Thinking has been defined as the process of affirming or denying connections. Right thinking is, therefore, a matter of affirming the right connections or denying the wrong connections. To put it differently: right thinking is the process of adjusting the best means to a right end; whereas wrong thinking is a matter of overlooking the best means, or directing improper means to a wrong end. Right thinking involves proper adjustment; wrong thinking improper adjustment. In the intellectual world as in the physical, improper adjustment means extinction. Illustrations of this:
(1) A contractor undertakes to build a skyscraper. In the excavation an old wall is discovered. The thought of the contractor is, “I must make a pot of money out of this job, and since this old wall is in the right spot I will build on it, and thus save me ‘five hundred’.” In the course of ten years, without warning, the building topples over and fifty women and children are killed. The contractor is convicted and sent to prison for life. If the builder had thought the right thought; namely, “I want to put up a building that will stand for generations,” he would have survived the competition of his fellows andentered his long home with success etched upon his soul.
(2) Two school teachers, A and B, are working in the same system. A’s ambition is to be promoted and she uses “pull” as the means. For a time she succeeds in pulling the wires, and likewise in pulling the “wool” over the eyes of the Board of Education. B aspires to professional growth, using as the means every opportunity for genuine improvement. In time both are known as they really are, not as they seem to be. A is denominated a “shirk,” a politician, a mere school keeper; whereas B is looked up to as the best equipped worker in the building, a real school teacher.
There may seem to be many exceptions to this point of view, and yet in the last analysis we find that these exceptions are only apparent. When we maintain that right thinking means survival and wrong thinking extinction, we assume that the standard adopted is genuine efficiency and not a certain money basis. High positions may be secured through wrong thinking, but these cannot be filled creditably without the preponderance of right thinking.
5. INDIFFERENT AND CARELESS THOUGHT.
It may be advanced as a plausible hypothesis that man, especially if he is an American, finds much trouble for himself, and makes much trouble for the world because of his indifference to thought. To leap first and look afterwards is the spirit of youth, and America is young. Think twice before you look and look twice before you leap is sound logical doctrine. A logically minded manrationalizes every new proposition before he adopts it. He marshals before the mind the favorable points and then bombards them with every conceivable objection. With the steady eye of an honest, earnest, open minded critic, he weighs the unfavorable against the favorable and then accepts the indications of the balance unequivocally. If logic did nothing else save to inspire young people to thus rationalize every doubtful undertaking, it would do its share toward world betterment.
6. THE RATIONALIZATION OF THE WORLD OF CHANCE.
Man seems to be a natural born gambler. He loves to “take a chance” and herein lies much of his unhappiness. Without discussing the evils of the stock exchange, the horrors of the gambling den, and the unbusiness like procedure of the race track, we may merely attempt here to show how the rationalization of the conception of chance may be instrumental in dimming the glare of gambling to the average youth.
(1) The meaning of the term chance.
The term chance implies an inability to find a cause for any particular event. Whenever we trust to luck, we do so through ignorance. In reality every thing in this world is ordered according to law, and if we possessed infinite knowledge concerning these laws, then, for us, the word “chance” would have no meaning. One accomplishment of knowledge has been to rationalize superstition and chance. “Not a grain of sand lies upon the beach, but infinite knowledge would account for its lying there; and the cause of every falling leaf is guided by the same principlesof mechanics as rule the motions of the heavenly bodies.”—Jevon’s Prin. of Science, vol. I, p. 225.