Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/68

64 cultivation of the mental plasticity and poise in order the more successfully to combat all tendencies encouraging a blind reliance upon authority and fixed states of mind, we must know something about the manner in which comparatively slight deviations from the normal balance are converted into the stable systematized delusions of the insane. The alienist quickly recognizes the fact that the sentimental tendencies expressed in the uncritical devotion to the maintenance of the ideals of a single college offer a very favorable soil for the development of petty prejudices and provincial ways of thinking, the directions of our thoughts being determined by the presence of ruts, however much we may, sometimes, attempt to explain them away with all the vehemence of stand-patters. American ideals should be substituted for the Harvard, Yale or Princeton ideals, if we wish to cultivate the quick and ready discernment of the right wherever it is to be found One of the principal lessons to be forced home upon students, striving to acquire a normal physiological habit of thinking, is to impress them with the fallibility and not the infallibility of individual judgments, but when young men are encouraged to believe that the institution from which they graduate represents the most advanced position on the road to the intellectual Mecca, they unconsciously get a mental twist, the effects of which it is difficult to counteract.

The principles of logic and of criticism may be taught in theory, but the conditions essential to the proper selection of premises and the formation of sound judgments are still far from favorable, and this will continue as long as American students are encouraged to form general opinions altogether lacking in discrimination as to the respective merits of different institutions. The same narrowness of vision and absence of charity which have created the barriers of opinion between many of the different theological schools have unfortunately afflicted the universities. When Harvard professors begin to urge some of their students to take a year at Cornell or Columbia, in order to get into another atmosphere, or the benefit of a change to the Cambridge environment is recommended to correct the inflexible mental traits acquired on New Jersey soil, there will be reason to believe that the universities are becoming centers, whence sound advice is being disseminated as to the methods of developing sane and logical thinking. There is danger that the odium institutionum may in a measure replace the odium theologicum of earlier days. Students are often advised to take a trip abroad following graduation in order to readjust their mental foci. The blind devotion to the maintenance of a proper college spirit forbids the entertainment of a recommendation that an excellent prophylactic measure directed against the possible development of this form of institutional myopia would be a year, preferably the senior year, spent at some other American institution.