A whole Cabinet—at least a whole Democratic Cabinet—could have been made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin great men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in the past seven years.
XVIII
CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF
I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on the causes and see how they can be removed.
There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about himself and needs to change his mind about himself.
He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as they look to one kind or group of people—sees things in spotlights of personality, of place or time—all the rest black.
Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness—is always getting lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. He either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means.
The Habit of Flat-Thinking—of not thinking things out in four dimensions.
The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for instance, it would be evaporated thinking.