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In the first place, it has been authoritative rather than scientific, which is to say that students have been induced to accept the statements of teachers and text books, and have not been trained to weigh for themselves their reasonableness and worth; a principle essentially unscientific and undemocratic, since it inculcates in the future citizen convictions rather than encourages the habit of open-mindedness so necessary for democratic citizenship.
But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold upon things.
The strange medley of contradictory qualities which blended in the English character, its love of liberty and its love of order, its prejudice and open-mindedness, its religious enthusiasm and its cool good sense, remained alike unintelligible to them. And as they failed to understand England, so in many ways England failed to understand them.
Pasmer told me you had started this way, and I cut across lots to overtake you, and then, when you came in sight, I had to let you pass before I could screw my courage up to the point of running after you. How is that for open-mindedness?" "It's a very good beginning, I should think." "Well, don't you think you ought to say now that you're sorry you were so formidable?"
"I want to say," he continued, "that although I have known and ahem admired you for many years, Victoria, what has struck me most forcibly in your favour has been your open-mindedness especially on the great political questions this summer. I have no idea how much you know about them, but one would naturally have expected you, on account of your father, to be prejudiced.
I find, however, that his critics are agreed in ascribing to him with remarkable unanimity the virtue of 'open-mindedness. His trenchant way of laying down his conclusions might give the impression that they corresponded to rooted prejudices. Such prejudices might of course intrude themselves unconsciously into his mind, as they intrude into the minds of most of us.
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