Understand in about 5 minutes
Atkinson treats the mind as a set of trainable faculties, attention, perception, memory, imagination, and will, and explains how each can be strengthened by practice.
Mind Map
Core Message
Atkinson sets aside arguments about the ultimate nature of mind and treats psychology as practical. The question is not what the mind ultimately is, but how its powers can be observed, exercised, and improved.
Nothing is clearly perceived, remembered, or reasoned about until attention is directed to it. Voluntary attention, the kind the will commands, is presented as the first power to train, because strengthening it strengthens everything else.
The senses report far more than the mind ever notices. Perception is the trained act of interpreting those reports, and memory is the storehouse that holds them. Both improve through interest, attention, and steady practice.
Imagination builds new forms only from material already gathered through the senses. The will, working through desire, deliberation, and action, can direct all of these faculties and is itself trained by use, habit, and the practice of doing hard things.
Summary
Your Mind and How to Use It is a manual of practical psychology. Atkinson begins by refusing the old habit of defining the ultimate nature of mind. Following thinkers such as William James, he treats the mind as something to be used, and bends his attention to the laws of mental activity and the methods by which mental powers can be developed. The whole book is organized around a working classification of the faculties: consciousness, perception, representation through memory and imagination, feeling, intellect, and will.
Attention comes first because so much depends on it. Atkinson distinguishes involuntary attention, caught by any new or striking thing, from voluntary attention, directed by the will toward an object of deliberate choice. We become conscious of the senses only where attention is turned, so the clock can strike unheard while we read. He argues that voluntary attention is the result of training, that it can be built by practice on dull material until interest grows, and that it marks the person of strong will and character.
Perception and memory follow as the powers that turn raw sensation into knowledge. Sensation is only a feeling; perception is the thought that interprets a group of sensations and assigns them to the object that caused them. Most of what the senses report is never perceived at all, so perception too is a skill, sharpened by analysis and by the deliberate habit of noticing detail. Memory is the storehouse of past impressions; its strength depends on the depth of the original impression, on association, and on use, and it can be schooled like any other faculty.
Imagination is the higher representative power. In its reproductive form it differs little from memory, but in its constructive form it arranges remembered impressions into new combinations. Atkinson is careful to insist that imagination invents nothing from nothing: the unicorn, the centaur, and the mermaid are all assembled from parts already seen in nature. Because every invention and every plan is built this way, imagination is treated not as idle fancy but as a working tool of thought, capable of being developed by the same methods as memory.
The will closes the book as the central power of the self. Atkinson describes it in three phases: desire, which supplies the motive force; deliberation, the weighing and balancing of competing desires under the eye of the intellect; and action, the expression of the chosen desire. The will can strengthen or starve a desire by granting or withholding attention, and it is trained chiefly by intelligent use, by forming good habits, and, following James, by regularly doing small disagreeable things so that the will is ready when a real emergency comes. A closing chapter gathers sayings on resolve to tone up the reader's own will.
Key Concepts
Atkinson treats psychology as the study of mental states and the methods of developing them, rather than as speculation about what mind ultimately is.
It sets the whole book's tone: the faculties are described in order to be exercised and improved, not merely classified.
Attention directed by the will toward a chosen object, as distinct from the reflex attention caught automatically by anything new or striking.
Atkinson makes it the first faculty to train, because perception, memory, reasoning, and will all draw on the attention given to their objects.
Memory and imagination re-present to consciousness what the senses once delivered; memory stores impressions and imagination recombines them into new forms.
It shows that thought is built from stored experience, so enriching and ordering that store is a practical route to clearer thinking.
Mental Models
Each mental power, attention, perception, memory, imagination, and will, is treated as a capacity that grows by practice and use, like a muscle, and weakens through neglect.
It turns vague wishes for a better mind into specific exercises, since each faculty has its own drills for strengthening it.
A sensation is a bare feeling; perception is the thought that groups several sensations and ties them to the object causing them, drawing on memory of past experience.
It clarifies why two people can receive the same sense reports yet notice very different things, and why noticing can be practiced.
Atkinson splits an act of will into desire that supplies the motive, deliberation that weighs competing desires under the intellect, and action that expresses the choice.
It locates where self-command actually works: by directing attention among desires and by training the action stage through habit and deliberate effort.
Selected Quotes
Memory is the primary representative faculty or power of the mind.
The dramatic values of life depend upon the quality of the imagination.
Habits are the beaten track over which the will travels.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Your Mind and How to Use It by William Walker Atkinson.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/42055/pg42055.txt
Project Gutenberg states this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions.
Project Gutenberg released this ebook in 2013; the manual dates from the early twentieth century.