152 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
feeling, which enters the game, or unless the disagreements with one s organized experience are so numerous, distinct and obtrusive as to render reconciliation impossible, it will probably secure the mind s assent to the new presentation.
Now, when we reflect that the majority of the contents of one s intellectual system have secured their introduction into it through these processes, it is apparent that, while feeling does not exercise an absolute control since many unpleas ant things have to be accepted it has been a most potent factor in the organization of one s whole system of beliefs ; and, through its extensive control over the activity of the system which it has been so potent in forming, is constantly influencing the incorporation of new materials in it.
IV. If we look back over the foregoing analysis of mental attitudes, we perceive that there are three general classes of beliefs those which have their basis in the nat ural credulity of the mind, those which rest principally upon positive agreement with the intellectual system, and those which derive their certification chiefly from powerful feel ings that spring from one s instinctive organization. The first can be referred to the suggestibility of the mind; the second to its rationality ; and the third, if I may coin a word, to its affectability, i.e., to its capacity for suffering and en joyment. We are beings who have conscious needs and desires, who must live or die and who crave life. Out of this deep instinctive substratum of our nature spring long ings for certain kinds of satisfactions, and these longings generate belief in the reality of those objects which are necessary to their satisfaction.
We may distinguish, then, primitive credulity, rational conviction and vital assurance. Credulity believes things because it is told that they are true. It is natural and beauti ful in the child, because the child has had but little experi ence and has, therefore, no well-established positive standard of critical judgment. In credulity its mental life normally begins. But it does not by any means excite our admiration when we observe it in the grown person, because the grown
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