A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions our
belief and opinions. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds
without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we
are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are
incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find
ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes
to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas
themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is
threatened. We are by nature stubbornly pledged to defend our own from
attack, whether it be our person, our family, our property, or our
opinion. A United States Senator once remarked to a friend of mine
that God Almighty could not make him change his mind on our
Latin-America policy. We may surrender, but rarely confess ourselves
vanquished. In the intellectual world at least peace is without
victory.

Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished
convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like
to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true,
and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our
assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to
them. _The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in
finding arguments for going on believing as we already do_.

I remember years ago attending a public dinner to which the Governor
of the state was bidden. The chairman explained that His Excellency
could not be present for certain "good" reasons; what the "real"
reasons were the presiding officer said he would leave us to
conjecture. This distinction between "good" and "real" reasons is one
of the most clarifying and essential in the whole realm of thought. We