activated by his choice lead in the direction of cognitive efficacy. To the extent that he fails or refuses to make
awareness the regulating goal of his consciousness—to the extent that he evades the effort of thought and the
responsibility of reason—the result is cognitive inefficacy.
To think or not to think, to focus his mind or to suspend it, is man's basic act of choice, the one act directly within
his volitional power. This choice is involved in three fundamental psycho-epistemological alternatives—
alternatives in his basic pattern of cognitive functioning. They reflect the status that reason, understanding, and
reality occupy in a man's mind.
- A man can activate and sustain a sharp mental focus, seeking to bring his understanding to an optimal level of
precision and clarity—or he can keep his focus to the level of blurred approximation, in a state of passive,
undiscriminating, goalless mental drifting. - A man can differentiate between knowledge and feelings, letting his judgment be directed by his intellect, not his
emotions—or he can suspend his intellect under the pressure of strong feelings (desires or fears), and deliver
himself to the direction of impulses whose validity he does not care to consider. - A man can perform an independent act of analysis, in weighing the truth or falsehood of any claim, or the right
or wrong of any issue—or he can accept, in uncritical passivity, the opinions and assertions of others, substituting
their judgment for his own.
To the extent that a man characteristically makes the right choices in these issues, he experiences a sense of control
over his existence—the control of a mind in proper relationship to reality. Self-confidence is confidence in one's
mind—in its reliability as a tool of cognition.
Such confidence is not the conviction that one can never make an error. It is the conviction that one is competent to
think, to judge, to know (and to correct one's errors)—that one is competent in principle—that one is unreservedly
committed to being in unbreached contact with reality to the fullest extent of one's volitional power. It is the
confidence of knowing that one places no value or consideration higher than reality, no devotion or concern higher
than one's respect for facts.