There is a good and a bad side to the two types of interest. The
objective minded conquer the world in dealing with what they call
reality. They bridge the water and dig up the earth; they invent,
they plow, they sell and buy, they produce and distribute wealth,
and they deal with the education that teaches how to do all these
things. They find in the outer world an unalterable sense of
reality, and they tend rather naively to accept themselves, their
interests and efforts as normal. In their highest forms they are
the scientist, reducing to law this tangle of outer realities, or
the artist, who though he is a hybrid with deep subjective and
objective interest, nevertheless remodels the outer world to his
concept of beauty. These objective-minded folk, the bulk of the
brawn and in lesser degree of the brain of the world, are apt to
be "materialists," to value mainly quantity and to be
self-complacent. Of course, since no man is purely objective,
there come to them as to all moments of brooding over the eggs of
their inner life, when they wonder whether they have reached out
for the right things and whether the goods they seek or have are
worth while. Such introspective interest comes on them when they
are alone and the outer world does not reach in, or when they
have witnessed death and misfortune, or when sickness and fatigue
have reduced them to a feeling of weakness. For it is true that
the objective minded are more often robust, hearty, with more
natural lust, passion and desire than your introspectionists,
more virile and less sensitive to fine impressions.
The introspectionists, culling, chewing the cud of their
experiences and sensations, find in their own reactions the
realities. In fact, interested in consciousness, they are
sometimes bold enough to deny the realities of anything else.
Where the others build bridges, they build up the ideas of
eternal good and bad, of beauty, of the transitory and the
permanent, of now and eternity. They deal with abstract ideas,
and they luxuriate in emotions. They build up beliefs where
thought is the only reality and is omnipotent. They are the
founders of religious, cults, fads and fancies. They inculcate
the permanent ideals, because they are the only ones who interest
themselves in something beside the show of the universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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