Selfcontrol and how to secure it 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: II THOUGHT THOUGHT Then, one will say, we need will and energy, and we require to use these forces in that moral liberty which makes man superior to ani... more »mals. I should like to content myself with these established expressions, and speak as the world speaks. I believe I have no tendency to oddity, and the spirit of contradiction which everybody has does not seem to be abnormal in me. But words are only the labels of thoughts, and it is dangerous to use them without thoroughly knowing what they represent. In applying one's self to their analysis one finds that the label does not always correspond to the contents. There are words that have preserved throughout the ages the meanings they had at their beginning; they then served only to designate a fact without explaining causes. On the contrary, there are expressions that have been corrupted from their original meaning. Frequent overhauling wasnecessary for these words. Besides, words are elastic, and become distorted in the mind of each person under the pressure of word- ideas which pre-exist in the understanding of the thinker. We use our legs without knowing anything of anatomy or of the physiology of the organs of locomotion; we use our eyes very well without understanding the laws of optical physiology, yet this science is of great help to us in correcting the faults of our eyesight. On many subjects man also thinks very wisely without having any notion of psychology; but the mechanism of thought is much more complicated than that of the eye. If one ventures on the ground of moral analysis, it becomes necessary to understand the instrument one uses—reason—and to have previous knowledge of the words one uses. From this point of view let us examine the word "thought." Man is strangely deluded when he imagines himse...« less