Norwich bulletin., 1912-11-09
OPEN-MINDEDNESS IS THE WAY TO EXACT
 KNOWLEDGE

(Written Specially For The Bulletin.) | ''fe-es," said Farmer Corntossell in the famous old story, John Sartinly | is mighty well eddicated: but I dunno | as he's any better off fer knowin' so | many things t ain't so.'
 I've sometimes thought that one pro life source of failure among us farm CTS is our aptnesS to know things | that ain't so" That is, our tendency | to think we know things which we don't know,-for the irrefragable req son that the things don't exist. Somebody once remarked that it l tsok a mighty smart man to tell the truth I don't remember who it was said this, but he was a philosopher.
 He didn't mean that it took a smart I man to be willing to tell the truth, or to want to tell the truth. Most of us feel that way. What he meant was that it took a clever fellow to know the truth so he could be able to tell it.
 Have you never looked out through one of the old-fashiOned seven by-nine panes in a country window? The glass is apt to be full of bubbles and streaks and crimps and waves, turning what ought to be a plain sheet into a dozen or more utterly irregular and i'm perfect lenses, which distort the rays of light into all sorts of queer twists and crC3ka. You see man approach ing driving alone in a carriage. Sud- denly as he passes one of these i'm perfections in the glass; his one horse turns into a monstrOSity with three heads. and about seven fore-legs. An other instant, and the horse has only afra hr,f s-nfu .1f rising and falling hips., Still another step or two and the single driver sud- denly splits into a baseball nine, with 6 whole bundle of bats where the s0li- tary whip was supposed to be.
 Now, if you got but one momentary glimpse of the approaching neighbor, and that during one of these distor tions, what kind of a description would you be able to give of the team? You might, perhaps, be able to tell what you saw or thought you saw, but would it be the truth about the actual team which was actually coming down the road? If you should report that you saw a horse with one rather small body and three or four heads, any one of them bigger than the rest of the beast ,prancing sideways down the road, would anybody recognize from that description Deacon Jones' sober old brood mare, who never had but one head in her life and never dream ed of such thing as prancing?
 Yet somethinq of that sort is alto- gether too common among men; among farmers as well as other men. We see thing hastily: only half see it, at the best: see it through some dis torting medium of prejudice or mental myopia: see it sometimes through the fog as well as through a crooked glass. Nevertheless, we accept our misleading vision as true sight and proceed to build a plan of work or a whole scheme of life around it. Not only that, we expect other people to see it as we saw it, and to adopt our methods as deduced from it. If they can't see it our way we set them down as stupid: if they won't join in our methods we denounce them as slow coaches and old fogies.
 There's g great deal of this amonu us old farmers. We are, many of us, welded to ideas and practices which started in just this way,--tnrough see- ing something wrong. We go potter ing along from year to year in the way we think we saw indicates as the right way. We don't seem to accom- plish much: we don't get anywhere: things don't pan out as we think they ought to. But we fall back on the fact that we saw what we saw,-and can't we believe our own eyes?
 No, brethren, we CANNOT always believe our own ey $.
 If both optics were always and equal Iv normal -ViSionpd. if neither ono Ua c ever either far-sighted or near sight ed: if we never looked through any crooked window glass: if the air was always still and clear and waveless: and if we then took time to look at a thing all over and all around,-top and bottom, both sides and both ends in the vertical light of noontime and the level rays of sunset,-why then we might In most cases see the truth about it and be able to tell the truth which we saw,
 But that combination of circum- stances seldom happens
 When you add to all the chances for mistaken sight which outside inter ferences produce the fact that most of have old hobbies and prejudices which affect OUT mental states, you've got a condition which is almost unequalled for seeing things wrong and for lead ing us to tell things which aren't so.
 For instance; there was Old Mar Iverson. When he was young farmer just beginning to plant things he put out his cucumbers in the old of the