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The conservative objector is, first, apt to object before fully examining what he dissents from, and, secondly, prone to have in mind ideal conditions with which to compare the new methods commended to him. In the matter of legislation, he dreams of a body of high-minded lawgivers, just, wise, unselfish, and not of legislators as they commonly are.
Apart from formal and specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent philosophy.
In reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess none of the special features by which we distinguish the introspections of experimental psychology from the casual introspections of everyday life."* Titchener, of course, dissents from this opinion, but I cannot see that his reasons for dissent are adequate.
He professes himself to be one of the humble 'pig-philosophers' so vigorously denounced by the prophet. Carlyle is described as a 'transcendentalist' a kind of qualified equivalent to intuitionist. And while he admires the shrewdness, picturesqueness, and bracing morality of Carlyle's teaching, Fitzjames dissents from his philosophy.
It does not exist in schools; but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs from the newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny, two papers of opposite politics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikes having his mind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to allow a paper which dissents from his views to be brought into his house.
"Was that the debate?" "Oh no! that was among the higher powers where the procession should start from. The precedent was an opening that began with going to church, and having a sermon from the Bishop; but then there's no church, and after that spur the Bishop gave them they can't ask him without one; besides, the mayor dissents, and so do a good many more of them.
He appointed of his own usurped authority a board for the administration of the revenue, the members of which were expressly dispensed from recording their dissents, until they chose it; and in that office, as in a great gulf, a most important part of the Company's transactions has been buried.
All this, however, is done without confusion or disturbance. "They have a mild, playful, laughing disposition; and this is portrayed in their countenances. They are polite, and unobtrusive. When one speaks, the rest pay strict attention: when he is done, another assents by 'yes, or dissents by 'no; and then states his reasons, which are listened to with equal attention.
Many an Eastern dervish has, I think, got immortality upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary sojourner in Massachusetts. Mandeville, in his argumentative way, dissents from this entirely.
Probability wanting that intuitive evidence which, infallibly determines the understanding and produces certain knowledge, the mind, if it WILL PROCEED RATIONALLY, ought to examine all the grounds of probability, and see how they make more or less for or against any proposition, before it assents to or dissents from it; and, upon a due balancing the whole, reject or receive it, with a more or less firm assent, proportionably to the preponderancy of the greater grounds of probability on one side or the other.
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