acts and
events by the mind, and the correct inferences as to the relations
between them, constitute knowledge, and it is chiefly by knowledge that
men have become better able to live well on earth. Therefore the
alternation between experience or observation and the intellectual
processes by which the sense, sequence, interdependence, and rational
consequences of facts are ascertained, is undoubtedly the most important
process for winning increased power to live well. Yet we find that this
process has been liable to most pernicious errors. The imagination has
interfered with the reason and furnished objects of pursuit to men,
which have wasted and dissipated their energies. Especially the
alternations of observation and deduction have been traversed by vanity
and superstition which have introduced delusions. As a consequence, men
have turned their backs on welfare and reality, in order to pursue
beauty, glory, poetry, and dithyrambic rhetoric, pleasure, fame,
adventure, and phantasms. Every group, in every age, has had its
"ideals" for which it has striven, as if men had blown bubbles into the
air, and then, entranced by their beautiful colors, had leaped to catch
them. In the very processes of analysis and deduction the most
pernicious errors find entrance. We note our experience in every action
or event. We study the significance from experience. We deduce a
conviction as to what we may best do when the case arises again.
Undoubtedly this is just what we ought to do in order to live well. The
process presents us a constant reiteration of the sequence,--act,
thought, act. The error is made if we allow suggestions of vanity,
superstition, speculation, or imagination to become confused with the
second stage and to enter into our conviction of what it is best to do
in such a case. This is what was done when goblinism was taken as the
explanation of experience and the rule of right living, and it is what
has been done over and over again ever since. Speculative and
transcendental notions have furnished the world philosophy, and the
rules of life policy and duty have been deduced from this and introduced
at the second stage of the process,--act, thought, act. All the errors
and fallacies of the mental processes enter into the mores of the age.
The logic of one age is not that of another. It is one of the chief
useful purposes of a study of the mores to learn to discern in them the
operation of traditional error, prevailing d