Influences Reaction.

This is, perhaps, but one of the major changes in emotional pattern that the new education demands of us. Attitude, emotional set, undoubtedly influences our reactions to new training. There is, for example, the man who venerates precedent. His father was a good engineer, let us say, and he sees no need for improvement upon methods used in his father's day. This without consideration of the fact that engines and traffic conditions have changed mightily since his father's day.

Precedent is an excellent thing and worthy of consideration, but if it is antedated it may become an unsafe guide. Because an expedient has served for twenty years or thirty years does not prove its worth if conditions to-day are not what they were in the past. This sort of close-mindedness is the enemy to safety training. It is not intelligent; it does not evaluate risks.

Here a word may be apropos about the worker's prevalent distrust of the “armchair critic,” the laboratory worker, the dealer in theories. This is natural. The man who does, feels superior to the man who thinks or talks. But, if it is natural it is also dangerous.

Advancement always begins as an idea, a theory. The theory may be the outcome of actual work—often is. But it may be the outcome of abstract thinking. At any rate, scorn and incredulity are not always intelligent. They may blind one to risks and to opportunities. The “smart guy who knows nothing about the job of the engineer” may possibly see some phase of that job which is lost to the man actually busy at its performance.