I hope that I do not seem to you to have gone too far afield from my
topic, the origin of philosophies. For it seems to me that the historic
source of philosophies cannot be understood except as we dwell, at even
greater length and in more detail, upon such considerations as these. We
need to recognize that the ordinary consciousness of the ordinary man
left to himself is a creature of desires rather than of intellectual
study, inquiry or speculation. Man ceases to be primarily actuated by
hopes and fears, loves and hates, only when he is subjected to a
discipline which is foreign to human nature, which is, from the
standpoint of natural man, artificial. Naturally our books, our
scientific and philosophical books, are written by men who have
subjected themselves in a superior degree to intellectual discipline and
culture. Their thoughts are habitually reasonable. They have learned to
check their fancies by facts, and to organize their ideas logically
rather than emotionally and dramatically. When they do indulge in
reverie and day-dreaming--which is probably more of the time than is
conventionally acknowledged--they are aware of what they are doing. They
label these excursions, and do not confuse their results with objective
experiences. We tend to judge others by ourselves, and because
scientific and philosophic books are composed by men in whom the
reasonable, logical and objective habit of mind predominates, a similar
rationality has been attributed by them to the average and ordinary man.
It is then overlooked that both rationality and irrationality are
largely irrelevant and episodical in undisciplined human nature; that
men are governed by memory rather than by thought, and that memory is
not a remembering of actual facts, but is association, suggestion,
dramatic fancy. The standard used to measure the value of the
suggestions that spring up in the mind is not congruity with fact but
emotional congeniality. Do they stimulate and reinforce feeling, and fit
into the dramatic tale? Are they consonant with the prevailing mood, and
can they be rendered into the traditional hopes and fears of the
community? If we are willing to take the word dreams with a certain
liberality, it is hardly too much to say that man, save in his
occasional times of actual work and struggle, lives in a world of
dreams, rather than of facts, and a world of dreams that is organized
about desires whose success and frustration form its stuff.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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