But the flagrant partisanship of
human nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to
identify ourselves with one possible course of events, and to
reject the other as foreign. If we cannot take sides in overt
action, and throw in our little weight to help determine the
final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We
desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to the
outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all.
From this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of
sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the
chief paradoxes of thought. Born in partiality, in order to
accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached
impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to
affect his observations and interpretations of the existing
situation will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes
and fears may be the chief motive for a thoughtful following of
the war on the part of an onlooker in a neutral country, he too
will think ineffectively in the degree in which his preferences
modify the stuff of his observations and reasonings. There is,
however, no incompatibility between the fact that the occasion of
reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going on and the
fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's
self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of
achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in
situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the
course of events and is designed to influence the result.
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