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.

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    vulgar form of personal, class, or racial egotism. Self- protective bias arising from their own material interests will be easily detected by students who are honest with themselves. But they should be aware also of a subtler and more pervasive bias; they should be alive to the existence, perhaps in sub- consciousness, of a personal preference for a par¬ ticular set of human values, or for what they hold to be a desirable state of mind in the individual or the community.1 It may be that such an investigator will start open-eyed with regard to the particular part of society that he is investigating; yet his ultimate judgment, the way in which he states the facts, and his inferences from these facts, will be influenced, not necessarily by class or racial interests, but by his ideals of what should be. This emotional preference, this creative choice for one state of mind over another, may well be deemed not only inevitable but also desirable. But, like the mother’s love for her child, which may be the very object of her existence, it must not be allowed to interfere with the use of the intellect in discovering the process by which alone the purpose, whether it be a good or an evil purpose, can be fulfilled. The practical suggestion is that we must, if we are to arrive at correct conclu¬ sions—that is, if we are to succeed in making “our order of thought” correspond with “the order of 1 Do we ever succeed in going to a foreign country with a genuinely open mind? We may think that we do; but, on reflection, we may discover that we have unconsciously sought to discover in what respects the foreigner has adopted our own ideas and our own standards—instead of endeavouring to appreciate what exactly were his ideas and his standards.