The Education of Self Author:Paul Dubois Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n THOUGHT Then, it will be said, we need will and energy, and we must make use of these forces in that moral liberty which constitutes the superiority of m... more »an over the animal. I should like to be able to content myself with these established expressions, and to speak as everyone speaks. I do not think that I have any tendency to singularity, and the spirit of contradiction which we all have does not seem to me to be abnormally developed in me. But words are only the labels of thoughts, and it is dangerous to make use of them without knowing thoroughly what they represent. When one applies one's self to this analysis one finds that the label does not always correspond to the content. There are words which have preserved throughout the ages the meanings which they had at the time of their creation, if they only served to designate a fact without explaining the causes of it. On the other hand, there are expressionswhich have been altered from their original meaning. Continual modification was necessary in such terms, but that has not been done. Besides, words are elastic and become distorted in the mind of each person under the pressure of the word-ideas which preexist in the understanding of the thinker. Words often represent two aspects of a single reality, and sometimes opposed ideas, and this absence of agreement in the exact meaning of the terms employed gives rise to barren discussions. We use our legs without knowing anything of the anatomy or the physiology of the organs of locomotion; we use our eyes quite well without knowing the laws of optical physiology; yet that science is of great assistance to us in correcting the defects of the eye. On many subjects man also thinks very sensibly without having any ideas of psychology; but the mechanism of thought is muc...« less