Because our present feelings arise from a long series of thoughts and value judgments about our past experiences, they may or may not have valid application to each new aspect of reality that we confront. Often, our feelings survive from childhood—particularly if we have not fully integrated the fact that we are adults who are no longer as vulnerable as we were as children. Exaggerated fears of rejection or feelings of helplessness, for instance, may persist from a period in infancy when we were totally dependent on the benevolence, care, and assistance of others. Frequently, our feelings are grounded in beliefs formulated when our context of knowledge was much more limited. For instance, a child may have been taught by her parents that people of another race or nationality were inferior, before she could acquire direct experience of such individuals for herself. As an adult, her consequent emotional prejudices could be overcome only by a painstaking conscious thought process, including careful observation of her experiences and reevaluation of her beliefs.

Feelings, in summary, spring not from any direct access to present reality, but rather from our past thought processes. Consequently, they cannot be any more reliable than those past processes in providing us with authentic knowledge. Reliable knowledge, in contrast, arises from the direct perception of reality and from an ongoing objective conceptual process based on such perception.