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The dictionaries give more than one meaning of the word prejudice. In particular - and this, I think, is the only meaning we are concerned with - it is defined as a ‘previous, premature or hasty judgment’. What seems to be implied is that it is an emotional judgment - either positive or negative - and that, while not necessarily wrong, it is the product of faulty reasoning, and so much less likely to be right than an unprejudiced one.
This seems a straightforward notion. But I think it contains the seeds of possible confusion, because two distinct types of judgment are mixed up in it: judgments of fact, which I will call beliefs; and judgments of value, that is, evaluations.
Take the case of a racial antipathy, and consider under what conditions we can, strictly speaking, call it a prejudice. Clearly both types of judgment are involved. There is a belief that a certain race has certain qualities; and there is a negative evaluation of these qualities - that is, they are disliked. So, in deciding whether the antipathy is a prejudice, two questions arise: Does the race really have the qualities attributed to it? And if it does, can dislike of them still be called a prejudice?
The classical Greeks believed all Cretans to be liars, and disliked them accordingly. But if, as is probable, this belief was unreasonable - perhaps a gross exaggeration of an element of truth - the antipathy based on it was clearly a prejudice. The difficulty in deciding what is, or is not, a prejudice arises only when a given race really has a quality for which it is disliked. For, at first sight, the decision might then seem to depend in a rather arbitrary way on the nature of the quality. Most people would say that it would be a prejudice to dislike a race because