SELF-CONFIDENCE 229The human mind is a marvelous, mysterious piece of machinery,
which I was reminded of a few months ago when I picked up Emerson's
Essays and reread his essay on spiritual laws. A strange thing happened.
I saw in that essay, which I had read scores of times previously, much
that I had never noticed before. I saw more in this essay than I had
seen during previous readings, because the unfoldment of my mind
since the last reading had prepared me to interpret more.
The human mind is constantly unfolding, like the petals of a flower,
until it reaches the maximum of development. What this maximum
is, where it ends, and whether or not it ends at all, are unanswerable
questions, but the degree of unfoldment seems to vary according to
the nature of the individual and the degree to which they keep their
mind at work. A mind that is forced or coaxed into analytical thought
every day seems to keep on unfolding and developing greater powers
of interpretation.
Down in Louisville, Kentucky, lives Mr. Lee Cook, a man who has
practically no legs and has to wheel himself around on a cart. Despite
Mr. Cook having been without legs since birth, he is the owner of a
great industry and is a millionaire through his own efforts. He has
proved that people can get along very well without legs if they have
a well-developed Self-Confidence.
In the city of New York one may see a young man, without legs
but otherwise able-bodied and able-headed, rolling himself down Fifth
Avenue every afternoon with cap in hand, begging for a living. His
head is perhaps as sound and as able to think as the average. This young
man could duplicate anything that Mr. Cook of Louisville has done,
if he thought oj himself as Mr. Cook thinks oj himself.
Henry Ford has more money than he will ever need or use. Not
so many years ago, he was working as a laborer in a machine shop, with
but little schooling and without capital. Scores of other men, some
of them with better-organized brains than his, worked near him. Ford
threw off the poverty consciousness, developed confidence in himself,