Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/654

636 The skeptic in religion opens a book on Christian evidences, only to close it in haste when he perceives its trend; while the pious believer, who picks up the work of Strauss or Renan, drops it like a burning coal. We avoid books, men, sermons, society, that are not, as we say, congenial. Hence the trouble we have in getting our books read by the very people for whom they were written, or in getting our articles printed in the journals that circulate among the readers we desire to reach. The preacher prepares a vigorous sermon for "sinners," but he preaches it to his own devout people; the "sinners" are not there.

Our psychological law of prejudice thus developed teaches us that, since we seek not for what may correct our possible errors, but for what will confirm our already acquired opinions, our mental life always tends toward intensification or involution. Evidently this tendency of the mind toward involution will grow with age, and our every-day experience confirms this deduction. Teaching new tricks to old dogs is easier than giving us new apperceptive organs when middle life is past. The old man changes his politics rarely, his religion never. He lives from within. The mind becomes more and more a microcosm. The cerebral tracts show well-beaten paths of association. The brain becomes hardened and fixed."An old man," says Dr. Holmes, "who shrinks into himself, falls into ways which become as positive and as much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clock-work." The brain, he continues, has its "systole and diastole as regular as that of the heart itself."

 Minds roll in paths like planets: they revolve This in a larger, that a narrower ring, But round they come at last to that same phase, That self-same light and shade they showed before. I learned his annual and his monthly tale, His weekly axiom and his daily phrase. I felt them coming in the laden air, And watched them laboring up to vocal breath, Even as the first-born at his father's board Knows ere he speaks the too familiar jest Is on its way, by some mysterious sign Forewarned, the click before the striking bell."

The older we get, the larger becomes the subjective factor of knowledge and the smaller the objective. We are, as said the obscure sage of Ephesus, like those asleep, withdrawn each into a private world of his own. We can now understand that state of mind described by the word "confirmed." We hear of a confirmed pessimist, a confirmed protectionist or free-trader. Sometimes we apply the word without shame to ourselves, saying that experience has confirmed us in this or that opinion, not