This, I know, is not the whole truth. At its worst, wishful thinking is a dangerously fatuous complacency. Its denouncers, however, are frequently no less fatuous in their tacit assumption that all news is bad news until it can be proved good, and that, when a good or bad outcome can be expected, the bad one is more likely to turn up.
Some form of wishful thinking is at the root of alleinitiative and daring and high courage in the face o danger. It is practised, automatical ly, by every serving soldier, sailor and airman, and I am beginning te think that the civil population might be allowed its reasonably small share as well.
'There is, I admit, another kind o courage which reds no sud stimulus. You may find it in Haig' "backs to the wall" despatch, or, more poetically, in that thrilling quatrain of A. E. Housman:
The King with half the East at heel.i marched from lands of morning: Their fighters drink the rivers up, thei:
shafts benight the air; And he that stands will dle for nought and home theres no returning: The Spartans on the sea-wet rock so'
down snd combed ther hair.
Yet this kind of courage is for the elite, and even then it needs it occasion. We common folk must rely on faith and hope to aid such day-today judgments as we make. When the facts on which we have to base them ere of necessity incomplete, who shall say that wishful thinking must always be wrong?
Europe today is no laboratory in which strictly-controlled atoms move to their predestined ends. Our destinies are in ourselves; and I, for one, claim the right to think wish-tinies are in ourselves; and I, for cheerfulness about the house.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.