psychology and physiology have been considered as equally associated and
of prime importance. "A sound mind in a sound body" is an old Latin
proverb. The need of every one to "know himself," both in mind and body,
was taught by the earliest "Wise Men" of Greece. The Roman emperor
Tiberius said that any one who had reached the age of thirty in
ignorance of his physical constitution was a fool, a thought that has
been modernized, with an unnecessary extension of the age, into the
proverb, "At forty a man is either a fool or a physician."

The study of psychology is a basis for every employment or activity
which has to deal with enlightenment or persuasion of the public.
The person who would like to become a speaker or writer needs to begin
with it rather than with the study of elocution or rhetoric. The first
thing essential for him to know is himself; the second, his hearers or
readers--what is the order of progress in their enlightenment. Even
logical development of a subject is subsidiary to the practical
psychological order. Formal logic, the analysis of the process of
reasoning, is a cultural study rather than a practical one, save in
criticism both of one's own work and another's. More cultural, and at
the same time more practical, is the study of exact reasoning in the
form of some branch of mathematics. Abraham Lincoln, when he "rode the
circuit" as a lawyer, carried with him a geometry, which he studied at
every opportunity. To the mental training which it gave him was due his
success not only as a lawyer, but also as a political orator. Every one
of his speeches was as complete a demonstration of its theme as a
proposition in Euclid is of its theorem. Lincoln once said that
"demonstration" was the greatest word in the language.

Delineation of character is the chief element of fiction, and herein
literary aspirants are particularly weak, especially the women, far more