INTRODUCTION TO THE MASTER MIND 87Destroy every plant the Ford Motor Company owns, every piece of
machinery, every atom of raw or finished material, every finished auto-
mobile, and every dollar on deposit in any bank, and Ford would still be
the most powerful man, economically, on earth. The brains that have
built the Ford business could duplicate it again in short order. Capital
is always available, in unlimited quantities, to such brains as Ford's.
Ford is the most powerful man ( economically) because he has the
keenest and most practical conception of the principle of organized
knowledge of any man on earth.
Despite Ford's great power and financial success, it may be that he
has blundered often in the application of the principles through which
he accumulated this power. There is little doubt that Ford's methods
of mind coordination have often been crude; they were bound to be so
in the earlier days of his experience, before he gained the wisdom of
application that would naturally go with maturity of years.
There can't be much doubt that Ford's application of the principle
of mind chemistry was, at least at the start, the result of a chance alliance
with other minds, particularly the mind of Edison. It is more than
probable that Mr. Ford's remarkable insight into the laws of Nature was
first begun as the result of his &iendly alliance with his own wife, long
before he ever met either Mr. Edison or Mr. Firestone. Many a man who
never knows the real source of his success is made by his wife, through
application of the Master Mind principle. Mrs. Ford is a most remark-
ably intelligent woman, and I believe that it was her mind, blended
with Mr. Ford's, that gave him his first real start toward power.
It may be mentioned, without in any way depriving Mr. Ford
of any honor or glory, that in his earlier days he had to combat the
powerful enemies of illiteracy and ignorance to a greater extent than
did either Edison or Firestone, both of whom were gifted by natural
heredity with a most fortunate aptitude for acquiring and applying
knowledge. Ford had to hew this talent out of the rough, raw timbers
of his hereditary estate.