Yet, across this ‘primitive culture’, to use a phrase which has become classical, so reasonable, and therewith so full of uniformities, in its intimate interplay of hand and tongue with brain, patches of shadow fall; a chaos of such incredible absurdities and (in the widest sense) of ‘barbarities’, that the charitable hypothesis that here and there man has lost his way and just stopped thinking hardly seems adequate to account for things, and writers like Levy-Bruhl are provoked to the pessimist guess that there can be a savage logic which is different from ours and yet is ‘logical’ in some coherent sense; which stets verneint the conclusions, and even the axioms, which are clear as day to us; and is a ‘knowledge of evil’ side by side with the knowledge of good.

But examples of this ‘primitive thought’, when we come to analyse them, all seem to resolve themselves into one or other of the ordinary sorts of fallacy, as our own logic-books expound them.  If the study of them proves anything at all, it is the familiar aphorism that, while there is only one right way of doing and thinking, there are countless ways of going wrong.  Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) that the world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages of reason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was no word either for the devil or for sin in their language.  For the Greek all human wrongdoing came under the one simple category of [Greek:  hamartia], ‘making a mistake’, or better ‘making a miss’.  It is the slang of target-practice, for the correlative [Greek:  otochazein], used of all happy guesses at truth, is likewise only the word for ’aiming straight’.

But why make mistakes?  Why these failures of co-ordination between design and execution, between nature’s truth and man’s theory and practice?  Why this declining from the best into sloppy or antiquated work, to name only two main sorts of technological fallacy?  Again the answer comes down, past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist.  It is only in superficial appearance that ’though reason is common to all, most men live as if they had a way of thinking of their own’,[5] Heraclitus’ momentary despair anticipating Levy-Bruhl almost verbally.  Once penetrate, with Heraclitus himself, below the surface, and ’all men have it in them to understand themselves and to think straight’.[6] It is failure to think, not some distinct and illogical sort of thinking, that is the cause of the trouble:  the lapse of that ‘organized common sense’ which is the content of all ‘science’.

Such disorganization of common sense, ‘idiotic’ thinking, in the Heraclitan sense of an [Greek:  idia phronesis], can be as cumulative, fallacy on fallacy, and as elaborately wrong, as the fabric of knowledge is cumulatively and elaborately right.  ’Hath this man sinned, or his parents, that he was born blind?’ That is the tragedy of primitive culture:  for the brains are there and the eyes; only they have never seen anything straight, because in the world they were bred up in there was nothing left straight to be seen.