Читать книгу The Art of Thinking - Ernest Dimnet - Страница 10

INTRODUCTORY

It is obvious that the chief obstacle to thought is stupidity, that is to say a congenital incapacity for thinking. However, no abnormal condition will be dealt with in the following pages. Most people who, in perfect good faith, tackle psychoanalysis, in the hope of bettering themselves, are repulsed by the fact that practically all Freudians seem interested only in medical cases. The man who has no reason to doubt that he is normal, but is conscious, like every one of us, of those obsessions now currently called inferiority complexes and wants to get rid of them, turns away in disgust from literature filled with hospital experience. This book is intended for average minds equally remote from genius which knows no obstacles, or from stupidity to which everything is an obstacle. It presupposes average lives finding the usual chances and encountering only the usual difficulties.

In the same way, no attention will be given to what is the main cause of human errors, viz: passion. It seems at first sight illogical to brush aside self-love, prejudice, and the innumerable likes or dislikes which prevent us from seeing even facts as they are, or inferring from them their natural conclusions. But the subject of this book is the production, not the guidance of thought, and its every chapter takes it for granted that we are honest in our wish to produce unadulterated thought.