e, "Experience teaches fools,"
has a meaning of its own, but in one sense it is the reverse of the
truth. The mark of a fool is that he is not taught by experience, and
we are all more or less intractable pupils, till our energies begin to
fail.

_The Bias of Happy Exercise._

If an occupation is pleasant in itself, if it fully satisfies our
inner craving for action, we are liable to be blinded thereby to its
consequences. Happy exercise is the fool's Paradise. The fallacy lies
not in being content with what provides a field for the full activity
of our powers: to be content in such a case may be the height of
wisdom: but the fallacy lies in claiming for our occupation results,
benefits, utilities that do not really attend upon it. Thus we see
subjects of study, originally taken up for some purpose, practical,
artistic, or religious, pursued into elaborate detail far beyond their
original purpose, and the highest value, intellectual, spiritual,
moral, claimed for them by their votaries, when in truth they merely
serve to consume so much vacant energy, and may be a sheer waste of
time that ought to be otherwise employed.

But as I am in danger of myself furnishing an illustration of this
bias--it is nowhere more prevalent than in philosophy--I will pass to
our next head.

_The Bias of the Feelings._

This source of illusion is much more generally understood. The
blinding and perverting influence of passion on reason has been a
favourite theme with moralists ever since man began to moralise, and
is acknowledged in many a popular proverb. "Love is blind;" "The wish
is father to the thought;" "Some people's geese are all swans;" and so
forth.

We need not dwell upon the illustration of it. Fear and Sloth magnify
dangers and difficulties; Affection can see no imperfection in its
object: in the eyes of Jealousy a rival is a wretch. From the nature
of the case we are much more apt to see examples in others than in
ourselves. If the strength of this bias were properly understood by
everybody, the mistake would not so often be committed of suspecting
bad faith, conscious hypocrisy, when people are found practising
the grossest inconsistencies, and shutting their eyes apparently in
deliberate wilfulness to facts held under their very noses. Men are
inclined to ascribe this human weakness to women. Reasoning from
feeling is said to be feminine logic. But it is a human weakness.

To take one very powerful feeling, the