Free minds: a venture in the philosophy of democracy

In the face of the common charge that most of our speaking and writing is seldom burdened with thought, this book ventures. to suggest that most of us think more soundly than they realize, and that, at the middle of the twentieth century, both we and the free culture of our western demoeratie nations are equipped and ready to enlarge our horizons in more constructive and effective thinking. than any people in any civilization have heretofore accomplished in all the history of mankind.
Yet for this book it is no less appropriate than it was for its predecessor twenty years ago that I should begin a preface by referring to the intellectual habits that guide the specific processes of our thinking as the most durable, and least readily changeable or improvable, of all elements of human culture. These inherently and uniquely human aspects of our common life lie deepest within us individuals. They are more than individual, however. The conclusions or judgments that we reach by the exercise of our habitual procedures of thinking are socially sharable in a significant sense. They are indeed the very crossbeams and tie rods of civilization; hence all of our basic and broader judgments are crucially and imperatively sharable-if men and women like ourselves are to be civilized or even wholly human.