Sex and civilization / by Paul Bousfield.

  • Bousfield, Paul, 1880-
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Sex and civilization / by Paul Bousfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reasons for not believing it. This, fortunately for pro- gress, is gradually passing away, just as the opposition to the idea of the evolution of the body passed away. As Mill saw years ago,—* The difficulty is that which exists in all cases where there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings it gains rather than loses in stability by, having a mass of argu- ment against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction, but when it rests solely on feel- ing, 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 entrenchments of argument to repair any breach in the old. Of course, one of the other difficulties in the way of com- ing to correct conclusions is that people insist on holding definite opinions when the amount of real knowledge they have is very small. This, of course, is inevitable in our limited circumstances ; but it should not be equally in- evitable that we should hold firmly to our beliefs, when we come to realize how limited is our knowledge of any one subject. And in order to examine facts and to get rid of rationalization as far as possible, we must try, with the utmost power at our command, to refuse that reaction of self-defence and self-pride, which prevents us from looking at ourselves and from realizing that our opinions about ourselves may be erroneous. We must be pre- pared to accept temporary, not fixed, judgments, based upon the evidence which we have. We must be prepared to reverse those judgments in the light of new evidence. *J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women.
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