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And I felt myself merely a conventional if astonished onlooker before the theoretically abnormal but manifestly natural emotional activity which swept over California. After what must have been a most usual intellectual cycle of, first, helplessness, then conventional cataloguing, some rationalizing, some moralizing, and an extensive feeling of shallowness and inferiority, I called the job done.
A hypocrite, however, wants to speak otherwise than he thinks, but there is impediment in the tongue as a result of which he can only mumble. Hypocrisies are lighter or more grave in the measure of the confirmation against God and of the outward rationalizing in favor of God. A fifth kind of profanation is committed by those who ascribe to themselves what is divine.
And from having seventy-five dollars spending money a month before I was married, I jumped to keeping two of us on sixty dollars, which was what was left after the rent was paid. I am not rationalizing when I say I am glad that we did not have a cent more. It was a real sporting event to make both ends meet! And we did it, and saved a dollar or so, just to show we could.
Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension or error. The little word my is the most important one in all human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, and my house, or my faith, my country, and my God.
"Five Thousand Dollars Reward" in its brisk action, strong suspense, and humorous denouement carries on the technique so neatly achieved in "The Doomdorf Mystery" and other tales about Uncle Abner. The Committee value, also, the story about animals: universal interest in puzzles, in the science of ratiocination, is not more pronounced than the interest in rationalizing the brute.
This spontaneous and loyal support of our preconceptions this process of finding "good" reasons to justify our routine beliefs is known to modern psychologists as "rationalizing" clearly only a new name for a very ancient thing.
The result is that the development of their imagination is rarely unhampered and complete; for as soon as their fancy passes the middle level, the rationalizing education of parents and teachers is eager to master and control it. In truth it gives its full measure and reveals itself in the fulness of growth only among primitive peoples.
As yet however this rationalizing movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some co-operation on man's part with the work of grace.
But the fact is an interesting commentary upon the extreme to which we sometimes carry our principle of rationalizing everything before permitting it to be mastered. I repeat that the reform movement has done excellent service in extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn adaptive instincts, play, imitation, and rhythmic repetition.
We rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is entirely wilful.
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