there
was nothing left straight to be seen.

Lucretius hit upon half the trouble when he referred the organized
absurdities of his contemporaries to hereditary fear: which in the last
analysis is a derangement of the higher activities extending to
abdication. Its onset is an ataxy; and its culmination a paralysis. In
its mental aspect it is failure of the Will-to-know; acceptance of an
inferiority to which ignorance consigns us.

The other half of the trouble, less clearly diagnosed by Lucretius, but
detected, as we have seen, by Heraclitus, is hereditary pride, based on
ignorance no less than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul',
the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well as
after, that we know how things stand, when in fact we do not. Like fear,
in its mental aspect, it is a failure of the Will-to-know; once again,
an acceptance of the inferior status of the ignorant.

Organized fears, then, lead to _tabu_, the systematic inhibition of
experiment which might conflict with hypothesis; and organized pride, to
_magic_, with its systematic disregard of the results of each experiment
that is made, when it does so conflict with hypothesis. And it is these
two superstructures of ignorance, inhibiting and insisting by turns,
which add the glamour of irrationality to so much of the behaviour of
mankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Beset
by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer
alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it
thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not',
the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail to
endanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or a
trade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conforms
to opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his own
judgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own,
and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best.

Wide uniformities of conduct and of material culture may therefore
result from ignorance, no less than from knowledge, and unless we have
very full acquaintance with the region and external conditions, it is
not easy to decide whether any one of these uniformities is wisely
uniform or not. The record of the dealings of quite well-meaning
conquerors with the institutions and arts of their subjects is full of
tragedie