Our free press, also, and our free speech are great educators. In these days we are compelled to see and hear and think. The narrow-minded man is unhappy and distracted. He is no longer protected in his little system by college or cloister walls. A myriad unwelcome facts peer in at him from every side from the circulating library, from the interesting novel, from the omnipresent and iconoclastic newspaper. The man of mental bias is veritably a victim of persecution. Optimists tell us that the world is growing honest. I am optimist enough to believe that it is growing broad-minded. Perforce it must. The air is full of everybody's ideas. They circulate everywhere and act as a series of incessant shocks wherever they find a mind too narrowly planned to admit them. Hence men are beginning to avoid systems as the cause of more friction than they save. They are willing to sacrifice a narrow love of unity and consistency for a broader harmony with the spirit of the age.
What is likely to be the result of this general breaking up of old unities, systems, habits? An increase of insanity? By no means. Insanity proceeds from the opposite movement, from the involution of the mind upon itself, till fixed ideas can no longer be rectified by objective facts. The results will be good and bad: good, in encouraging inquiry and in substituting the love of truth for the love of consistency; bad, in discouraging a certain moral earnestness and enthusiasm which are the outgrowth of strong conviction, for the narrower is one's system of thought, the stronger often are one's convictions of its truth and importance. The extreme form of this union of prejudice and intensity we call fanaticism. If not in fanaticism, at least in enthusiasm, there is an element of good which we must not overlook. Men possessed with one idea are men of action. Enthusiasts carry forward great movements. The development of the intellect is the weakening of the will. Children and animals act out every thought. Education is a training in the inhibition of movements by the higher intellectual processes. The man of many-sided mind finds every volition "checked" by some antagonistic idea. The correction of mental bias, therefore, will result in a certain loss of spontaneity. But progress will not suffer. If we move more slowly, it will be more surely. What we lack in enthusiasm we shall make up in balance.
