Some persons are ear-minded. If you say to them

they don’t see any breakfast table at all. Instead they hear in their mind’s ear the sound of dishes, the murmur of conversation, and the clatter of knives and forks. When they have learned their lessons, and stand up to recite, they hear an inner voice telling them what to say. They cannot easily remember how places look on the map; but they remember the songs of birds, the different whistles and bells of their neighborhood, they like lectures and readings, and when they have heard a tune once, they know it again. Such people may find it hard to learn to read a foreign language, but they make it up by learning easily to understand it when spoken.

Musicians are apt to be ear-minded. Mozart, for example, could listen to a long piece of music, then go home and hear it over again as many times as he liked in his mind’s ear, and so write it down at his leisure. Beethoven, after he became stone deaf, used still to write his magnificent symphonies, that took hours to perform, making them up in his head and hearing them in his soul’s ear—violins, and trumpets and cymbals and drums, each in its proper place, long after his bodily ears had ceased to hear any noise.

Not many people are ear-minded; not nearly so many are as eye-minded. Those that are, can always hear sweet music and pleasant sounds, whenever they will, and recall the words and voices of their friends. Surely there is much happiness in being ear-minded. Whatever ear-mindedness one has, is well worth hanging on to and improving.

More people are muscle-minded. Think of a

Do you see the ball in your mind’s eye? or do you hear the word ball in your mind’s ear? or do you feel the ball in your fingers, and the pull of your muscles as you throw? If the last, you are muscle, or motor-minded, and you probably found yourself saying to yourself the word ball.

Motor-mindedness, too, is a great convenience. It helps to make games come easy, and dancing, and all sorts of gymnastics; it makes it easy to carry oneself properly, to use tools, to be skillful with one’s fingers, to play musical instruments. Motor-minded people are apt to talk easily, and to learn readily to speak foreign languages. Anything, in short, comes easy to them which involves doing something.

Nearly all blind people are motor-minded. If they are also deaf, then of course, they have to be so. I have seen a blind man get off a street car, turn into his street, walk down the street as far as his own gate, and there turn in without the least pause or hesitation, any more than as if he could see. He couldn’t see. He simply felt that he had walked just far enough. And he had.

Do you want to know which of the three possible sorts of minds your mind happens to be? Then think of the street number of your house, or the year in which Columbus discovered America. Did you look for the figures, or listen for them, of try to say them to yourself? Did you see 1492 printed out somewhere, or did you hear something say it; or did you feel yourself saying it in your throat? In the first case you are eye-minded; in the second, ear-minded; in the third, motor-minded.

Most persons are mixed-minded. They have one principal sense, with which they do most of their thinking; but where that is not convenient to use, they employ another. Occasionally even, they use the third. I am myself motor-minded. To learn anything, I say the words over to myself. If anybody tells me anything, I cannot remember it, unless I first say it over; and whenever I think of anything, I say words about it to myself. I can Recognize tunes when I hear them, but I cannot recall a tune, unless I fit it to some words or sounds and think of myself as singing it. But I can think of how things look, or imagine how things will look, much more easily than I can think about how they sound; and I can, with some effort, think how things look without starting to say anything about them to myself in words. So I am also somewhat eye-minded.

Most of you will probably find yourselves, first eye-minded, then motor-minded. That is, on the Whole, the most useful arrangement. But the best sort of mind is one that can handle all three kinds of ideas; and think about seeing, hearing, and doing all about equally well. So you had better notice which you can’t do, and set about learning to do it.