Feeding the Mind – Public Doma

Practical advice for how to properly feed the mind.

In this short book, Carroll likens reading to eating and the life of the mind to the life of the body. And so, he gives practical advice for how to properly feed the mind.

His three basic rules are that our mental intake should include the right kind, amount, and variety of reading to support a well-nourished mind.

From there we must (1) be careful to provide the right amount of time between meals (giving the mind an opportunity to rest) and (2) make sure that we properly chew and digest our food (he calls it ‘mastication’ and sums it up with Cranmer’s famous words that we are to ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest‘).

Here are a few of my favorite quotes with a brief introduction to each:

1. You know what foods don’t sit well with your body; shouldn’t you know what kinds of books don’t sit well with your mind?

First, then, we should set ourselves to provide for our mind its proper kind of food. We very soon learn what will, and what will not, agree with the body, and find little difficulty in refusing a piece of the tempting pudding or pie which is associated in our memory with that terrible attack of indigestion, and whose very name irresistibly recalls rhubarb and magnesia; but it takes a great many lessons to convince us how indigestible some of our favourite lines of reading are, and again and again we make a meal of the unwholesome novel, sure to be followed by its usual train of low spirits, unwillingness to work, weariness of existence—in fact, by mental nightmare.