BIAS. In a very helpful work. Herbert Spencer has explained the influence of a number of different kinds of bias, educational, patriotic, social, political, theologi cal. It is a common charge against theologians that they are biased. It is not sufficiently realized, on the other hand, by their opponents that men's views are distorted equally by an anti-theological bias. The theological bias cannot, of course, be denied. " Under its special forms, as well as under its general form, the theological bias brings errors into the estimates men make of societies and institutions. Sectarian antipathies, growing out of differences of doctrine, disable the members of each religious community from fairly judg ing other religious communities. It is always difficult, and often impossible, for the zealot to conceive that his own religions system and his own zeal on its behalf may have but a relative truth and a relative value; or to con ceive that there may be relative truths and relative values in alien beliefs and the fanaticisms which main tain them. Though the adherent of each creed daily has thrust on his attention the fact that adherents of other creeds are no less confident than he is—though he can scarcely fail sometimes to reflect that these adherents of other creeds have, in nearly all cases, simply accepted the dogmas current in the places and families they were born in, and that he has done the like; yet the special theological bias which his education and surroundings have given him, makes it almost beyond imagination that these other creeds may, some of them, have justifications as good as, if not better than, his own, and that the rest, along with certain amounts of absolute worth, may have their special fitnesses to the people holding them." But
the anti-theological bias also leads to serious errors. " both when it ignores the essential share hitherto taken by religious systems in giving force to certain principles of action, in part absolutely good and in part good rela tively to the needs of the time, and again when it prompts the notion that these principles might now be so estab lished on rational bases as to rule men effectually through their enlightened intellects. . . . It generates an un willingness to see that a religious system Is a normal and essential factor in every evolving society; that the specialities of it have certain fitnesses to the social con ditions; and that while its form is temporary, its sub stance is permanent. In so far as the anti-theological bias causes an ignoring of these truths, or an inadequate appreciation of them, it causes misinterpretations." See Herbert Spencer, The Study of Soeiology, 18th ed., 1897.