or the rise of a new hypothesis concerning the world, causes unlooked-for expansion of thought. Unknown aspects of the universe are brought to light, hidden processes revealed, undreamed-of conceptions introduced. What follows? The traditional balance between knowledge and emotion is disturbed. The intellect adjusts itself rapidly to the changed conditions; the emotions cling tenaciously to the conditions that are being left behind. Years, perhaps generations, have to go by before once more the intellectual possessions of the age are brought into sympathetic relation with its common feelings and aspirations, and the adjustment in this way approximately restored.
Illustrations of the principle here outlined may be found without going further than the experiences of our own lives. We all know well enough that at a time of great emotional stress or upheaval we tend to revert to those ideas of our earlier days which we fancy we have outgrown, and which in calmer seasons no longer have any hold upon us. This is so notoriously the case that much capital has been made in theological literature out of the undeniable fact that during periods of unusual excitement—during periods, that is, when the feelings take the upper hand—the most skeptical spirits are apt to be driven back from the open sea of doubt to the safe anchorage of their boyish faith. It is a trite remark, too, that long after the judgment has been convinced of some new proposition, the feelings will still persist in protest and opposition. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still," as Hudibras long ago told us. Now all this, in view of our generalization, is precisely what we should expect. The feelings in most of us are very imperfectly adjusted to our new intellectual acquisitions and their philosophical consequences; hence, in times of crisis, the almost inevitable lapse into our older thought of the world, and our cruder guess at the riddle behind it. In other words, the most advanced thinker is likely to be more or less conservative upon the side of his emotions. And all this explains not only the conservatism of women and elderly men, but also the constant tendency among those engaged in the study of the problems of life to segregate into opposing parties, roughly definable as the theological and the scientific—those who, guided mainly by the feelings, resist the new knowledge of the age; and those who, looking at facts from the point of view of the insulated intellect, accept such knowledge, concerning themselves but little with the question of its emotional results.[1]
Now this generalization interprets for us certain well-known
- ↑ A striking commentary upon these remarks will be found in the wonderful scene between Clotilde and Doctor Pascal in Zola's novel, Le Docteur Pascal, chap. iv.
