Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/653

Rh limited by the quality and amount of its previous acquisitions. "No man," Emerson tells us, "can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser—the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we can not see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream." Instinctively, therefore, we seek the mental food that our minds are prepared to digest that, namely, which is most clearly related to what we know already. In conversation, notice how people brighten up when you tell them something that they know already, especially if it is something they have long believed or themselves discovered. In society we know how to make ourselves agreeable by speaking to each person on the subject of his peculiar interests. If we are wise, we shall engage each person in subjects of conversation about which he is best informed. By so doing we can not only make ourselves agreeable, but lay by a stock of useful information at the same time. Such a course is by no means easy. We fall naturally into the vice of parading our own knowledge, and we like to hear others talk, not of their interests, but of ours. Sometimes persons in conversation act simply as foils each for the other. I listen to your stories only that you in turn may listen to mine; and in the next company I tell not the ones I heard, but the ones I told before. Thackeray, in "Henry Esmond," hits upon this human weakness. "They emptied scores of bottles at the 'King's Arms,' each prating of his love, and allowing the others to talk on condition that he might have his own turn as a listener."

We like also to read that which favors our side of a question. The Republican subscribes for a Republican newspaper, and the Democrat reads the organ of his party. In the last political campaign it was no doubt true that advocates of free trade or of tariff reform, and advocates of protection, read for the most part literature favorable to their respective views. The churches plead for greater consensus of opinion, yet the Methodist subscribes for a Methodist paper, the Baptist for a Baptist paper, the Roman Catholic for a Catholic paper. In general we read the organ of our own sect or party. There are, of course, some valid economic reasons for so doing. I shall speak of these reasons below. But, if truth alone were sought, the plan we pursue would be the worst plan possible. Sometimes even we indignantly refuse mental food that might serve as a corrective of our possible one-sidedness, instinctively avoiding that which we feel can not be assimilated without a dangerous readjustment of our mental possessions.