64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



cultivation of the mental plasticity and poise in order the more success- 

 fully to combat all tendencies encouraging a blind reliance upon au- 

 thority and fixed states of mind, we must know something about the 

 manner in which comparatively slight deviations from the normal bal- 

 ance are converted into the stable systematized delusions of the insane. 

 The alienist quickly recognizes the fact that the sentimental tendencies 

 expressed in the uncritical devotion to the maintenance of the ideals 

 of a single college offer a very favorable soil for the development of 

 petty prejudices and provincial ways of thinking, the directions of our 

 thoughts being determined by the presence of ruts, however much we 

 majr, sometimes, attempt to explain them away with all the vehemence 

 of stand-patters. American ideals should be substituted for the Har- 

 vard, Yale or Princeton ideals, if we wish to cultivate the quick and 

 ready discernment of the right wherever it is to be found One of the 

 principal lessons to be forced home upon students, striving to acquire 

 a normal physiological habit of thinking, is to impress them with the 

 fallibility and not the infallibility of individual judgments, but when 

 young men are encouraged to believe that the institution from which 

 they graduate represents the most advanced position on the road to' the 

 intellectual Mecca, they unconsciously get a mental twist, the effects of 

 which it is difficult to counteract. 



The principles of logic and of criticism may be taught in theory, but 

 the conditions essential to the proper selection of premises and the 

 formation of sound judgments are still far from favorable, and this will 

 continue as long as American students are encouraged to form general 

 opinions altogether lacking in discrimination as to the respective merits 

 of different institutions. The same narrowness of vision and absence 

 of charity which have created the barriers of opinion between many of 

 the different theological schools have unfortunately afflicted the uni- 

 versities. When Harvard professors begin to urge some of their stu- 

 dents to take a year at Cornell or Columbia, in order to get into 

 another atmosphere, or the benefit of a change to the Cambridge 

 environment is recommended to correct the inflexible mental traits ac- 

 quired on New Jersey soil, there will be reason to believe that the uni- 

 versities are becoming centers, whence sound advice is being dissemi- 

 nated as to the methods of developing sane and logical thinking. There 

 is danger that the odium institutionum may in a measure replace the 

 odium theologicum of earlier days. Students are often advised to take 

 a trip abroad following graduation in order to readjust their mental 

 foci. The blind devotion to the maintenance of a proper college spirit 

 forbids the entertainment of a recommendation that an excellent 

 prophylactic measure directed against the possible development of this 

 form of institutional myopia would be a year, preferably the senior 

 year, spent at some other American institution. 



