We need not dwell upon the illustration of it. Fear and Sloth magnify dangers and difficulties; Affection can see no imperfection in its object: in the eyes of Jealousy a rival is a wretch. From the nature of the case we are much more apt to see examples in others than in ourselves. If the strength of this bias were properly understood by everybody, the mistake would not so often be committed of suspecting bad faith, conscious hypocrisy, when people are found practising the grossest inconsistencies, and shutting their eyes apparently in deliberate wilfulness to facts held under their very noses. Men are inclined to ascribe this human weakness to women. Reasoning from feeling is said to be feminine logic. But it is a human weakness. To take one very powerful feeling, the feeling of self-love or self-interest--this operates in much more subtle ways than most people imagine, in ways so subtle that the self-deceiver, however honest, would fail to be conscious of the influence if it were pointed out to him. When the slothful man saith, There is a lion in the path, we can all detect the bias to his belief, and so we can when the slothful student says that he will work hard to-morrow, or next week, or next month; or when the disappointed man shows an exaggerated sense of the advantages of a successful rival or of his own disadvantages. But self-interest works to bias belief in much less palpable ways than those. It is this bias that accounts for the difficulty that men of antagonistic interests have in seeing the arguments or believing in the honesty of their opponents. You shall find conferences held between capitalists and workmen in which the two sides, both represented by men incapable of consciously dishonest action, fail altogether to see the force of each other's arguments, and are mutually astonished each at the other's blindness. _The Bias of Custom._ That custom, habits of thought and practice, affect belief, is also generally acknowledged, though the strength and wide reach of the bias is seldom realised. Very simple cases of unreasoning prejudice were adduced by Locke, who was the first to suggest a general explanation of them in the "Association of Ideas" (_Human Understanding_, bk. ii. ch. xxxiii.). There is, for instance, the fear that overcomes many people when alone in the dark. In vain reason tells them that there is no real danger; they have a certain tremor of apprehension that they cannot get rid of, because darkness is inseparably connected in their minds with images of horror. Similarly we contract unreasonable dislikes to places where painful things have happened to us. Equally unreasoning, if not unreasonable, is our attachment to customary doctrines or practices, and our invincible antipathy to those who do not observe them.