again is a wonder. ”

“ Learning a series of words by heart by thinking of the Relations between them is wholly unlike learning it by rote. In the latter case, three or five words at a time or all ten words are read over from 10 to 20 times. This reading secures scarcely anything more than a succession of sights to the eye or sounds to the ear. No study of the words is required. The action of the intellect is not invoked. ”

“ But if the pupil‌ whose attention was formerly weak will never allow a date to come before him without fixing it in mind by my method, and if he will also occasionally learn by heart a passage of prose or poetry by my assimilating methods, he will train his Attention in a pleasanter and more effective way than Hamilton did his by his studies in Euclid—besides making himself conspicuously accurate where most men are notoriously inaccurate. ”

“ Every Correlation is a Synthetic Series. It can be and should always be analyzed, but Analysis never makes a Correlation. That is the function of Synthesis. Since “extremes” are words with no relation between them, Analysis cannot find what does not exist. But accident sometimes makes a spelling or letter relation between the “Extremes,” and then Analysis can memorise these “extremes” by means of such accidental relations. ”

“ Will a pupil always require an aid to remember figures? What is required of him in order to enable him to do away with any conscious aid? What does a thorough training in my system accomplish in the meantime? Will there ever be any necessity of using the figure alphabet? Will not a decided benefit ensue to those who have acquired a great power of attention? ”

“ They know where to find the coveted knowledge, but they do not possess it or retain it in their minds. On the other hand, the student who masters a book by my method really knows the contents of it, and he is thus enabled to devote to other purposes an enormous amount of time in the future that other people have to spend in perpetually refreshing their superficial acquirements. ”

“ What other great advantage does the method of Interrogative Analysis give? Are all well-informed persons good talkers? If not, why? In conversation, in what state are their minds apt to remain? Do any trains of thought arise in their own minds? What does the practice of Interrogative Analysis compel such persons to do? What do teachers often complain of? What is the cause? What does my method show them? Can they help practising it? Do I not fully illustrate my method? Does not the pupil gain confidence by practising this method? Does not the habit of active thinking thereby grow upon him? ”

“ Ideas are never words nor are words ever ideas, but words become so associated with ideas by habit, or by the Law of Concurrence, that they arouse certain ideas whenever they are used. They are used as signs of ideas—as the means of communicating them. There is rarely, if ever, any necessary connection that we can discover between a particular idea and the word used to stand for it. ”

“ A minor object is to memorise the Series—but a greater and higher object never lost sight of in these Lessons is to train the Memory and Attention. And let the pupil clearly notice how this training comes about. Merely running over a Series—two words at a time—without discriminating the kind and quality of the relations between the words—hoping that the mind unpractised in the Laws of Assimilation will intuitively feel those relations, constitutes no training of the Memory. Such reading neither strengthens the old power nor develops any new power. ”

“ Does not the attention always wander unless wooed to its work by great interest in the subject dealt with, or by the method of learning which is given? How is the intellect occupied by using my method? Is the habit of Attention also promoted? Where is the justification of this method found? Can the intellect assimilate a simple idea more easily than a complex idea? ”

“ All that the student requires is one analytic word. I have gone through the varieties of Inclusion, through Exclusion, and Concurrence, merely to show how to find analytic words and not because more than one word was necessary. ”

“ A modicum of mental training would have led him to say, “Kindly send me your Prospectus.”
LEARN FIRST TO MAKE ABSTRACTS OF WHAT IS NEW TO YOU.
A great authority on education says: “Any work that deserves thorough study, deserves the labor of making an Abstract, without which, indeed, the study is not thorough.”
A work which deserves thorough study is obviously one full of IDEAS, new to the reader, such as the student must master.
If you are thinking of making an Abstract of a particular book, awaken the utmost interest in regard to it before you begin. ”

“ If when we wish to retain in our memories a paragraph of fine sentiment or lucid reasoning, we find our attention wanders, so it must wander here where only a pair of words is before it, and we are not only not furnished with any tests or guides or stimulus or motive for examining the words or for finding the relation between them, but on the contrary we are forbidden to interfere with the spontaneous action of the mind. ”

“ It is often said that habit is “second” nature. The Duke of Wellington more truly said: “Habit is ten times nature.” The reader early acquired the habit of learning prose and poetry by the rote method—the method of repeating the sentences over and over again almost endlessly till ear or eye retains the exact language.
Now, if the reader has gained a clear conception of the Analytic-Synthetic and Interrogative Analysis methods, he is sure to be convinced of their undoubted superiority to the rote method. ”

“ And that by memorising and repeating for a considerable period Analytic Series, and especially by making and memorising one’s own Correlations, it is an unequalled system of Memory-TRAINING. Let the ambitious Pupil learn as many examples as I give in the lessons in order to so strengthen his natural memory that he will no longer have to use the device for memorising, his natural memory permanently retaining all he desires to remember. This result comes only to those who carry out all the directions with genuine alacrity—not shirking one of them.
Do all persons find them easy? ”

“ Is it ever possible to remember two extremes without thinking of the intermediates? In what cases? What did Dr. Johnson sometimes do when introduced to a stranger? What sometimes occurs with people who have adopted the Johnsonian Method? Why is this? As Max Müller names mental acts in this order: Sensation, Perception, Conception, Naming, and Memory, would he hold that failure to remember names implies weakness of naming power? No! Remembering a name is an act wholly unlike imposing a name in the first instance. ”

“ The other mode of learning any book in the thorough manner I have indicated, whether it be a book in which the reader finds but few novel ideas or where they are all new, as in a scientific or technical work, is by my Method. In fact, I believe no one can learn any book so thoroughly by rote, even if he possesses a marvellous Natural Memory and if he peruse it ever so many times, as my Pupils can by my method in a single perusal. ”

“ The fourth method is the pupil’s final method.
‌The foregoing exhaustive methods of dealing with a book are recommended to those only whose natural memories are not yet made powerfully retentive by the System as a Memory-TRAINER. If, however, a Pupil possesses a good natural memory and a mastery of the System as a Device for memorising, and he has also greatly added to the power of his Concentration as well as his memory by doing all the exercises, he will not use my System, even in the reading of the first book, except now and then—certainly not constantly, but only occasionally. ”

“ The unnumbered objects of thought which civilization constantly brings before the mind, without giving any opportunity for a mastery of many of them; the fierce rivalries of interest, and the enervating habits of body which are constantly being formed or perpetuated—all alike and together tend to break down an acquired power of Attention. It is said that Alexander Hamilton used to go through the demonstrations of Euclid’s Geometry before the commencement of each Session of the early Congress. ”

“ It is infinitely better for him to learn by analysis the order of the Presidents than to learn that order by the only other method the pupil has heretofore known, viz., endless repetition. When the pupil thinks a relation may be weak, let him consider that a weak relation thought about is a hundred-fold stronger than mere repetition without any thinking at all. ”

“ One teacher has re-arranged Series in Foreign Grammars in such a manner that he finds a natural suggestiveness between the words. No doubt such a re-arrangement can be made, but I question whether his doing it for another would help the latter much. For the pupil to benefit, he should re-adjust the Series for himself. My Pupils, when trained in Analysis and Synthesis, have no difficulty in correlating the Series just as they may find it. No time is spent in trying to discover relations that may not exist.‌ At best, when found, they will be weak ”

“ In pursuance of my plan to keep the mind in an Assimilating condition when trying to learn and to further aid in making the intellect stay and work with the senses, I proceed to furnish a Training Method for committing prose and poetry to memory.
Endless repetition or repeating a sentence to be memorised over and over again is the usual process. ”

“ Few people ever notice any relations among numbers. But any possible figures or dates always possess relations to the mind trained in In., Ex., and Con.
Fujiyama, the noted volcano of Japan, is twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet high. Does any pupil who has mastered the first lesson and who is expert in the use of In., Ex., and Con., fail to notice that here we have the disguised statement that the height of this mountain is expressed in the number of months and days of the year, 12,365 feet high? ”

“ It is, Learn by Thinking. What is Attention? It is the will directing the activity of the intellect into some particular channel and keeping it there. It is the opposite of mind-wandering. What is thinking? It consists in finding relations between the objects of thought with an immediate awareness of those relations. ”

“ A young clergyman is very apt to imagine that he will correlate together 20 to 100 propositions in every discourse—a theoretical conjecture never verified in fact. In practice, he will find that he will very rarely correlate more than ten propositions together, and he will correlate sub-propositions, citations, or illustrations to the respective propositions‌ to which they belong. Instead of correlations, he may unite his propositions together by analysis. Each person will manage this matter as he finds most convenient to himself ”

“ To fully understand what takes place when trying to study, let the pupil recall that there are three sources of knowledge.
First: The Senses carry into his mind reports from the outside world—Sensation—sight of the letters, words and sentences, &c. Second: The Intellect operates on these undigested elementary Sense-reports, or Sensations, and find relations among them. This is Perception, or relations among Sensations. Third: The mind acts on the perceived relations and finds relations among them. This is Reason or relations among relations. ”

“ Suppose we wish to memorise Bacon’s definition of education: “Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things.” Begin with the briefest sentence and then go on: 1. Education is cultivation. 2. Education is the cultivation of a familiarity. 3. Education is the cultivation of a familiarity betwixt the mind and things. 4. Education is the cultivation of a just familiarity betwixt the mind and things. 5. Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things. ”

“ A little practice will enable you to dispense with writing down the figures and the consonants which represent them; but at first pains must be taken in the above way to secure accuracy.
What would be your method of procedure? What must be done in all cases? What will a little practice enable you to do? What must be done to secure accuracy at first? Deal with an original date in the way indicated here. In dealing with the date of the foundation of Yale College, would the phrase “taxes due” express 1701? If not, why? Can you translate into a word or phrase the date of your own birth? ”

“ The contents of a book which demand your attention are the IDEAS which are NEW to you, or the NEW USES made of familiar ideas.
Students who have not learned to exercise any independent thought often confess that in reading any book they are always in a maze. One thing seems just as important as another. ”

“ There are other legitimate ways to assist a poor memory to master these lines, but whatever is done let no one ever think of resorting to the unthoughtive, brainless process of endless repetition.
Poe’s “Bells,” being a difficult selection to learn, furnishes, as all difficult selections do, numerous opportunities for applying Analysis to fix the lines in memory. Hence it should be mastered and often recited by all who would learn to memorise poetry or prose, in, at the very least, one-fifth of the time required by the old mind-wandering process of rote learning. ”

“ If a person is afflicted with a very bad memory in any or all respects, and particularly if this memory weakness is traceable to mind-wandering, or if it co-exist with the latter infirmity, such a person may find it best to make a series of from one hundred to five hundred words on the model of the foregoing series, and learn the same and recite it daily both ways for a month or more in addition to the prescribed exercises, and if any trace of mind-wandering remain after that, let him make and memorise another series of the same extent and practise it for the same period. ”

“ When we begin to learn such words they are wholly unknown to us. But in learning ordinary series of names or prose or poetry by heart, all the names and words used may be equally well known by us; but it is mainly the order in which these occur that we wish to memorise, and we begin at the beginning and proceed as we learn on from the Better Known or Best Known. In the list of American Presidents the series extends back to a little more than a century ”

“ This kind of a case is of rare occurrence, and it would be like the charlatanry which has disgraced many former memory systems to allow the pupil to suppose that it frequently happens. A glance at the event, word, or description will quickly tell him if it represents the necessary figures, and if it do not, he must resort to an analytic date word, or phrase, or sentence, whichever he finds most suitable for him. No one figure alphabet contains‌ the advantages of all others. ”