Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/42

 will be at least dimly realized, and some resort to other methods of shaping belief be attempted.

But even when freed from the fetters imposed by authority, the minds of the leaders of men have not always followed in the footsteps of wisdom. They have been prone to overlook the tyranny of their own organization and inheritance, and have come to accept a more liberal and humane dictator and one of their own seeking—but a dictator none the less. They believed what was agreeable to reason; they accepted that to which they naturally inclined; and the philosophers of cultivation inclined to beliefs that were plausible, or comforting, or stimulating, or uplifting, or liberalizing. Congenial spirits found one another or a common leader, and schools of opinion came and went. The pendulum swung now this way and now that; here a dominant leader impressed his personality strongly upon his contemporaries; there a reaction from an extreme doctrine induced attention to new lines of thought; everywhere opinion came to be more responsive to influences from without—from practice and experience, from custom and institution. But whatever progress results under this régime is fitful, and hazardous, and ill-defined; it is only when the causes of our inclination are scrutinized and the objective worth, not the agreeableness, of our reasoning comes to be regarded as of primary import, that the pursuit of knowledge, and the fixation of belief in which it results, realize their allegiance to a higher power. Strange gods have been worshiped in strange ways by the followers of their inclinations; the intuitionalists and the mystics and those who believed themselves inspired—tho the inspiration of one was folly and anathema to another—have therein found exercise for their inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Truth,” Lowell explains, “is said to lie at the bottom of a well for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better-looking than he had imagined.”

The method of scientific verification has been so wrought into the fiber of our thinking that we find it difficult to realize the power and dominion of other sovereigns; we the