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 tragedies of this kind.  I call to mind an example in Paraguay, where abstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearly wrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at once began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was averted.  It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone,