That common resistance to progress called prejudice is a physical brain condition. Certain ideas are early formed, usually under strong pressure, and no further action is taken on that subject, no admission of new ideas, no examination of what is already there. This inactive area dwindles in disuse, is ill-nourished because unused, becomes stiff and feeble; and it is exceedingly difficult to make any fresh impression on the neglected part. When another person does try to arouse thought in that locality, to explain, convince, persuade, enlighten, he is confronted with this thick, inert mass we call a prejudice.
Prejudices are stronger and more extensive among the ignorant, because the brain is so little used in any part that the clogged areas spread and thicken undisturbed for generations. The lumpy brain is transmitted in turn to the young, and the false ideas promptly reinserted during each child’s defenceless infancy, so that in time a formidable obstacle to progress is developed, called race-prejudice. The more learned are not absolutely free from prejudice, only relatively so in comparison with the more ignorant. In whatever portion of the brain we do not actively think, we find an accumulating tendency to prejudice.
A healthy and active brain, used to free movement and clear connection, is affronted by any inert mass among its vital processes, as a housekeeper is affronted by some mouldy heap in a disused closet and cleans it out energetically. Old and familiar subjects are more heavily clogged in this way than those more recent and less known, yet prejudices will form, if allowed, even on the most recent of sciences. A brain, like any other organ, must be frequently and fully used to keep it healthy.
These natural tendencies of the brain, the inertia of habit and the local stiffening of prejudice, would not be so injurious if left to the healthy counteracting influence of equally natural tendencies to growth. But the passive resistance has been rendered active and infinitely multiplied in power by the conscious brain action which has so mistakenly exalted its worst faculties, and choked the growth of its best ones.
We very early made it the highest test of virtue to believe what we could not understand; i. e., to hold by main force an unassimilated idea, like a stone in the stomach; and an equal test of sin to presume to examine this irritating mass.
The organic method is to relate each perception to those previously received. The brain is of its own nature logical. Impressions made upon it are sorted and stored in definite connection. This may be noted in ordinary conversation, as when the hearer discovers that the stream of talk he understood to concern Jane was really about Mary. “Oh!” says he, with a sense of physical un-ease as of one who has stepped down where there was no step, “I thought you were talking about Jane!” and there is a pause while he hastily pulls out all those statements from group “Jane” in his mind, and rearranges them in group “Mary.”
By this natural power of relating impressions, called consistency, we are able to form a connected scheme of things and work rationally thereunder. If any of these impressions are incorrect, it leads to further error; and if the false impressions be those of main importance, the whole fabric of mental association will be wrong.
Thus a belief in luck necessarily tends to underrate mere knowledge—study, accuracy. The woman who says she “has no luck with her bread” is not likely to go to a cooking school. Take the full extension of this same concept about luck—chance—fate—and you get fatalism, the logical consequence of which is seen in those backward and inert nations where it rules. They may make good fighters, but never good inventors—discoverers—creators; they endure life, but do not promote its development. Religious history gives us plenty of “awful examples” of the power of one radically wrong concept to fill the mind with error, and the world with blood and tears.
Our disinclination to accept a statement which does not agree with those previously held is the brain’s physical rejection of an impression claiming to belong to a certain group, but finding no connection there. If forced to accept it as incontrovertibly true, we must then throw out all the others and wholly rearrange that group of concepts. This is where we say “Ah! that alters the case,” when some patent fact forces us to “change our minds.”
If forced to accept facts indisputably true, but as far as we can see irreconcilable, there can be no mental action whatever on that subject. They are held by force in the brain, but do not grow there and do not lead to any further grouping of concepts. This state of mind is familiar to the guessers of charades. “My first is this,” “my second is that”—“my whole is so and so”—and the brain seizes these detached assertions and seeks for some possible arrangement in which they will “make sense” as we call it—or else “gives it up.” If the riddle has been misstated, it is impossible to guess it. And this is the first great difficulty in what has been so long called the riddle of human life—it has been misstated. No wonder we have had to give it up.