Thinking and Feeling

Thinking and feeling are rival instruments of decision. Both are reasonable and internally consistent, but each works by its own standards. The important point to recognize is that each kind of judgment has its appropriate field. To use feeling where thinking is called for can be as great a mistake as to use thinking where feeling is needed.

Thinking is essentially impersonal. Its goal is objective truth, independent of the personality and wishes of the thinker or anyone else. So long as the problems are impersonal, like those involved in building a bridge and interpreting a statute, proposed solutions can and should be judged from the standpoint "true-false", and thinking is the better instrument.

But the moment the subject is people instead of things or ideas and some voluntary cooperation from those people is needed—the impersonal approach is less successful. People (even thinkers) do not like to be viewed impersonally and relegated to the status of "objects". Human motives are notably personal. Therefore, in the sympathetic handling of people where personal values are important, feeling is the more effective instrument.

To thinkers, the idea of evaluating by means of feeling sounds flighty, unreliable, and uncontrolled, but thinkers are no judges of feeling. They naturally judge all feeling by their own, and theirs is relatively underdeveloped and unreliable. When feeling is well-developed, it is a stable instrument for discriminating the worth of personal values, selecting as guiding stars those values that rank highest and subordinating the lesser to the greater.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the author of this passage mainly concerned with?
2. Under what circumstances should we resort to the instrument of thinking?
3. Why does feeling prove to be a more effective instrument in handling human relationships?
4. Why does a thinker tend to underestimate the personal worth of a feeling evaluation?
5. What does the word "discriminating" (Paragraph 4) mean judging from its context?

(Keys.)