Tke Prejudices of Mental Indolence.
We have hitherto considered the prejudices which have their origin in, or are connected, with our faculties; but another class of prejudices spring up in us from the absence of faculties ; from indolence, which may be denominated a negative power of the mind. The love of repose, timidity, and mental inactivity, are voluntary diseases, which weaken and paralyse the exercise of reason, without substituting any other faculty of the mind in its stead.
An aversion to new ideas, to change, to reform, to all, in short, that requires any great energy of mind, or that militates against the principles we had already formed, is a disposition common to all people, and its empire is great, according to the inveteracy of our prejudices, or according to the necessity under which we labour to shake off its control. Activity of mind is, we confess, a disposition natural to man; but it is a disposition which has a tendency to decay. It seems to be peculiar almost only to youth ; and with by far the greater number of men it diminishes in proportion as they advance in years. Mental contention, or our original and long established principles being opposed by new ideas, is the source of great uneasiness and labour to hint who has laid aside the habit of analyzing all his thoughts. The doubt that our former opinions are founded on prejudices, is the announcement of a painful and laborious investigation. It compels us to enter upon a process of examination, which requires a degree of atten tion which discourages us ; and not unfrequently we have to retire from the task, from the humiliating conviction that we cannot perform it—that it is beyond the reach of our faculties—and that the higher regions of thought arc a sphere which is now for ever denied us.
When we have submitted a great number of our preju dices to examination, and when, having thus fixed our opinions on several points, we have, as it were, erected land-marks to guide us in the vast regions of thought, doubt is by no means unpleasant or alarming. We know the firmness of the basis on which our convictions rest, and we feel a repose and a surety which ignorance or pre judice could never afford. The truth of our principles
encourages and animates us; and our mind, anxious to fix its ideas, takes in successively new objects of contemplation with an ardour more and more lively. We thus are daily making conquests in the region of darkness. But by far the greater number of men have not been accustomed to reflection. They have substituted the authority of others in the place of reason. They have maintained, unaltered and uninvestigatcd, the opinions which they received from their instructors, and never imagined that the ideas which they thus obtained were susceptible of proof, or required it. If, in a mind thus formed, a doubt on any one point were to be started, it would be immediately overwhelmed with confusion and astonishment ; every opinion would be shaken and undermined ; truth and falsehood, reason and prejudice, would be indiscriminately blended together, and all would be conjecture and uncertainty.
In proportion as prejudice has made inroads upon our natural opinions, the habit and the power of reflection have been removed or annihilated ; and doubt, when introduced into the mind, commits there the greatest ravages. A mind, over the faculties of which prejudice has for a con siderable time exercised authority, has, from this lung state of repose, and inactivity, lost the very basis of reasoning; it possesses precise and defined opinions on no subject, and it is ignorant of the method of acquiring them. In a building, a single stone removed, or put out of its proper place, is sufficient to bring the whole edifice to destruction. In like manner, doubt on one point not unfrequently leads to absolute and universal incredulity. Every one must have remarked, that those in the Protestant church, who shake off the common belief, are contented with modifying it in a greater or less degree ; while those who abandon the Catholic church plunge almost always into atheism. When a single point of faith is attacked, the influence of the whole system is weakened ; and thus the opinions and the hopes which we were once taught to cherish are gra dually undermined and destroyed.