THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



Christian because you chance to be born in Europe or 

 America, and for no better reason? Would you with 

 the same unquestioning faith have accepted the tenets 

 of Islam, had you chanced to be born in Western Asia ? 

 Are you a Republican because your birthplace was 

 Massachusetts ? A Democrat because your parents live 

 in Georgia? Or is there in the case of each of your 

 beliefs some principle involved that appeals to you you, 

 an intellectual being gifted with the power of choice 

 as a convincing force?" 



As you stand thus face to face with yourself, exer- 

 cising this wondrous privilege of challenging your own 

 mind, are you pleased with the answer? Does the re- 

 sponse give you warrant for saying that your mind is a 

 "cold, clear, logic engine"; or does it suggest that your 

 alleged reason is after all only the pitiful image of a 

 chance environment ? Are you able to say with pride 

 that you have worked out your mind's salvation until it 

 stands forth untrammeled from amidst the crude super- 

 stitions, the false pre-conceptions, the absurd, incon- 

 gruous, contradictory beliefs that have come as a 

 heritage from a past that would shackle the present? 

 Can you claim even in a limited sense that you are a free 

 mental agent ? But if not, there should be for you no 

 joy, but only humiliation, in the reiteration of that ec- 

 static cry of Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." 

 For you do not really think. Your brain serves merely 

 as a cobwebbed structure, on which may settle a little of 

 the dust of ages. Your mind serves as little the uses of 

 a progressive body-politic as the remotest cobwebbed, 

 dust-laden garret serves in the domestic household. 



[118] 



