HUMANITY is hemmed in by so many influences that, from time immemorial, no real effort has been made to gain control of the impulses that run loose in the world. It has been, and still is, easier to let things go as they will rather than exert the will to direct them.

We are all creatures of emotions, passions, circumstances and accident. What the mind will be, what the heart will be, what the body will be, are problems that are shaped to the drift of life, even when special attention is given to any of them.

If you will sit down and think for a while you will be surprised to know how much of your life has been mere drift; how little you have done toward finding out the power that operates in animal volition, whence it comes, how it is lost, and how it may be utilized.

Look at any created life, and see its effort to express itself. The tree sends its branches toward the sunlight; struggles through its leaves to inhale the air; and, even underground, sends forth its roots in search of water. This you call inanimate life; but it represents a force that comes from some source and goes to some equilibrium.

Man is a higher animal, and animal life is a higher vege­tation. There are more millions of flesh cells in your body than your mind could conceive or your pencil could write in figures, yet not one of these cells originated otherwise than in a vegetable, nor could it have originated but for some force that existed in and of the cell itself.

We propose to call this force mere energy, and you may give it any scientific name you please. It has been named by various investigators, but the terms used do not help the student to understand it any the better. In fact, whenever a new book is written the author, believing that his invention of a few hundred scientific words will establish a new science and draw all students to his feet, loads the volume with long and unbearable terms until its interest sinks with its weight. Once in a while a short, simple word is necessary to the explanation of a new idea; but the dispo­sition of scientific writers to invent hundreds and thousands of long technical terms has loaded their special literature with an incubus that for the most part throttles it.

There is no place on this globe where energy is not found. The air is so loaded with it, that in the cold north the sky shines in boreal rays; and wherever the frigid temperature yields to the warmth, the electrical conditions may alarm man. Water is but a liquid union of gases, and is charged with electrical, mechanical and chemical energies, any one of which is capable of doing great service and great damage to man. Even ice, in its coldest phase, has energy, for it is not subdued, nor even still; its force has broken mountain rocks into frag­ments.

This energy about us we are drinking in water, eating in food and breathing in air. Not a chemical molecule is free from it; not an atom can exist without it. We are a com­bination of individual energies.

REASON OF UNMAGNETIC CONDITIONS

The plant is a collection of individual energies, without the power to unite the forces they represent, except in its gen­eral life. Man is a similar collection with the power and sometimes the habit of so uniting the individual energies within him; but he has the possibility of educating and train­ing this power.

If we can be understood at this step it will help along the work if the present volume both in your understanding of it and your practice of its exercises. In the first place your body, whether living or dead, is a collection of millions times millions times millions of little energies, that can never die. In the second place these energies are separate and individual; although at times they act in some degree of har­mony. In the third place the human body is a drifting mechanism of life, capable but not accustomed to control the forces within it, except as habit, will, cultivation or special excitement may marshal these forces to the accomplishment of some important end. We are satisfied from many experi­ments and from the reports of a host of pupils that this power of marshaling and using these energies can be, in every per­son, cultivated to a high degree. To do so much as this, the pupil must study and practice.

You drift day after day.

The air, sunlight, food and water you take, are agents of a force that comes from the sky and earth. You idly float upon the tide of circumstances to make up your day's life, and the opportunities of being something better than you are drift beyond your reach and pass away.

There are three classes of persons who will undertake the study of this work, and the performance of the exercises:

First. Those who, through curiosity, or as incredulous investigators, pursue the study with hesitation and indiffer­ence.

Second. Those who commence with enormous zeal and determination to succeed, and devote every spare moment to it for a few days, or weeks, and then suddenly cool off. This is a large class, and they have had their ardor as suddenly cool off in a hundred other undertakings before.

Third. Those who commence deliberately and work and wait patiently, plodding along in the dark for some time; but persisting until the light dawns upon them. When the light does come it seems to break all at once. They possess that rare faculty called application.

The last named class will achieve success. The other two will accomplish something of value in every minute they devote to it. Out of the very many exercises of the book there is not one which is not of great value.

When the subject was first being systematized for study, there was no intention to connect it in any way with benefits to the health; but it was found that every exercise produced good results in that line. Therefore, while not claiming or laying stress upon the fact, we find the following to be always true of this special training:

1. It promotes a healthy blood circulation.

2. It invigorates the whole body.

3. It builds a good brain power.

4. It makes perfect nerves, overcoming nervous pros­tration.

HOW MUCH TIME WILL IT TAKE?

This is the question that everybody asks. Let it be answered by asking how much time does it take for one who is naturally gifted with personal magnetism to acquire or to hold the power? It takes no time at all. When the singer whose voice is getting worse is told that there is an artistic position in which the vocal organs may be maintained in order to improve the tones by the mere act of using, he needs no more time to sing with those organs in their proper place than to sing with them out of place. This is the whole secret of magnetism-growth. How long will it take a young lady to write a letter, spelling her words correctly, as compared with the time required to write the same letter, spelling the words incorrectly? How much more time is required to go up­stairs so as not to weary the body, than to go up in the usual careless way ? No more.

You will now begin to catch the secret of our course of instruction. Yet some routine work must be done. This will be found to be agreeable and full of pleasant experiences. Our earlier instruction kept the student down to severe labor without much relief, and while the progress was rapid, it has been found that even more speedy results are obtainable by the use of the natural vitality that daily loses itself in the drift of life. Where the waters of Niagara rush to seek their quietude in the volume of the lake below, the building of steam engines where Nature's forces are mightier than man's inventions would be the adoption of the lesser for the greater.

For endless time there has run to waste in that one region more power than was needed to run all the enginery of earth. In like manner each individual carries in his own body and loses daily through drifting habits more energy than the most magnetic man or woman that ever lived needs to give absolute supremacy to active life. It is true that we can acquire power by building the steam engine on the banks of Niagara, and that the steam so employed is a natural force, as gravity is; but economy prefers to use the power that is at hand awaiting man's bidding, rather than go to the trouble of generating it in less quantity and energy. The work before us is to acquire the most satisfactory results in the briefest time and with the least effort.

Very recently the author put into practice with novices and others a certain regime which at once gave the most gratifying results in each and every case. It was the first instance in which the energy known as personal magnetism had been brought into active existence at the start.