uences, of
this and that happening. He is identified, for the time at least, with
the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. But even
for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of every move
made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends.
To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is
indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome. To fill our
heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and
done-for thing, is not to think. It is to turn ourselves into a piece
of registering apparatus. To consider the bearing of the occurrence
upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective
experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time for
separation in space. Imagine the war done with, and a future historian
giving an account of it. The episode is, by assumption, past. But he
cannot give a thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the
time sequence; the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies
in what was future for it, though not for the historian. To take it by
itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively.
Reflection also implies concern with the issue--a certain sympathetic
identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of
the course of events. For the general in the war, or a common soldier,
or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking
is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon
imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence
of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible
course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. If we cannot take
sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine
the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We
desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to the outcome does
not follow or think about what is happening at all. From this dependence
of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences
of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in
partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain
detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to
affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation
will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears may