Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/69

 MENTAL SYSTEMS 5 1

tendencies are strongly divergent he will react against the influences of his environment. But whether his attitude be one of conformity or of resistance, that environment will be equally powerful in the formation of his mental system. The radical who lives in an atmosphere of proscription will develop an intellectual life very different from that which he would in an atmosphere of freedom. Indeed, a man who is a radical in one intellectual atmosphere might quite con ceivably have been a conservative had he dwelt in another, and vice versa. An environment is equally powerful in its influence upon the conformist and the non-conformist. It may assimilate or it may alienate, but it can not be ignored. Now, as these several processes of differentiation go on, each crossing and modifying the other, the mental systems of men necessarily become more and more highly differen tiated; men become more variant and widely sundered in their intellectual interests and modes of thought. It is sometimes said that there is an even stronger counter tend ency. It is declared that the development of intercom munication in various ways the increase of travel, the publication of knowledge of every sort, the reading habit, etc. swells enormously the fund of common ideas, and tends towards the establishment of common standards and points of view. Then there is the practice of using over wide areas the same text-books in the public schools. The stronger movement, therefore, is sometimes declared to be in the direction of a dead level of mental uniformity. But this is a superficial view. It is true that the tendency is for all knowledge to be made available for every man ; that the views of every man are coming more and more to be ac cessible to all men. And we may, if we choose, imagine this to go on until the theoretical limit is reached, and all that every man thinks is placed at the disposal of all men. What of it? Would it reduce the mental life of men to a dead uniformity? It would have rather the opposite effect. No individual can appropriate all ideas. He simply has an ever-enlarging fund of other men s ideas to draw upon in

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