You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One of the main drawbacks to understanding the nature of man, and hence to understanding the more ill-adapted of his actions is the fact not simply that we examine ourselves, or that we examine ourselves from the surface inwards, but that we begin the examination with a very considerable bias in favour of our own reasonableness and goodness of intention. A psychological problem can be measured only when we have examined it from within outwards, in this case examined the sources of mental energy, the primary methods of controlling this energy—in short, the basic functions of mind. So far from being on the whole a reasoning and reasonable animal, man reasons or is reasonable only under the most favourable circumstances. Our margin of sanity is in some respects thinned out to a very fine dividing line. In falling asleep we can sometimes observe ourselves step across the line into a territory where primitive impulses and primitive modes of thinking reign supreme. Adult man is irrational through the greater part of his waking life. Man is an inveterate self-deceiver and one of his commonest self-deceptions is to confound intention and conduct. In some respects and in some directions man has succeeded in inhibiting the more ferocious of his impulses. But this is very qualified praise, since it omits all reference to periodic outbreaks of war. And taking our war activities into account, we have no reasonable ground for saying that man is any less ferocious than he was in the Stone Age.
One of the greatest dangers of pacifism is the emphasis placed explicitly or implicitly on good intentions. However genuine they may be in themselves, when correlated to the activities of the whole group, they correspond in effect to the smile on the face of the tiger.
This is a mad world but there is method in the madness. The essence of that ancient mental mechanism projection is the capacity to attribute to external objects impulses which exist in ourselves. It is really a form