CHAPTER I.

1. THE NATURAL DEFECTS AND ERRORS OF OBSERVATION

AND REASONING.

In all historical ages-and, having regard to their traditions and superstitions, we may assume it to be true also of the pre-historic ages-men have continually made errors in their observations and reasonings; they have seen and drawn conclusions from what they have seen more often wrongly than rightly. It is thought to be no matter of surprise that savages and barbarians did so habitually in the prescientific ages; the tendency is rather to look down with compassion on their aberrations as the natural consequences of their low mental states, and to nurse the pleasing conviction that nothing of the kind happens now, in these days of superior insight and better reasoning. Notwithstanding this easy selfgratulation, it is undeniable that the same kind of errors in seeing and thinking which were made then are made still, that the great majority of persons

reason no better now than the great majority did then, and that beliefs are cherished now which have no better foundations than many extinct pre-scientific beliefs; and it is pretty certain that in years to come some cherished beliefs of to-day shall serve to those who are then alive as curious and instructive examples of states of imperfect mental evolution. As in the past and now, so then, wiser descendants shall wonder to think that rational beings could ever have been so very irrational as their forefathers.

Does it not seem strange, when we consider it, that the race of man on earth should have gone forward as well and far as it has gone, when all the while most of that which it was thinking and believing was not true? Let any one read and quietly reflect on the appalling histories of the numerous absurd beliefs and practices that have prevailed among mankind in the past, and prevail still in the dark places of the earth especially, considering by the light of them what the human race has been from its beginnings until now, and he can hardly fail to be seriously perplexed what to think of it. He may well think that to go wrong is as natural to the human mind as to go right, if he conclude not outright that the annals of human history are annals of human folly. Incredibly strange it certainly would be were we to suppose that the faiths which inspired actual conduct

were as badly based as those which filled the abstract regions of speculation, the implicit in conduct as ungrounded as the explicit in thought. But men have never fed their bodies on fictions. The reasonings of the savage concerning the habits of the game which he pursued and the fish which he caught for his food; the wily precautions taken by him to hide his trail from his enemies and to foil their stealthy pursuit; and his careful observations of the almost imperceptible signs by which to guide himself through the trackless forest and across the pathless prairiethese were as sound as the reasoning and observation of the astronomer of the present day, who, noting the track of a comet, predicts the exact moment a thousand years to come when it will be at the same spot in the heavens, or, from an unexplained deviation of a planet's orbit, proclaims the presence of an undiscovered planet at a place where it is afterwards found to be. In the one case, as in the other, the rules of right seeing and thinking are the same, and in the one case, as in the other, the same fallacies are apt to infect seeing and thinking.

To the vulgar it seems a marvellous thing when the astronomer makes predictions that embrace such vast lengths of time and such immensities of space; but the wonderful science which enables him to do such things is not at all different in kind from the

common knowledge by which the dullest rustic foretells with certainty that one sort of seed, when put into the earth, will grow into a mustard plant, and another sort of seed into a turnip. The science of the astronomer is of the same kind as the knowledge of the vulgar; it is the inevitably ensuing intelligence common to those who, being normally constituted mentally, have the opportunities, appliances, and training necessary to the study of a class of phenomena requiring special means of observation; it is the common sense appertaining to an uncommon class of phenomena. And the errors of such knowledge have no prerogative of birth or dignity over other errors; they are errors simply, of the same kind and illustrating the same mental tendencies

as common error.

We are apt nowadays, perhaps, to think too much of theories of knowledge and too little of the knowledge which is implicit in wise action. No nation ever yet made itself by theories of social contract or by any other explicit theories; the work was done first, and the theories came afterwards; the reason was latent in the fact before it was patent in the explanation. It was not by fictions of thought, but by realities of feeling and doing, that savages grew into powerful tribes or nations; and the inquirer must look beneath their ridiculous ceremonials and superstitions and