Sources and editorial notes

The essential feature of a common thought is not that it is held in common but that it has been produced in common.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett distinguishes agreement that is merely shared from understanding made together. The catalog asks how individual habits affect that shared work; private good intentions cannot settle every common question.

These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has become organized into a vast social operation, not with the coöperation of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the individual owning the capital.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Writing about industrial relations, Addams contests the idea that an enterprise is simply the owner’s private undertaking. This supplies a necessary limit to a catalog of personal dispositions: organization and participation also deserve examination.

Inquiry was made after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of us were corrected by our fathers; and though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin recalls taking stones for a useful childhood wharf and being corrected by his father. The retrospective story tests the excuse that a beneficial result makes the means acceptable; it is not a claim about modern business outcomes.

To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business; it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not, that clear and round dealing is the honor of man’s nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon’s alloy image admits the apparent convenience of a small falsehood while questioning what it does to the transaction. The chip hidden by the ribbon presents the same temptation in miniature.

A man may be accomplished in art, literature, and science, and yet, in honesty, virtue, truthfulness, and the spirit of duty, be entitled to take rank after many a poor and illiterate peasant.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Smiles separates accomplishment from honesty. Skill at presenting a product, or even genuine technical excellence, does not answer whether the recipient has been allowed to understand its condition.

They are a part of the truth; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part, but exaggerated, distorted, and disjoined from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill is discussing partial truths in competing opinions. His warning helps distinguish accurate details from an adequate account; the passage does not establish that every incomplete statement is deliberately deceptive.

Divide with reason between self-love and society; and be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others, specially to thy king and country.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon contrasts self-regard with the obligations of association. His king-and-country language belongs to its historical setting; here the useful question is whose legitimate interests a convenient arrangement excludes, rather than unconditional obedience to an organization.

If I ought not to go to my group feeling that I must give up my own ideas in order to accept the opinions of others, neither ought I to go to force my ideas upon others.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

In Follett’s account of a group, contribution requires neither surrendering one’s judgment nor imposing it. Cooperation needs room for personal interests without giving one participant automatic precedence.

To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others, develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill connects concern for others with the development of capacities that purely private convenience leaves unused. This concerns fair obligations, not a demand that a worker meet every request.

Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon directs attention from possession to use. His compressed claim invites a question about what the gain serves, rather than supplying a rule that every reserve or retained investment is excessive.

But these we must hold to be the exceptional cases, of low-minded and grasping men, who, though they may gain wealth which they probably cannot enjoy, will never gain an honest character, nor secure that without which wealth is nothing—a heart at peace.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

The contrast in Self-Help is between acquiring wealth and acquiring an honest character. Read as a moral distinction, it avoids the comforting but unreliable inference that a grasping person can never prosper.

The possession of a library, or the free use of it, no more constitutes learning, than the possession of wealth constitutes generosity.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles compares possessing books with learning and possessing money with generosity. The parallel asks what a resource makes possible, instead of treating the size of the holding as an achievement in itself.

Such thoughts are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey distinguishes a conclusion reached through examining evidence from a judgment supplied in advance. In the scene, the preferred parcel has already won before the balance is allowed to work.

We are wedded to opinion, to fancy, to prejudice; which destroys the soundness of our judgments, and the serenity and buoyancy of our feelings.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt describes attachment to a favored opinion as an obstacle to judgment. The issue is not having a prior view, but refusing to let a relevant comparison alter it.

These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment; they impede the democratic relationship and add to the self-consciousness of all concerned.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams is discussing class differences, clothing costs and the self-consciousness of encounters between working girls and wealthier visitors. Her concrete case shows how status can distort a supposedly straightforward assessment; it is not a description of every present-day encounter.

Again, envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man’s self; and where there is no comparison, no envy; and therefore kings are not envied but by kings.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon places comparison at the center of envy. His examples of rank are historical generalizations, not universal psychological laws; they invite us to notice which person has become the measuring stick.

Taste is often envy in disguise: it turns into the art of reducing excellence within the smallest possible compass, or of finding out the minimum of pleasure.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

In these aphorisms on criticism, Hazlitt suspects a taste that chiefly reduces excellence. Criticism can be justified; the question here is whether discovering something good has become an unwelcome result.

It is good that this ambition should be cultivated, not by any rivalry in expense, but by a rivalry in knowledge and in liberal feelings; and few things would more contribute to so desirable an effect, than the abolition of all such contracted views as those to which we have alluded.

Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures · Read the source

Babbage redirects rivalry toward knowledge and liberal feeling. The comparison offers an alternative to cutting down the neighboring flower: improve what can usefully be shared, rather than compete only in display or expenditure.

Vanity and avarice have different goals and travel different roads.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt separates the pursuit of admiration from the pursuit of wealth. Their visible rewards may coincide, but asking which audience matters can reveal the motive behind the grand portrait.

It chooses its way considerately, and pursues it steadfastly; esteeming duty above reputation, and the approval of conscience more than the world's praise.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Character gives conscience and duty a higher place than reputation. This is a standard for assessing the work even when its appearance has secured applause, not an objection to every form of recognition.

We are pleased not only with praise, but with having done what is praise-worthy.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith distinguishes actual applause from deserving it. A person can value good work and welcome appreciation without making the audience’s response the only measure of the result.

Genuine ignorance is more profitable because likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; while ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with a varnish waterproof to new ideas.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey contrasts acknowledged ignorance with a coating of borrowed catchphrases. Knowledge helps only if it remains permeable to the next relevant observation, including one offered by a junior colleague.

Intellectual capacity is sometimes found associated with the meanest moral character with abject servility to those in high places, and arrogance to those of low estate.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Smiles places deference upward beside arrogance downward. The contrast makes standing and power part of the examination: a confident tone may change dramatically with the person being addressed.

Such is true wisdom and humility; for the more a man really knows, the less conceited he will be.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Self-Help presents increasing knowledge as a reason for less conceit. This is an ethical ideal, not a guarantee that expertise automatically produces humility.

It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

In his essay on great place, Bacon distinguishes power over others from command of oneself. The passage questions whether obtaining control has actually enlarged the freedom of the person who insists upon it.

We only shew a spirit of independence and resistance to power, as long as power is against us.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt’s contrast tests a commitment to independence after its defender gains power. The question is whether another person’s agency still matters when we could override it.

Some of the advocates of guild socialism oppose function to authority and liberty, but we can have function and liberty and authority: authority of the whole through the liberty of all by means of the functions of each.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett is considering authority and the organization of a whole, rather than denying the need for coordination. Her account makes the freedom of participating functions part of effective authority, not an inconvenience to remove.

But if he be an impudent flatterer, look wherein a man is conscious to himself that he is most defective, and is most out of countenance in himself, that will the flatterer entitle him to, perforce, “spretâ conscientiâ.”

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon’s flatterer attributes the very quality the recipient lacks. Praise can then protect an error from the evidence needed to correct it; the level stays hidden while the crooked frame is admired.

They who wish well to their fellow-creatures are angry at their vices and sore at their mishaps; he who flatters their errors and smiles at their ruin is their worst enemy.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt distinguishes wishing someone well from approving their faults. Disagreement may serve a relationship more faithfully than the reassurance that helps an avoidable error continue.

For teacher or book to cram pupils with facts which, with little more trouble, they could discover by direct inquiry is to violate their intellectual integrity by cultivating mental servility.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey’s example concerns education: supplying discoveries ready-made can frustrate intellectual integrity. The analogy is limited but useful—agreement learned as a habit can displace the exercise of judgment.

Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith describes humanity through fellow-feeling with suffering, injury and joy. The passage asks whether another person’s experience enters the judgment, rather than treating sympathy as a decorative expression.

A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant correction of his process.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

For Addams, daily experience with others can correct an abstract program of improvement. The point is to let people’s actual circumstances change the plan, not simply to label the plan benevolent.

I am touched by a story of want and suffering, I send a check, denying myself what I have eagerly desired in order to do so,—is that sympathy?

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett questions whether a sympathetic feeling and a check exhaust a relationship to suffering. Her question does not make financial help worthless; it challenges the distance that can remain after the gesture.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out; for as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law, but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the law out of office.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon’s wild-justice metaphor questions revenge as private punishment. It is a historical moral argument, not advice about current law or a demand that someone abandon safe, fair accountability.

In common life, however, when we judge of any person’s conduct, and of the sentiments which directed it, we constantly consider them under both these aspects.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

The two aspects in Smith’s discussion are the cause and the consequences of resentment. This makes both the grievance and the proposed response answerable to judgment; it does not treat anger itself as proof of a vice.

They will pardon a man's failures, but cannot forgive his doing a thing better than they can do.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Smiles describes resentment of someone else doing better. In the surrounding discussion of envy and detraction, the inability to forgive success helps explain why a perceived humiliation may become a wish to punish.

Thoughtfulness means, practically, the same thing as careful attention; to give our mind to a subject is to give heed to it, to take pains with it.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey associates thoughtfulness with attention and taking pains. The standard concerns appropriate care in the work, not whether its final wrapping looks conscientious.

Caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness, exactness, orderliness, methodic arrangement, are, then, the traits by which we mark off the logical from what is random and casual on one side, and from what is academic and formal on the other.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

In the same discussion, Dewey distinguishes a method of careful inquiry from a merely formal appearance of logic. A routine becomes useful when its checks actually examine the relevant risk.

Nothing, we think, can be more just than that one man should not suffer by the carelessness of another; and that the damage occasioned by blamable negligence should be made up by the person who was guilty of it.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith considers a person who suffers through another’s culpable carelessness. The moral question is who bears the cost of omitted care; this historical passage does not determine present legal liability.

Indeed, “how not to do it” is of all things the easiest learnt: it needs neither teaching, effort, self-denial, industry, patience, perseverance, nor judgment.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles points out how little effort is needed to learn avoidance. The elaborate folder chute gives avoidance a comic technical form while leaving the responsibility with somebody else.

Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.

Robert Louis Stevenson · An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays · Read the source

Stevenson challenges the equation of visible industry with a valuable life. His defense of apparently idle activity is an essential counterweight here: rest, curiosity and unpaid pursuits are not sloth because an employer cannot count them.

No work which cannot be done without pleasure in the doing is worth doing

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris states a deliberately demanding ideal in an argument about art and labor. It questions the quality and organization of work, rather than proving that every unpleasant but necessary task may be passed to a colleague.

On the other hand, habits of active inquiry and careful deliberation in the significant and vital problems of conduct afford the best guarantee that the general structure of mind will be reasonable.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey places reasonableness in continuing habits of inquiry. A satisfactory earlier result cannot conduct today’s examination of the loose bracket.

The habit of forming an estimate of the magnitude of any object or the frequency of any occurrence, immediately previous to our applying to it measure or number, tends materially to fix the attention and to improve the judgement.

Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures · Read the source

Babbage proposes estimating before measuring so that attention encounters a result it did not choose. This extracts the comparison of expectation with observation; it does not endorse the covert observation of workers discussed earlier in his paragraph.

But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it;

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin acknowledges the distance between his ideal and his conduct without dismissing the value of effort. The autobiographical judgment supports continued care without promising perfection or prescribing a vice-tracking program.

As will, considered without regard to direction, is simply constancy, firmness, perseverance, it will be obvious that everything depends upon right direction and motives.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles refuses to praise persistence without considering its direction and motives. Finishing matters, but a reasoned change of purpose is different from abandoning each task for the pleasure of beginning.

But those jurists who say that a group is governed by its purpose and leave the matter there are making a thing-in-itself of the purpose; we are governed by the purpose, yes, but we are all the time evolving the purpose.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett treats a group’s purpose as something that continues to develop. Constancy therefore cannot mean freezing the original plan after experience has supplied a sound reason to revise it.

Hence arises that eminent esteem with which all men naturally regard a steady perseverance in the practice of frugality, industry, and application, though directed to no other purpose than the acquisition of fortune.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith describes the esteem attached to sustained application, even in acquiring a fortune. Here the relevant contrast is the continuity of effort; accumulation alone does not settle whether the purpose is worthwhile.

Affected dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be;

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon criticizes the appearance of speed when it cuts the business short. His essay measures dispatch by actual advancement; squeezing the hourglass confuses pressure with progress.

If, however, prior experience and training have developed an attitude of patience in a condition of doubt, a capacity for suspended judgment, and a liking for inquiry, indirect control of the course of suggestions is possible.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey makes patience an active capacity for examining a suggestion, rather than passive delay. Waiting becomes useful when it preserves the inquiry a premature conclusion would end.

Iterations are commonly loss of time; but there is no such gain of time as to iterate often the state of the question; for it chaseth away many a frivolous speech as it is coming forth.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon observes that restating the real question can save time. A pause that prevents irrelevant discussion may advance the work more than an immediate rush to an answer.

He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill describes the capacities exercised in choosing and sustaining a deliberate decision. The sequence includes observation and discrimination before firmness; resolution is not a substitute for adequate information.

He must be able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions upon us.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett asks a leader to help a group reach wise decisions rather than impose ready-made ones. A timely decision can preserve shared judgment instead of ending discussion by force.

These are: (a) a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to corroborate or to nullify the suggested belief.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey pairs perplexity with investigation. Doubt is productive when it leads to a search capable of resolving it, rather than becoming the permanent residence between two equally serviceable stools.

Thirdly, though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill distinguishes a useful custom from the unexamined act of conforming to it. Even a good inherited method leaves judgment undeveloped when its suitability is never considered.

Whosoever is found variable, and changeth manifestly without manifest cause, giveth suspicion of corruption; therefore, always when thou changest thine opinion or course, profess it plainly, and declare it, together with the reasons that move thee to change, and do not think to steal it.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon advises making a change of course and its reasons explicit. Explained revision allows continuity of trust without requiring the same answer after the evidence changes.

Alertness, flexibility, curiosity are the essentials; dogmatism, rigidity, prejudice, caprice, arising from routine, passion, and flippancy are fatal.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey contrasts flexible inquiry with rigidity and caprice. Responsiveness to reasons differs both from repeating the same attempt and from changing merely for novelty.

It is moral courage that characterises the highest order of manhood and womanhood—the courage to seek and to speak the truth; the courage to be just; the courage to be honest; the courage to resist temptation; the courage to do one's duty.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Smiles names several forms of moral courage, including truthfulness and justice. The passage describes an ideal of conduct; it does not establish that a frightened or constrained person has a defective character.

Thus the virtue of fortitude or courage lies in the middle between the opposite vices of cowardice and of presumptuous rashness, of which the one offends from being too much, and the other from being too little affected by the objects of fear.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith is explaining Aristotle’s account of courage between excessive fear and rashness. That balance matters here: a safer, honest response is different from demanding needless exposure to danger.

Men who feel their strength within them need not fear to encounter adverse opinions; they have far greater reason to fear undue praise and too friendly criticism.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Self-Help presents the ability to encounter adverse opinion as a form of strength. Read alongside the limits of the harmless pencil scene, it concerns tolerating criticism, not an obligation to confront a powerful retaliator without protection.

The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be so important, then, that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons of their belief and its logical consequences.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey asks what grounds support a belief whose consequences may matter. Confidence in a hurried delivery needs examination of the load and route, not simply greater enthusiasm.

Wherever the increased speed of the engine would lead to injurious or dangerous consequences, this is applied; and it is equally the regulator of the water-wheel which drives a spinning-jenny, or of the windmills which drain our fens.

Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures · Read the source

Babbage describes a regulator that restrains dangerous increases in speed. The mechanical example makes safeguards part of effective operation, rather than evidence that an operator lacks ambition.

It is some glory to fail in great designs; and some punishment is due to having rashly or presumptuously embarked in them.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt permits admiration for a great attempt while questioning rashly embarking upon it. The aphorism resists the idea that an impressive aim excuses every foreseeable risk.