Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/94

 study of other psyches can only be derived from study of our own; the standards which every objective study requires can only be those which form our own inner experience. The finest, the most penetrating, humour lies in the discovery that the disinterested motives that have been figuring in the foreground of our own consciousness and have been feeding our sense of self-approval are to a large extent the servile tools of the primitive lusts for power and self-importance, or else protective weapons for the customary habits and institutions which give us status and security. But though the most ancient of psychologists bade us “Know thyself,” few have been willing to follow that knowledge when it damages our customary self-esteem. Now intellectual self-esteem requires us to believe that our thinking is purely disinterested and that our public spirit and philanthropy are untainted by any self-seeking. The terminology of psychology in its elevated character promotes this self-deception, and is in part designed to do so. Pugnacity is “sublimated” on the football field, and is feigned to be subordinate to skill and dexterity, but the processes of kicking, scrum, and tackling are none the less fighting processes. Applied to man’s work in science and philosophy, though the outside student of the mental processes may succeed in imputing pure logic to the reasoning involved, no faithful observer of his own scientific or philosophic thinking can fail to recognize the moulding influence of pre-existent interests and