But that only pushes the problem back a step. What is this tolerance, and how can it be attained? It is easy for us to be tolerant on matters we do not care about, but hard on matters that are deep in our hearts. Religious tolerance is growing because religious intensity of the old type is weakening. Religious wars, as practised in Europe three hundred years ago, will never be repeated because Christians are no longer certain that their fellow-Christians of different sects are going to burn in everlasting flames. Thomas Jefferson was tolerant on religion because he was fairly indifferent to the whole subject; his intolerance was reserved for political opponents, and for the aristocratic party in other lands as well. The rarest object in the whole museum of history is the man who has profound convictions of his own, and yet is tolerant of those who differ from him—a Roger Williams, for example, who was a pious clergyman but allowed liberty of conscience in his settlement of Rhode Island even to Catholics and Jews. Such a man is a symbol of what the whole world may become in the messianic age, a type of our strictly modern ideal. 2. The study of intolerance takes us at once out of the field of individual psychology into the newer and less cultivated field of social psychology, the mind of the group. For intolerance is characteristically an attribute of groups. Intolerance is the white against the black; the Christian against the Jew, the Frenchman against the German—always one group lined up against another. Intolerance nestles in the individual mind simply because every individual of us is a member of a nation, a religion, a race, and has the typical prejudices of his own people. I may think myself better than you, but that is merely egotism. If I think my family better than your family and refuse to associate with you, that becomes intolerance. And if I join an organization of people with similar opinions to my own, and we decide to keep you and all your kind from doing business or holding public office or otherwise prospering and succeeding in a country which we both inhabit, then intolerance has attained its growth and come to flower. Always one body of people against another, animated by prejudice, and the reasons do not matter. For prejudice, literally, means prejudgment, opinion before the facts come in, and the facts are then selected to give us reasons for our attitude.