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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...conflict by simply neglecting altogether the significance of any fact or idea which is incompatible with it: contact between the two is completely avoided. Now although this statement is literally true of a small number of cases, the actual state of affairs is in most instances somewhat more complicated. Contact between the two opposing systems of ideas can rarely be avoided in the completely efficient manner which our description suggests. The opposing systems do come into contact, but only through a medium which so distorts the connecting processes that the real significance of the incompatible forces is concealed, and the mind fails to appreciate that any actual contradiction is present. This distorting medium is provided by the mechanism of rationalisation. Rationalisation, instances of which we have already met with in Chapter IV, allows the mind to regard the facts incompatible with the complex in such a light that their incompatibility is more or less efficiently cloaked. This conception of two opposing groups of ideas, only allowed to come into contact through the distorting medium of rationalisation, will be made clearer by the consideration of some specific examples. The man whose commercial morality differs fundamentally from the code which he practices in his private life, persuades himself that the latter code is not properly applicable to business relations, that to ask a customer three times the value of a certain article is obviously something quite different from thieving, that a man must live, and that the immorality of lying completely disappears when it is necessary for the support of one's wife and family. Whenever, in fact, our actions conflict with our ethical principles we seek for specious reasons which will...

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