SECTION 20. STUDIES PREPARATORY TO ALL INVESTIGATIONS. 193 



him to look truth straight, in the face. Fortunately, however, 

 there is a growing feeling that the love of truth should be the 

 supreme arbiter in all enquiries, and that, especially in social 

 investigations, antipathy is the sworn foe of truth, and narrow 

 sympathy scarcely less. Were it not for psychical prejudice 

 selecting favourable, and ignoring or rejecting unfavourable, 

 evidence, this wholesale and consummate self-deception would 

 be impossible. 1 



We have dilated above on a familiar form of prejudiced 

 thinking. Delving deeper, we encounter another and more 

 insidious form, which makes its home in the scientific process 

 itself. That is, the material we have collected and the con- 

 clusions we have arrived at, psychologically fill, and therefore 

 dominate, our minds, and we accordingly neither perceive things 

 in perspective nor as others would view them. The remedy 

 for this is a two-fold one. We should periodically suspend 

 our studies for appreciable periods at a time. This would lead 

 to a scattering of the mass of familiar but unimportant ideas 

 and divest those ideas of much of their feeling value. We 

 should consequently be able to assume a more critical and 

 objective attitude- towards our studies, and correct prejudiced 

 conclusions. (See 161.) Moreover, throughout our scientific 

 work we should cultivate the detachment and coolness of the 

 critic who comes fresh to an examination of our views. We 

 should therefore be habituated to see ourselves, from time to 

 time, as others see us. Unless we acquire this rare capacity, 

 together with the self-control needed in occasionally interrupt- 

 ing our labours for appreciable periods, we are in perennial 

 danger of reaching sophisticated results. 



1 4i The information which an ordinary traveller brings back from a foreign 

 country, as the result of the evidence of his senses, is almost always such 

 as exactly confirms the opinions with which he sets out. He has had eyes 

 and ears for such things only as he expected to see. Men read the sacred 

 books of their religion, and pass unobserved therein multitudes of things 

 utterly irreconcilable with even their own notions of moral excellence. With 

 the same authorities before them, different historians, alike innocent of 

 intentional misrepresentation, see only what is favourable to Protestants or 

 Catholics, Royalists or Republicans, Charles I. or Cromwell; while others, 

 having set out with the preconception that extremes must be in the wrong, 

 are incapable of seeing truth and justice when these are wholly on one 

 side." (Mill, Logic, bk. 5, ch.4, 3.) "Before experience itself can be used 

 with advantage, there is one preliminary step to make, which depends wholly 

 on ourselves: it is the absolute dismissal and clearing the mind of all pre- 

 judice, from whatever source arising, and the determination to stand and 

 fall by the result of a direct appeal to facts in the first instance, and of 

 strict logical deduction from them afterwards." (Herschel, Discourse, [68.].) 



"The temptations to make statements too broad, to neglect objections, to 

 smooth over difficulties artificially, are almost infinite." (Frank Cramer, 

 op. cit., p. 31.) 



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