Читать книгу Logic, Inductive and Deductive - William Minto - Страница 45

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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.