asiest to justify its
conviction by some sweeping general principle. It really starts,
speaking in terms of logic, by assuming the truth of its minor and
takes for granted that any major which will cover the minor is
therefore established. Nothing saves so much trouble in thinking as the
acceptance of a good sounding generality or a self-evident truth. Where
your poor scientific worker plods along, testing the truth of his
argument at every point, making qualifications and reservations, and
admitting that every general principle may require to be modified in
concrete cases, you can thus both jump to your conclusion and assume
the airs of a philosopher. It is, I fancy, for this reason that people
have such a tendency to lay down absolute rules about really difficult
points. It is so much easier to say at once that all drinking ought to
be suppressed, than to consider how, in actual circumstances, sobriety
can be judiciously encouraged; and by assuming a good self-evident law
and denouncing your opponents as immoral worshippers of expediency, you
place yourself in an enviable position of moral dignity and
inaccessibility. No argument can touch you. These abstract rules, too,
have the convenience of being strangely ambiguous. I have been almost
pathetically affected when I have observed how some thoroughly
commonplace person plumes himself on preserving his consistency because
he sticks resolutely to his party dogmas, even when their whole meaning
has evaporated. Some English radicals boasted of consistency because
they refused to be convinced by experience that republicans under a
military dictator could become tyrannous and oppressive. At the present
day, I see many worthy gentlemen, who from being thorough-going
individualists, have come to swallow unconsciously the first principles
of socialism without the least perception that they have changed,
simply because a new meaning has been gradually insinuated into the
sacred formulae. Scientific habits of thought, I venture to suggest,
would tend to free a man from the dominion of these abstract phrases,
which sometimes make men push absolute dogmas to extravagant results,
and sometimes blind them to the complete transformation which has taken
place in their true meaning. The great test of statesmanship, it is
said, is the knowledge how and when to make a compromise, and when to
hold fast to a principle. The tendency of the thoughtless is to
denounce all compromise as wicked