by Elsie Lincoln Benedict
Available in 98 free installments
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¶ Today we fly from continent to continent and air travel is superseding land and water transportation whenever great speed is in demand. A man receives word that his child is dangerously ill; he steps into an airplane and in less than half the time it would take trains or motors to carry him, alights at his own door.
Commerce, industry, war and the future of whole nations are being revolutionized by this man-made miracle. Yet it is but a few short years since S. P. Langley was sneered at from one end of this country to the other because he stooped to the "folly" of inventing a "flying machine."
¶ Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But it was many years before he could induce anybody to finance it, though some of the wealthiest, and therefore supposedly wisest, business men of the day were asked to do so. None of them would risk a dollar on it. Even after it had been tested at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and found to work perfectly, its possibilities were so little realized that for a long while no one could be found to furnish the funds necessary to place it upon the market.
¶ Then after the world had become accustomed to transacting millions of dollars worth of business daily over the once despised telegraph and telephone it took out its doubts on Marconi and his "wireless telegraphy." "It's impossible," they said. "Talk without wires? Never!"
But now the radio needles pierce the blue from San Diego to Shanghai and from your steamer in mid-ocean you can say good night to your loved one in Denver.
¶ Ideas always have to go begging at first, and the greater the idea the rougher the sledding.
The most successful play ever put on in America was "Lightnin'," written by Frank Bacon, a typical Cerebral-Osseous. It ran every night for three years in New York City. It has made a million people happy and a million dollars for its sponsors. But when Mr. Bacon, who also plays the title role, took it to the New York producers they refused it a try-out. But because he had faith in his dream and persisted, his name and his play have become immortal.
¶ The ideal combination is a dreamer who can DO or a doer who knows the power of a DREAM. Thinking and acting?almost every individual is doing too much of one and too little of the other!
¶ The world is divided roughly into these two classes: those who act without thinking (and as a result are often in jail); and those who think without acting (and as a result are often in the poorhouse).
¶ To be a successful individual today you have got to dream and then DO; plan and then PRODUCE; contemplate and then CONSTRUCT; think it out and then WORK it out.
If you do the latter at the expense of the former you are doomed to work forever for other people, to play some other man's game. If you do the former at the expense of the latter you are doomed to know only the fringes of life, never to be taken seriously and never to achieve.
¶ If you are inclined to take your pleasure out in cerebrating instead of creating; if it suffices you to see a thing in your imagination whether it ever comes to pass or not, you are at a decided disadvantage in this hustling world; and you will never be a success.
¶ On the other hand if you are content to do what other men dream about and never have dreams of your own you will probably always have a berth but will never have a million. You will exist but you will never know what it is to live.
¶ The extreme Cerebral can sit on a park bench with an empty purse and an empty stomach and get as much pleasure out of reflecting on the "whichness of the what and the whitherness of the wherefore" as an Alimentive gets out of a planked steak. Needless to say, each is an enigma to the other. Yet most people imagine that because both are human and both walk on their hind legs they are alike. They are no more alike than a cow and a canary.
