The Mind in the Making (Hardcover)

The Mind in the Making by James Harvey Robinson With an Introduction by H. G. WELLS Jonathan Cape Eleven Gower Street, London First published by Harper f Brothers London and New Tork 1921 New and Revised Edition with an ln induction by H. G. Wells published by Jonathan Cape 1923 All right reserved Printed in Gnat Britain lg Butler Tanner Ltd, Fwme and London Preface THIS Is an essay not a treatise on the most Important of all matters of human concern. Although it has cost its author a great deal more thought and labour than will be apparent it falls, in his estimation fa below the demands of its implacably urgent theme. Many of its pages could readily be expanded into a volume. It suggests but the beginning of the beginning now being made to raise mens thinking on to a plane which may perhaps enable them to fend off or reduce some of the dangers which lurk on every hand, JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON Introduction WHEN I last visited America I watched the Washington disarmament confer ence 5 met all sorts of interesting and Impor tant people, and saw a multitude of significant things. But when I come to reckon up if ever I do reckon up 3 the values of this American visit 3 I think I may well reckon that, from my own persona 3 Individual point of view the encounter that has been of most importance and that Is likely to have the greatest lasting effect upon me is meeting and talking to Professor James Harvey Robinson, and reading his fascinating book The Mind in the Making. For me I think James Harvey Robinson Is going to be almost as important as was Huxley in my adolescence and William James In later years. He takes much that was latent and crude In my mind and gives it texture and form andconfidence and the spirit of the school he has organized liberates something of my private dreams into the world of reality. I find after reading The Mind in the Making just the same sort of imaginative 7 Introduction release Into collateral fields that I got long ago from Huxley and from James, I have long been curious and puzzled by the sculp tures, wrlting 3 and such-like remains of the Neolithic mind found In America the anti quarian material from Mexico, Peru, and Central America There Is not a word about this stuff in The Mind in the Making and yet after reading it I find much that was monstrous and obdurate in these old riddles dissolving at last into a quite acceptable and comprehensible explanation. The book has had the effect of Illuminating me not only at Its point of application, but all along the line of my curiosities, These autobiographical confidences would be Inexcusable If they concerned me alone, but I feel that what has happened to me the sense of having created a bridge and come Into a new land of understanding must be hap pening to quite a number of other readers of this great teacher. It Is possible that we were all ripe for this book, that most of the clamber-Ing to the ridge has been done In our studies of psycho-analysis and of educational and other politico-social problems during the last quarter 8 Introduction century But If that deprives Mr, Robinson of isolation, it robs him not at all of his pre eminent leadership, I do not know who it was who first said that the human mind being a product of the struggle for existence 3 was essentially a food seeking system and no more necessarily a truth-finding apparatus than the snout of a pig, I believe it must havebeen Lord Balfour twenty-five or thirty years ago It is upon the lines of this suggestion, it is upon a pro found scepticism of the truth-testing instru ment, that the new school of thought is going Our minds, the most fundamental of our presuppositions are as much a response to immediate necessities and as much the out come of a process of trial, error...