CHAPTER I.

THE POWER OF THOUGHT

In other volumes of this series, we have considered the operations of the human mind known as Will In the psychology of this era, the "Will" was considered the mental faculty that allows a person to choose a course of action and carry it out., Memory, and so on. We now approach the consideration of those mental activities which are concerned with the phenomena of thought—those activities which we generally speak of as the operation of the intellect or reason.

What is thought? The answer is not an easy one, although we use the term familiarly almost every hour of our waking existence. The dictionaries define the term “Thought” as follows: “The act of thinking; the exercise of the mind in any way except sense and perception In this context, "sense and perception" refers to the raw data gathered by the physical senses (sight, touch, etc.) before the mind begins to process or analyze that data.; serious consideration; deliberation; reflection; the power or faculty of thinking; the mental faculty of the mind; etc.” This drives us back to the term “to think,” which is defined as follows: “To occupy the mind on some subject; to have ideas; to revolve ideas in the mind; to cogi- The text breaks here at the end of the page; the full word is "cogitate," meaning to think deeply or meditate.