In the establishment of
these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some
simple process actually observable in operation--as denudation by
weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect
by incorporation of new words and pronunciations--and then to
generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great
results by summating its effects through the ages.
The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled
out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual
settles into NEW OPINIONS. The process here is always the same. The
individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new
experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or
in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other;
or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires
arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward
trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from
which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.
He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we
are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this
opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously),
until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the
ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea
that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them
into one another most felicitously and expediently.
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