of its action in his own mind, to recognize, that is to say, whether the tone of it is pro-national or anti-national, and thus to obtain a certain orientation for his efforts to neutralize it. Having frankly recognized this general tendency in his thinking, he will be able to do something towards correcting it by making allowance for it in his conclusion as a whole. If his tendency of feeling is pro-national, he will say to himself of any judgment favourable to his country, “This is a conclusion likely to have been influenced by prejudice, therefore for all the precautions I may have taken in forming it, and whatever scientific care and caution I may have used, in spite even of its agreeable appearance of self-evident truth, I must regard its validity as subject to some subtraction before it {222} can safely be made the basis for further speculation.” If his tendency of feeling is anti-national, he will have a similar task of attenuation to carry out upon the conclusions unfavourable to his country that he may reach, and will be prudent to make very drastic deductions in view of the supposed immunity to prejudice with which minorities are rather apt to assume the absence of vulgar approval endows them.3
Finally, one who attempts to deal usefully with matters in which strong feeling is inevitable will do well, however thoroughly he may try to guard himself from the effects of prejudice, to bring his speculative conclusions into such form that they are automatically tested by the progress of events. Symmetry and internal consistency are unfortunately but too often accepted as evidences of objective validity. That the items of a series of conclusions fit into one another neatly and compose a system logically sound and attractive to the intellect gives us practically no information of their truth. For this a frequently repeated contact with external reality is necessary, and of such contacts the most thoroughly satisfactory one is the power to foretell the course of events. Foresight is the supreme {223} test of scientific validity, and the more a line of argument is liable to deflection by non-rational processes the more urgent is the need for it constantly to be put into forms which will allow its capacity for foresight