It may be noted that medical men, who are a scientific class, and, therefore, more than commonly aware of the great importance of disinterestedness in intellectual action, never trust their own judgment when they feel the approach of disease. They know that it is difficult for a man, however learned in medicine, to arrive at accurate conclusions about the state of a human body that concerns him so nearly as his own, even though the person who suffers has the advantage of actually experiencing the morbid sensations.
Hamerton.
When pupils are encouraged to make for themselves fresh combinations of things already known, additional progress is certain. Variety of exercise in this way is as attractive to children as many of their games. If, when such exercises are given, the rivalry involved in taking places were discontinued, and all extraneous excitement avoided, the play of intelligence would bring an ample reward. I plead for discontinuance of rivalry in such exercises, because, while it stimulates some, in other cases it hinders and even stops the action of intelligence. If any teacher doubts this, he may subject a class to experiment by watching the faces of the pupils, and next by asking from the child who has been corrected an explanation of the reason for the correction. Hurry in such things is an injury, and so is all commingling of antagonistic motives. All fear hinders intellectual action, and the fear of wounded ambition offers no exception to the rule. The fear of being punished is more seriously detrimental than any other form of fear which can be stirred. It is essentially antagonistic to the action of intelligence. Let mind have free play.
Calderwood.
XVIII
THINKING AND FEELING
Bodily conditions.
In all our thinking it is very important to get a clear and full vision of the thing to be known. This is not always as easy as it seems. Like Nelson in the battle of Copenhagen, we may consciously turn the blind eye towards what we do not like and exclaim, “I do not see it.” The lenses through which we gaze may be green, or smoked, or ill-adjusted, and thus without suspecting it we may see things in false colors or distorted shapes. Our bodily condition may color everything we see and think. In health and high animal spirits every thought is rose-colored. In periods of disease and depression everything we think seems to pass, “like a great bruise, through yellow, green, blue, purple, to black. A liver complaint causes the universe to be shrouded in gray; and the gout covers it with inky pall, and makes us think our best friends little better than fiends in disguise.”
Prejudice.
One of the greatest hinderances to correct thinking is prejudice. Hence all who have presumed to give advice on the conduct of the understanding have had something to say concerning prejudice. Bacon has a chapter on the idols of the mind, and Locke contends that we should never be in love with any opinion. In a charming little volume on the “Art of Thinking,” Knowlson has a chapter in which he enumerates and discusses the prejudices arising from birth, nationality, temperament, theory, and unintelligent conservatism. The list might easily be enlarged. Close analysis must convince any one that feeling strengthens all forms of prejudice, and there are very few, if any, fields of thought in which it is not essential for the attainment of truth to divest ourselves of preconceived notions and the resultant feelings, and to weigh the arguments on both sides of a question before reaching a conclusion.