Heraclitan sense of an [Greek: idia phronêsis], 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.

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