Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    48/284 (page 36)
    by way of answer to the question, facts illustrating the success of what is liked and the failure of what is disliked. This implies no deliberate falsification; indeed, not even any conscious selection or rejection of evidence. The life of social institutions, past and present, is so varied and complicated, the social tissue of which society is composed is simultane¬ ously in so many different stages of growth or decay, that the investigator cannot help running up against apparently endless facts verifying almost every hypothesis and justifying almost every con¬ clusion. It is a law of the mind that, other things being equal, those facts which seem to bear out his own preconceived view of things will make a deeper impression on the student than those which seem to tell in the opposite direction. We notice these facts much more easily than we see any others, and they remain more firmly in our memory. And this concentration of attention makes us blind to facts of a different order, the very existence of which has been unsuspected by us. It has been truly said that things are seen through our eyes, not by them. This may be illustrated from personal experience. One of the authors, as the daughter of a successful business entrepreneur in Victorian England, and as the devoted pupil of Herbert Spencer, was, as a young girl, inevitably biassed in favour of freedom of competition and freedom of contract, and against any attempt to interfere with the perfect freedom of enterprise of the profit-making capitalist, whether by the state or by combinations of wage-earners.