Sometimes the feeling that a given way of looking at things is undoubtedly correct prevents the mind from thinking at all. A lady claimed that she had been taught to accept the statements of the Bible in their literal sense, and that in this belief she was going to live and die. She was asked to read the twenty-third Psalm. At the end of the first verse she was asked whether she could be anything else than a sheep if the Lord was literally her Shepherd. When, a little farther on, she was asked in what green pastures she had been lying down, she burst into tears. Her condition, and that of hundreds of thousands of others, is correctly given in the opening pages of J. S. Mill’s “Subjection of Women.”[52]
[Sidenote: J. S. Mill on the influence of feeling upon thinking.]
“So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as the result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to fill any breach made in the old.”
When a man’s opinions are, as he thinks, grounded in first principles, it is but natural that he should be unwilling to abandon them without a struggle to intrench himself behind impregnable arguments. If he has reached his conclusions as the result of long and careful inquiry, he has a right to hold on to them with more than ordinary tenacity. The same regard for truth which led him to form an opinion should, however, make him willing to change whenever he finds himself in the wrong. He should avoid the frame of mind of the Scotch lady who, when it was charged that she was not open to conviction, exclaimed, “Not open to conviction! I scorn the imputation. But,” added she, after a moment’s pause, “show me the man who can convince me.” The secret of this tenacity of opinion is not love of truth, but love of self,—in one word, pride.