first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise as
subversive and in bad taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that
limits his capacity for it, and especially his capacity to throw off
the prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell,
said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument of
reflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment
of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most
gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary
airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly
pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the
ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in
1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in
his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product,
to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his
wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and
vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been
revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to the
natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level of a
patriot and taxpayer.

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present
work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able to
embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of hitherto
unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional handicap of having
an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I
wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only
possible customers were Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike for
novelty in the domain of the intellect I have often discoursed in the
past, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need do
here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among the
great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way
to think in everything--not only in theology, or politics, or economics,
but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average
American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public
clamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of an
equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in
front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a dozen