The Open Mind

OF COURSE, we all pride ourselves on having an open mind. But what do we mean by that? More often than not, an open mind means that we stick to our opinions, and let other people have theirs. This fills us with a pleasant sense of tolerance and lack of bias--but it isn't good enough. What we need is not so much an open mind--readiness to accept new ideas--but an attitude of distrust toward our own ideas. This, as I said before, is the scientific habit of thought: as soon as you have an idea, try to disprove it. "To have doubted one's own first principles," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, "is the mark of a civilized man."