Page:Justice in war time by Russell, Bertrand.djvu/31

Rh are critical of our irrational beliefs. In national questions, this corrective is absent. Most men meet few foreigners, especially in time of war, and beliefs inspired by passion can be communicated to others without fear of an unsympathetic response. The supposed facts intensify the passion which they embody, and are magnified still further by those to whom they are told. Individual passions, except in lunatics, produce only the germs of myths, perpetually neutralised by the indifference of others; but collective passions escape this corrective, and generate in time what appears like overwhelming evidence for wholly false beliefs.

Men of learning, who are acquainted with the part played by collective error in the history of religion, ought to have been on their guard against assaults upon their credulity. They ought to have realised, from the obvious falsehood of the correlative opposite beliefs in enemy countries, that the myth-making impulse was unusually active, and could only be repelled by an unusual intellectual vigour. But I do not find that they were appreciably less credulous than the multitude. In the early days of last September, when the Germans were carrying all before them in France, the need for some source of hope produced in England an all but universal belief that a large Russian army had travelled from Archangel, through England, to Belgium. The evidence was very much better than the evidence for most facts of history: most men knew many eye-witnesses of their transit, and at last a newspaper, published a telegram from its correspondent saying that he had discovered them in Belgium. Only then was the story officially denied, but for a