In the workaday world that is
often the real judgment, long in advance of the evidence, and it
contains within itself the conclusion which the evidence is pretty
certain to confirm. Neither justice, nor mercy, nor truth, enter into
such a judgment, for the judgment has preceded the evidence. Yet a
people without prejudices, a people with altogether neutral vision, is
so unthinkable in any civilization of which it is useful to think,
that no scheme of education could be based upon that ideal. Prejudice
can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men
must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a
vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them,
and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will
depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other
people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of what is felt to be
positively good, rather than hatred of what is not contained in their
version of the good.
Morality, good taste and good form first standardize and then
emphasize certain of these underlying prejudices. As we adjust
ourselves to our code, we adjust the facts we see to that code.
Rationally, the facts are neutral to all our views of right and wrong.
Actually, our canons determine greatly what we shall perceive and how.
For a moral code is a scheme of conduct applied to a number of typical
instances.
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