THERE is not a more important factor in experience than thought. Indeed, experience without thought would not be experience, for the very term implies thinking or being conscious of something. All things have, for us, their existence in our consciousness. And they are as real to one as that one believes them to be —no more, no less. The acceptance or rejection of thoughts as factors in our affairs determines our activities; and yet it will generally be conceded that no subject is given as little serious consideration or analysis as thoughts and their bases.
As long as a child believes to be real the imaginary personages referred to in his fairy books, Santa Claus stories, or such like, that child is affected by the degree of reality he gives such characters. But when the child puts away such childishness through a better understanding, these images lose their seeming and only existence to him, and he is proportionately transformed. Just so it is with adults; their beliefs govern them in a large degree until they awake from the dream of mortal sense and find that such beliefs never had a foundation in fact.
Thinking is apt to be regarded as a routine matter of "hit or miss," as more or less uncontrollable. Our degree of real living, however, is commensurate with our degree of real thinking; indeed, it may be said that thinking and living are indissoluble terms.
