840 SLODIES FOR STUDEN FS 
It is in this tentative stage that the affections enter with 
their blinding influence. Love was long since discerned to be 
blind and what is true in the personal realm is measurably true 
in the intellectual realm. Important as the intellectual affec- 
tions are as stimuli and as rewards, they are nevertheless dan- 
gerous factors in research. All too often they put under strain 
the integrity of the intellectual processes. —The moment one has. 
offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems 
satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child 
springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite 
theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and it 
grows more and more dear to him. While he persuades himself 
that he holds it still as tentative, it is none the less lovingly tenta- 
tive and not impartially and indifferently tentative. So soon as 
this parental affection takes possession of the mind, there is apt 
to be a rapid passage to the unreserved adoption of the theory. 
There is then imminent danger of an unconscious selection and 
of a magnifying of phenomena that fall into harmony with the 
theory and support it and an unconscious neglect of phenomena 
that fail of coincidence. The mind lingers with pleasure upon 
the facts that fall happily into the embrace of the theory, and 
feels a natural coldness toward those that assume a refractory 
attitude. Instinctively there is a special searching-out of phe- 
nomena that support it, for the mind is led by its desires. There 
springs up also unwittingly a pressing of the theory to make it 
fit the facts and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the 
theory. When these biasing tendencies set in, the mind rapidly 
degenerates into the partiality of paternalism. The search for 
facts, the observation of phenomena and their interpretation are 
all dominated by affection for the favored theory until it appears 
to its author or its advocate to have been overwhelmingly estab- 
lished. The theory then rapidly rises to a position of control in 
the processes of the mind and observation, induction and inter- 
pretation are guided by it. From an unduly favored child it 
readily grows to be a master and leads its author whithersoever 
it will. The subsequent history of that mind in respect to that 
