These examples may be sufficient to show that a fixed attitude toward directions and plans, or toward knowledge in general, is a serious barrier to its application. The conditions are always changing, and one's ideas must be capable of corresponding modification if their full use is to be enjoyed.
2. It is opposed to progress.
Our attitude toward knowledge is intimately related also to the progress that we make; a fixed state of mind precludes reflection about one's course by precluding a feeling of its need. Men frequently show blindness to new truth. Boss politicians count upon from eighty to eighty-five per cent of all voters "standing pat" and voting according to party, no matter what facts may be discovered against one candidate and in favor of another. This fact is what gives the bosses their security. It was thought to be a wonderful sign of progress a few years ago when sixty thousand out of six hundred thousand voters in a certain election in Massachusetts ignored party lines and voted according to the merits of the candidate. One reason that we have so many mediaeval educational institutions is that persons in control have so many fixed ideas. There are few colleges and universities to- day, for instance, in which courses that prepare young women for home- keeping, such as domestic science and domestic art, receive credit toward a degree. Progressive changes in any line are conditioned upon sensitiveness toward changing circumstances and new ideas, and a fixed attitude is directly opposed to such responsiveness.
3. It is opposed to peace and happiness.
History is full of instances of the extent to which intolerance resulting from fixed convictions may carry people. Innumerable murders and many wars, entailing untold suffering, have found their principal cause in religious bigotry. Educational and political bigotry are likewise sources of much bad feeling and unhappiness. Family disputes, as between father and son, are in large measure due to too great fixedness of views and opinions; and much of the discontent of old age is found in the inability of old people to abandon their old-fashioned notions, so as to adjust themselves to new conditions and enjoy them. A fixed attitude toward ideas is, therefore, far from an unmixed virtue; it seriously limits the usefulness of knowledge; it greatly checks progress; and it strongly opposes peace and happiness.
4. It finds little justification in the nature of knowledge.
Finally, a fixed attitude toward ideas finds little justification in the nature of knowledge. If supposed facts were always true, and if they were always truly understood, a fixed state of mind toward them might still find justification; but that is far from the case. Probably some things are true for all time, such, for example, as the facts of the multiplication table, propositions in geometry, and some of the laws of physics. But perfect reliability is attached to very little of our knowledge. Some of the fundamental propositions in the exact sciences of physics and chemistry are only hypotheses, that have undergone extensive modification in recent years. Political opinions are subject to constant change. Sixty years ago the secret ballot was feared as one of the worst of evils, lest voters might then wreak awful vengeance upon those in authority; now its desirability is unquestioned.
So many new ideas have become established in recent years about the nature of childhood, the aims of the school, and even the use of school buildings, that education is a radically different field from what it was only twenty years ago. In the same way, facts in all lines are ever undergoing modification, and evolution prophesies such modification through all time to come. Even our statements of scientific law, instead of being final, only express man's interpretation of unvarying phenomena of nature, and are subject to error, like all other work of man. Huxley declares that "the day-fly has better grounds for calling a thunder storm supernatural than has man, with his experience of an infinitesimal fraction of duration, to say that the most astonishing event that can be imagined is beyond the scope of natural causes." [Footnote: T. H. Huxley, Life of Hume, p. 132.] Even within the field of science, therefore, we can never feel sure that the last word has been said, and the best established conclusions may have to submit to correction.
Turning from the better established fields of knowledge to such other facts as influence daily life, we find them to be remarkably uncertain. The facts about the weather, that guide the farmer, for instance, are only beginning to be fully known, and consequent miscalculations in the planning and the care of crops are without limit. In ordering goods only six months in advance, the merchant must be controlled by probabilities, many of which are only narrowly distinguishable from guesses. The facts that establish friendships are frequently still less tangible, blind feelings of affinity and faith alone being not seldom the basis of the attraction. Thus our so-called knowledge ranges all the way from ideas that possess a very high degree of probability to those that are a product of faith and hope, the greater portion of them approaching the latter. More than that, even in cases where the statements of principles, as in physics and ethics, seem thoroughly reliable, the variety of their application is so great and any individual's horizon is so narrow, that errors in their application to concrete cases must be very common. Correct theory about any matter by no means carries with it the correct application of that theory, as every one finds out sooner or later. It follows, then, that the highest wisdom represents only a rough approximation to the truth, and that ordinary facts are more nearly hypotheses than certainties. Since, therefore, so few ideas are fully reliable and unalterably fixed, a settled attitude toward them is undesirable, not only because it is opposed to utility, growth, and happiness, but because it finds no warrant in the real nature of knowledge.
The proper attitude toward knowledge.