ABSTRACT
That everybody’s views, opinions, judgments, are liable to be influenced, or even dominated, by personal feeling or interest, without any deliberate intellectual dishonesty, is notorious. Even the crudest of political careerists is usually able to believe that the cause he supports is reasonable and in the public interest, and that he is moved by those considerations in the support he gives. Psychology has almost wiped out hypocrisy. Sincerity is a matter of degree. It is very difficult for most men to conceive the possibility, much less to be convinced, that the satisfaction of any of their strong desires, not inhibited by some definite social taboo, should be illegitimate. So potent is the urge of the sacred instincts safeguarding the citadel of Personality that it is well-nigh impossible to prevent most men from finding reasons for believing anything they want very badly to believe. Now nobody would contend that the graver intellectual pursuits are quite immune against these disturbing personal motives. Wherever Science touches, even indirectly, any prized element of my Personality, my safety, or salvation, my property, my self-importance, powerful emotions rush to the defence, challenging the right or reason of the critic or assailant. We have already recognised how impossible it is to preserve an atmosphere of calm ‘disinterested’ inquiry into the existence of a deity, human immortality, the monogamous family, or communism. Though philosophers and scientists may not bang the door to reason with the intolerance of the platform politician or the popular preacher, their own personal feelings and interests, working less consciously, will surely intervene at every stage of a scientific inquiry. When man’s most sacred interests and beliefs were held to be threatened by freethought in astronomy or chemistry, the heaviest penalty was, not the outer persecution, but the secret inner ban on freedom of hypothesis and reasoning in his own mind and among the thinking few. If the doctrine of Heliocentricism seemed likely to involve the collapse of the whole fabric of Catholic Theology, with its scheme of personal salvation, was not this secret fear certain to affect the dryness of the light in which such a controversy was conducted? There are many alive to-day who remember the obstacles to the disinterested
study of geology and physics, due to the fear lest new evolutionary doctrines should injure the vested interests of comfortable beliefs.1 Biology today is rife with inflammable material. But the heat does not originate in the material itself: it is pumped into it by the excited feelings of the students whose reasoning is affected by their vested intellectual interests.
