Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/255

Rh won in our researches, and its bearings seem misty and uncertain, we gain nothing by filling the ink pot and knotting a cold towel around our heads in full determination to settle matters. Dogged does not always do it. Put the idea away in some corner of the mind to give it time to germinate, then bring it out at intervals for consideration. This mental chewing of the cud is wholesome because natural. When the way seems darkest and most beset with stumbling blocks we may be nearest the door, and it is best to go slowly in the dark. We attain our conclusions at unexpected moments and have generally to wait until they appear subconsciously, the time varying with the individual mind.

It is often an aid to reflection to drop for a while the subject that has begun to worry us, to take up a different and fresh problem. This alternation of subject is a necessary mental recreation and frequently accomplishes more than long hammering. For any change of thought is stimulating.

Yet the investigator need not be like Heine's "gray friend between two bundles of hay," slowly starving to death because he can not decide; it is better that he choose unwisely than not choose at all, else he can not maintain himself in the arena of thought. After all, if he eats one of the bales of hay and learns later that the other was larger and sweeter, he has not gone hungry.

It would seem to be on the average best for the general man to take rather a middle stand in his judgments, which means to see the good in both sides of any question. One should be neither too critical nor too tolerant. New ideas are constantly emerging, many of them contradictory to our own, and we have to cultivate a mode of meeting them, not to be bristling like the fretful porcupine, nor yet to embrace them eagerly because they are new. Also it is not safe to say an idea is wrong because it is new. We should react towards views as towards our fellow men, hunt for the best in them. Nothing is easier than to criticize, nothing less constructive. Life is too short for full achievement, unless Metchnikoff's prophecies may come true, and "Like as the waves move on the pebbling beach, so do our minutes hasten to their end." Then why misuse the moments in picking flaws? In the orchard before us we may readily find the insect-bitten fruit if we look for it, but what pays is to gather the good. Whether it be right or wrong from the philosophical aspect, the optimistic standpoint is the most wholesome, and that man is happy who sees only the good in others—in their personalities as well as in their opinions. We all shun him who has the squinting mind of noting only mistakes. Let us be fair to other men even though we can not be impartial, if only for the reason that it is the best policy, as Franklin would have said. For if we are not so, the retort courteous will be harder than the blow we struck, and then will be our time to wince.