At the same time I began, with such light and strength as I possessed, to train my mind, to discipline my thoughts, then as untamed as the birds of the wilderness. _I sought to think_--to think steadily, to acquire the power of forcing my understanding up to a point, and make it stand there and do its work. I attempted to gain the habit of speaking methodically, logically, and with accumulating power, directed to a particular object. I did all this as well by study as by practice. I read Locke on the Understanding and Watts on the Mind. I attempted composition, and aided myself by Blair's Rhetoric.
This was a task; for not only was my time chiefly occupied by my daily duties, but it was a contest against habit--it was myself against myself; and in this I was almost unaided and alone. I was to lay aside the slipshod practice of satisfying myself with impressions, feelings, guesses; in short, of dodging mental labor by jumping at conclusions. I was, indeed, to learn the greatest of all arts, that of reasoning--of discovering the truth; and I was to do this alone, and in the face of difficulties, partly founded in my mental constitution, and partly also in my training.
I did not at first comprehend the extent of my undertaking. By degrees I began to appreciate it: I saw and felt, at last, that it was an enormous task, and even after I had resolved upon it, again and again my courage gave way, and I ceased my efforts in despair. Still I returned to the work by spasms. I found, for instance, that my geography was all wrong: Asia stood up edgewise in my imagination, just as I had seen it on an old smoky map in Lieutenant Smith's study; Africa was in the south-east corner of creation, and Europe was somewhere in the north-east. In fact, my map of the world was very Chinese in its projection. I knew better, but still I had thus conceived it, and the obstinate bump of locality insisted upon presenting its outlines to my mind according to this arrangement. I had similar jumbles of conception and habit as to other things. This would not do; so I re-learned the elements of geography; I revised my history, my chronology, my natural history, in all of which I had caught casual glimpses of knowledge. What I read I read earnestly. I determined to pass no word without ascertaining its meaning, and I persevered in this, doggedly, for five-and-twenty years.