Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/31

 even under democracy it is one of the aims, though perhaps only a subordinate one. What brings it to futility is simply the fact that the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional distraction. But they also lack something more fundamental: they are incompetent to take in the bald facts themselves. Here I point to the observations of Dr. Eleanor R. Wembridge, a practical psychologist of great shrewdness. Her contribution is the discovery that the lower orders of men, though they seem superficially to use articulate speech and thus to deal in ideas, are actually but little more accomplished in that way than so many trained animals. Words, save the most elemental, convey nothing to them. Their minds cannot grasp even the simplest abstractions; all their thinking is done on the level of a few primitive appetites and emotions. It is thus a sheer impossibility to educate them, as much so as it would be if they were devoid of the five senses. The schoolmarm who has at them wastes her time shouting