How to Argue and Win

From the Introductory.
Thought is so wonderful and incomparable a thing that it is all the more deplorable that so many men use it indifferently. They will plan the building of a house, or a summer trip, to the smallest detail, but will permit their minds to remain in an almost continuous state of disorder.
How many men ever stop seriously to analyze the workings of their minds, or carefully to consider by what means they reach certain conclusions? Thinking, like breathing, comes so naturally to them that they do not see any necessity for study. To others thought is so complex and evanescent that any attempt at classification of ideas seems an altogether hopeless undertaking. When, however, we find men so often entangled in mental absurdities, we are led to believe that some such study is essential to clear and accurate thinking.
Disputation is carried on by most men as a spontaneous act. There are no rules by which the speaker is governed. But it should be remembered that "It is by a long, careful, patient analysis of the reasoning by which others have attained results, that we learn to think more correctly ourselves."
The mind conceives, compares, abstracts, defines, judges, and seeks to express its conclusions to other minds. Its power grows through practise, and gradually it comes to realize the truth of Pascal's exclamation: "With space the universe encloses me and engulfs me like an atom, but with thought I enclose the universe!"
Faculties that fall into disuse soon fall into disease. We should profit by the warning of Darwin who acknowledged that he almost entirely lost his taste for Shakespeare, poetry, and music, because he allowed his mind to become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. He said that if he had his life to live over again, he would make it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music not less than once a week, fie believed that a loss of these was a distinct loss of happiness, and possibly an injury to one's moral character.
Every one engages more or less in argumentation. The term does not mean contentiousness, but simply the art of persuading others to think as we do upon a given subject. We daily express our ideas, opinions, and judgments upon a great variety of matters, and in so far as we advance reasons we engage in argumentation....