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But it would be false not to insist that after getting whatever information, whether from observation, experience, or books you must think it through, must make it your own before it will sound truly convincing in conversation. You must integrate what you see and read with your own personality before it is a finished conversational product. The person who mulls about his experiences and observations with an eternal why and wherefore, who looks for the causes of things, who tries to see their interrela- tions, is giving himself the finest conversational background of all. Thomas Aquinas spent months puzzling about the definition he had read of God — and became the great doctor of the Church. Thinking things through for ourselves gives us what is called originality. It helps us "to place things," as Johnson said, "in such views as they are not commonly seen in." |
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