THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PREJUDICE. 643 



Our free press, also, and our free speech are great educators. 

 In these days we are compelled to see and hear and think. The 

 narrow-minded man is unhappy and distracted. He is no longer 

 protected in his little system by college or cloister walls. A 

 myriad unwelcome facts peer in at him from every side from the 

 circulating library, from the interesting novel, from the omni- 

 present and iconoclastic newspaper. The man of mental bias is 

 veritably a victim of persecution. Optimists tell us that the 

 world is growing honest. I am optimist enough to believe that 

 it is growing broad-minded. Perforce it must. The air is full of 

 everybody's ideas. They circulate everywhere and act as a series 

 of incessant shocks wherever they find a mind too narrowly 

 planned to admit them. Hence men are beginning to avoid sys- 

 tems as the cause of more friction than they save. They are 

 willing to sacrifice a narrow love of unity and consistency for a 

 broader harmony with the spirit of the age. 



What is likely to be the result of this general breaking up of 

 old unities, systems, habits ? An increase of insanity ? By no 

 means. Insanity proceeds from the opposite movement, from the 

 involution of the mind upon itself, till fixed ideas can no longer 

 be rectified by objective facts. The results will be good and bad : 

 good, in encouraging inquiry and in substituting the love of truth 

 for the love of consistency ; bad, in discouraging a certain moral 

 earnestness and enthusiasm which are the outgrowth of strong 

 conviction, for the narrower is one's system of thought, the 

 stronger often are one's convictions of its truth and importance. 

 The extreme form of this union of prejudice and intensity we 

 call fanaticism. If not in fanaticism, at least in enthusiasm, 

 there is an element of good which we must not overlook. Men 

 possessed with one idea are men of action. Enthusiasts carry for- 

 ward great movements. The development of the intellect is the 

 weakening of the will. Children and animals act out every 

 thought. Education is a training in the inhibition of movements 

 by the higher intellectual processes. The man of many-sided 

 mind finds every volition " checked " by some antagonistic idea. 

 The correction of mental bias, therefore, will result in a certain 

 loss of spontaneity. But progress will not suffer. If we move 

 more slowly, it will be more surely. "What we lack in enthusiasm 

 we shall make up in balance. 



" The great fault of non-manual training schools," says Prof. C. M. Woodward, 

 " is their haziness. The pupils look at multitudes of things but do not perceive 

 them. Having eyes, they see not ; and having ears, they hear not. There is too 

 much that is dim and muddy and feeble. Substances elude the grasp ; shadows, 

 uncertain and fleeting, are too often the only results. The method which reason 

 and experience both approve is reversed, and pupils are put to committing to 

 memory matters which they are not prepared to understand." 



