132 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ena, which are so extremely involved. And, again, very few have by 

 culture gained that plasticity of faculty requisite for conceiving and 

 accepting those immensely-varied actualities which societies in differ- 

 ent times and places display, and those multitudinous possibilities to be 

 inferred from them. 



Nor, of subjective difficulties, did these exhaust the list. From the 

 emotional as well as from the intellectual part of the nature, we saw 

 that there arise obstacles. The ways in which beliefs about social 

 affairs are perverted, by intense fears and excited hopes, were pointed 

 out. We noted the feeling of impatience, as another common cause 

 of misjudgment. A contrast was drawn showing, too, what perverse 

 estimates of public events men are led to make by their sympathies 

 and antipathies — how, where their hate has been aroused, they utter 

 unqualified condemnations of ill-deeds for which there was much excuse, 

 while, if their admiration is excited by vast successes, they condone 

 inexcusable ill-deeds immeasurably greater in amount. And we also 

 saw that, among the distortions of judgment caused by the emotions, 

 have to be included those immense ones generated by the sentiment of 

 loyalty to a personal ruler, or to a ruling power otherwise embodied. 



These distortions of judgment caused by the emotions, thus indi- 

 cated generally, we went on to consider specially — treating of them as 

 different forms of bias. Though, during education, understood in a 

 wide sense, many kinds of bias are commenced or given, there is one 

 which our educational system makes especially strong — the double 

 bias in favor of the religions of enmity and of amity. Needful as we 

 found both of these to be, we perceived that among the beliefs about 

 social affairs, prompted now by the one and now by the other, there 

 are glaring incongruities ; and that scientific conceptions can be formed 

 only when there is a compromise between the dictates of pure egoism 

 and the dictates of pure altruism, for which they respectively stand. 



We observed, next, the warping of opinion which the bias of patri- 

 otism causes. Recognizing the truth that the preservation of a 

 society is made possible only by a due amount of patriotic feeling in 

 citizens, we saw that this feeling inevitably disturbs the judgment 

 when comparisons between societies are made, and that the data re- 

 quired for Social Science are thus vitiated ; and we saw that the effort 

 to escape this bias, leading as it does to an opposite bias, is apt to 

 vitiate the data in another way. While finding the class-bias to be no 

 less essentia], we found that it no less inevitably causes one-sidedness 

 in the conceptions of social affairs. Noting how the various sub-classes 

 have their specialties of prejudice corresponding to their class-interests, 

 we noted, at greater length, how the more general prejudices of the 

 larger and more widely-distinguished classes prevent them from form- 

 ing balanced judgments. That in politics the bias of party interferes 

 with those calm examinations by which alone the conclusions of Social 

 Science can be reached, scarcely needed pointing out. We observed, 



