Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/64

 of the chemist. And yet these resemblances are quite superficial, the analogies of their likeness quite misleading. On the one shore lies the orderly kingdom of rational belief; across the border the chaotic realm of credulity.

Anyone who cares to take the trouble of examining the literature (sic) of the propaganda of logical unorthodoxy can readily satisfy himself of the reality and the character of the realm over which credulity holds sway. He will observe the truly unbalanced, the “cranks,” those possessed with what has been described as the “unconquerable determination of the human race to believe what it knows is not so,” the innocently and naively deluded, the faddists and extremists, the seemingly normal and wholly intelligent. The shades and grades of believers are as pronounced as on the other shore. And yet to the man of sturdy intellectual virtue these distorted, tho not wholly valueless, beliefs offer no temptation. And equally true is it that the logically molded thinker knows that it is useless to demand any ready-made prescription which shall save all men from credulity, not only in extreme cases—which most people do not really fear—but in the intermediate and more frequent and actual perplexities of the practical life.

The nature of the antidote which most is worth the seeking it has been the purpose of this essay to set forth. And last as first should it be emphasized that there is in many of the vital and typical problems of knowing and doing, an objectively best method of fixing belief to which we may reasonably approximate in practice. Neither the logical requirements of philosophical thought nor the actualities of the practical life, when rightly interpreted, appear to be seriously antagonistic to—indeed are wholly compatible with—the absorption of the principles rooted in the scientific analysis of belief. This infusion of the blood of science permeates the organic structure of the belief-attitude, and creates a sturdy affinity for right belief and a deep-seated aversion for the intellectual manners that error, attractive to credulity, is apt to bear. In truth this protecting aegis is in some measure an aesthetic trait—a certain intellectual fastidiousness which, as is also true of the ethical life, becomes a potent ally of virtue. And this logical virtue becomes