so evident that I should be ashamed
to repeat them if they were not universally ignored. But in the
actual world it is very necessary to repeat them.
To attain complete truth is not given to mortals, but to advance
toward it by successive steps is not impossible. On any matter of
general interest, there is usually, in any given community at any
given time, a received opinion, which is accepted as a matter of
course by all who give no special thought to the matter. Any
questioning of the received opinion rouses hostility, for a number of
reasons.
The most important of these is the instinct of conventionality, which
exists in all gregarious animals and often leads them to put to death
any markedly peculiar member of the herd.
The next most important is the feeling of insecurity aroused by doubt
as to the beliefs by which we are in the habit of regulating our
lives. Whoever has tried to explain the philosophy of Berkeley to a
plain man will have seen in its unadulterated form the anger aroused
by this feeling. What the plain man derives from Berkeley's
philosophy at a first hearing is an uncomfortable suspicion that
nothing is solid, so that it is rash to sit on a chair or to expect
the floor to sustain us. Because this suspicion is uncomfortable, it
is irritating, except to those who regard the whole argument as merely
nonsense. And in a more or less analogous way any questioning of what
has been taken for granted destroys the feeling of standing on solid
ground, and produces a condition of bewildered fear.
A third reason which makes men dislike novel opinions is that vested
interests are bound up with old beliefs. The long fight of the church
against science, from Giordano Bruno to Darwin, is attributable to
this motive among others. The horror of socialism which existed in
the remote past was entirely attributable to this cause. But it would
be a mistake to assume, as is done by those who seek economic motives
everywhere, that vested interests are the principal source of anger
against novelties in thought. If this were the case, intellectual
progress would be much more rapid than it is.
The instinct of conventionality, horror of uncertainty, and vested
interests, all militate against the acceptance of a new idea. And it
is even harder to think of a new idea than to get it accepted; most
people might spend a lifetime in reflection without ever making a
genuinely original discovery.
In view of a
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