Evening star., 1928-09-10
Impediments of Thought.

Everybody knows what an impede
ment of speech is, and if you have one.
everybody detects that, too; but would
you know if you had an impediment
OF thought, and would others detect it?
Perhaps few speak perfectly; no one
thinks perfectly. What are the COM
mon impediments of thought? And
why are they? This fundamentally i'm
portant inquiry has been strangely dis
regarded; nothing is so fatal to mental
fitness as serious impediments of
thought.
Francis Bacon, one of the great
minds that heralded the modern way
OF thinking, enumerated four idols"
or congenial errors of the mind-in
reality in1pediments of thought. He
gave them dramatic names. First are
the idols of the tribe" or presup-
positions and assumptions and accepted
notions common to nearly all men. We
all belong to our age and kind, reflect
and initiate, and absorb the views
around us. and so repeat the errors and
fall into the way of the day We fol-
low the fashions of our tribe. The
second are the "idols of the cave"
false notions and prejudices of those
who sit in the darkness of ignorance,
or the prejudices peculiar to their
bringing up, including all the
personal limitations. Your Sectarian
views, your provincialism, your class
and clan leanings and favoritisms and
antipathieS and peculiarities, stand in
the way of your fair Judgment, and are
errors due to the cave you live in.
Third are Idols of the FORUM"
which arise largely from misunder-
standing, and not a little from the i'm
plications of words, which, if they do
not conceal rather than reveal thought,
distort it in the reflection of language,
and make what you say different from
what you mean. Fourth are the idols
Of the theater," or platform. or rostrum,
or pulpit, which are the errors in ac-
cepted systems of thought, religious,
philosophical. political social. These
are peculiarly the thinkers impedi-
ments of thought.
That was good start 300 years ago;
but 1000 years earlier Aristotle made
a beginning by enumerating the falla-
cies of thought. But he made logic a
sort of a game with fixed rules, and if
you broke the rules, you made an
error. Mistakes, errors. fallacies, idols,
preJudices, delusionS-they are all i'm
pedlments of thought, or, rather, they
are the results of such impediments.
Aristotle neglected for he, too, sat in
cave) what Bacon considered, name
ly, the natural temptations of men in
their thinking to follow certain leads,
to believe not what could stand the test
OF proof, but what appealed to their
likes and dislikes.
1t was not until Freud came along
| IN this century and announced that
IN their thinking and no less in their
f@11 @F
| wish and desire. that the source of
much of our misleading and distorted
| thinking was definitely stated Freud
didn't discover this: he formulated it
IN a new way, in keeping with modern
| psychology When AeSop wrote the
| table of the Fox and the Sour Grapes,
| he put into story one of the common
| lmpedlments Of thought To decide
| that the grapes you can't reach are
| sour and not worth reaching, rather
! than admit defeat, is a congenial error
OF the human mind. It's your feelings
that get in the way Of your thinking.
| 1t would take not chapter, but a
| volume, to describe all the varieties of
impedimcnts of thought. If reduced
! to schedule they might read like this:
Faulty observation, noticing the acci-
| dental, not the essential; ignorance.
not knowing enough to form an opinion,
yet having one just the same; just poor
thinking, such as the testimonials to
patent medicines; jumping to conclu-
Sions on slight evidence; prejudice.
forming unfavorable opinions in regard
| to those you don't like; wish thinking.
believing what you hope or want to be
true; tradition, believing what has been
believed, and so to the end of the
| chapter
Add all these together and you begin