THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN HUMAN TRUTH. 797 



soul would gladly have devoted its powers toward climbing the 

 steps of a broader and higher truth. The octopian struggle for 

 existence with its deadly tentacles has throttled many a one that 

 would have gladly climbed to loftier heights of truth. 



Thus the emotions and the limitations of humanity deflect and 

 narrow truth. There is also another powerful deflecting factor. 

 This is called association or apperception by different schools. 

 Each succeeding truth that comes to the mind is changed by the 

 resultant force of preceding truths. A compass may point exactly 

 north until it is brought near a bar of iron, when the direction of 

 the needle is changed. This iron has an analogy to an idea al- 

 ready existing in the mind. To Turks and South Africans polyg- 

 amy may not clash with a moral truth, because they have been 

 brought up amid polygamous associations. Had we sprung from 

 such ancestry and been reared in the same way, we should doubt- 

 less consider polygamy quite moral. The child of Catholic, Baptist, 

 or Mohammedan parentage will commonly look at religion from 

 the point of view of his early associations. When we hear a per- 

 son, referring to a certain sect, saying, " I could never have be- 

 longed to this or that church," we may know that he would prob- 

 ably have been a Catholic, or Baptist, or a Mohammedan had he 

 been born such. The truths of religion may not change, but our 

 ways of apprehending them are largely determined by associa- 

 tion. 



Eminent German psychologists have said that we can not 

 think as we will, but we must think as just those associations 

 which happen to be present prescribe. When we come to view 

 such statements as these in the light of what history has recorded, 

 they furnish food for careful reflection. Had we been born in 

 the times of religious persecution, should we not have joined the 

 vast majority who believed in repressing heresy by lighted fagots? 

 When every Christian nation from Scotland to Spain was tortur- 

 ing witches, should we have stood aloof from the councils of the 

 wisest ? At one time even the most intelligent in the Southern 

 States were fighting for what early associations had taught the 

 people to regard as the truths of slavery. The North, schooled 

 difi'erently, was fighting on the other side. History shows us that 

 association has ever been a potent factor in our conception of 

 truth, and association is often purely accidental. 



All of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States 

 may be hearing the same testimony in a case, and yet these judges 

 frequently express dissenting opinions, although no selfish end is 

 to be gained by this course. This illustration shows the varying, 

 even accidental, factors in the production of so-called truth. The 

 truths of justice ought not to be less important than other truths, 

 and yet here are judges, each equally desirous of awarding jus- 



