of making it available for his own use. To be sure, in much of the writing which is done to meet the demands of everyday life, the occasion really supplies the subject-matter. The student who writes a notice for the college bulletin board or a petition to the faculty gets his material straight from his loss of a fountain pen or his need of two extra credits for graduation. Likewise, the lawyer who dictates a letter concerned with the settlement of an estate, or a scientist who publishes the results of his latest research, gets his material from his current activities without any special effort. But often it is very different: the writer must furnish the ideas himself, and until he thinks of something to say or sees something interesting in life to set down, he cannot write. Then his own faculties must serve him; his mind must be active, his senses keen, his imagination lively. And so far as may be necessary, he must know how to draw on sources outside himself.

A. FINDING THE GERM IDEA

Finding material for instrumental composition involves two distinct problems. There is first the need of an idea, a seed thought. As we have just said, this may come to the writer as a part of the occasion for writing; it may come by assignment, as in much journalistic work; but ordinarily it must come out of the productive mind of the writer himself. He must be a man of ideas. This is not anything to frighten the person who is devoid of genius. It means thoughtfulness, or habits of reflection; he who plunges along through life without ever stopping for quiet thought cannot hope to have anything to say which is of serious consequence. It means alertness, especially in observing such significant details as the merchant or the physician or the naturalist must observe. It means imagination, such as the inventor, the capitalist, or the statesman shows in his power to project thought beyond the actual. It means analytic power, the resolving of complex matters into their simple elements; and sound reasoning, the demonstrating

of such relationships as cause and effect. But more th thing else it means thinking for oneself.

There can be no intellectual productiveness witho reliant individuality. Of course, nothing broad and so come from one who closes his mind wholly to outside in in conceited self-sufficiency; such an extreme is both able and unprofitable. But if a person is to have any and significant ideas, he must do his own thinking. H not tolerate indifferent stagnation or weak dependence thoughts of others. He must have a wholesome curios active mind which insists on knowing and knowing at firs Strange as it sounds, Schopenhauer's warning against reading a substitute for thought of one's own is wise, fo much reading does deprive the mind of all elasticity, lik ing a spring continually under pressure. Furthermore, says, "A man may have discovered some portion of t wisdom, after spending a great deal of time and trouble in ing it over for himself and adding thought to thought; may sometimes happen that he could have found it all to hand in a book and spared himself the trouble. Bu so, it is a hundred times more valuable if he has acquired thinking it out for himself. For it is only when we ga knowledge in this way that it enters as an integral part, a member, into the whole system of our thought; that it in complete and firm relation with what we know; tha understood with all that underlies it and follows from it; it wears the color, the precise shade, the distinguishing of our own way of thinking; that it comes exactly at the time, just as we felt the necessity for it; that it stand and cannot be forgotten." 1

In spite of good counsel of this kind, many persons, espe young students of composition, are inclined to doubt the of their own ideas. However healthy they really are in thinking, they fear that because an idea is their own ra than a more famous person's, it must be foolish or of

1 Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 62. Translation by Bailey Saunde

consequence. Emerson cites an instance of this very lack of self-confidence in his essay on Intellect, and comments on it characteristically: "We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the great examples. Perhaps, if we should meet Shakespeare, we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality, - only that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying his facts, which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, we see the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all." Certainly there is no better encouragement to sane, vigorous trust in one's own ideas than that which this same author gives in the opening lines of his essay on Self-Reliance: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility

then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good s precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from other."

B. DEVELOPING THE MATERIAL

1. From personal sources.

When a writer has a germ i then, he is started toward composition. But he is only star A second step is necessary before he is ready to write. idea must be developed; the conception must be worked in detail; material must be gathered to clarify or amp or strengthen the original thought. To this end the w will often continue to draw on his own mental resources his own experience. For instance, he may think that the ag tion which fills our country for months before a presiden election is really a thorough test of the nation's vitality, and concentrated thinking develop this idea into an editorial. Ag he may have an idea about the growth of musical taste and in his own changing attitudes toward music the right stuff an essay. Thus comes the raw material for a great range instructive autobiographic pieces, as well as for a wealth essays conveying the writer's opinions about what he has served around him in life. Indeed, there is far more mate for writing to be drawn from purely personal sources than m students suppose. And provided the writer possesses real tellectual power and true skill in choosing between the nificant and the insignificant, such personal material is hig desirable, since it has the merits of abundance, definiteness, a individuality.

2. From printed sources. Nevertheless, personal sour are often inadequate to supply the material for developing writer's idea. He may need many more facts than he has any opportunity to observe or could possibly collect for hims by individual investigation. Perhaps, too, he may want

familiarize himself with the ideas about his subject held by men of another generation or another social class. In fact, experience soon demonstrates that there are many reasons why he must look to outside sources for additional material. Yet it is not altogether a simple matter to draw from encyclopedias and treatises and bound periodicals and newspaper files the material which is needed to work out his idea. Many a person gets along without any sources whatever or takes the first book he finds touching his subject, rather than go through the appalling mass of material which a library catalogue or some expert adviser points out. But the trained person, such as a reference librarian or an experienced author, gets the best material with comparative ease. Such skill in the use of printed sources comes, of course, only by practice, but a few suggestions may be helpful to the beginner.

In the first place, there is the matter of accuracy. We have learned earlier in this chapter that material which is in any way untrue cannot be acceptable for purposes of composition; hence it is important to collect facts or ideas from printed sources with the strictest care. One might suppose that unless a writer were positively unscrupulous and shifty, he would read his sources closely and transcribe his data accurately. But as a matter of fact, there is a great deal of unintentional yet serious inaccuracy among literary workers. To begin with, there is a shameful amount of sheer carelessness in the average person; he cannot set facts down straight or reproduce statements of opinion faithfully. But the gravest fault is that of taking matter out of its context or taking only that part of a reference which suits one's preconceived notions. The familiar remark that you can prove anything by statistics doubtless owes its point to the frequency with which contending writers make census reports or some other compilation of figures prove opposite sides of a question. Similarly, it is possible to garble almost any article so that the author's attitude will seem quite different from what it is in reality. Accuracy, then, in the fullest sense, means not only a correct recording of what is actually