Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/83

Rh our lives to them. We find it safer to do so than to trust our unaided senses.

While our senses tell us the truth as to familiar things, as rocks and trees, foods and shelter, friends and enemies, they do not tell us the whole truth: they go only so far as the demands of ancestral environment have forced them to go. Chemical composition our senses do not show. Objects too small to handle are too small to be seen. Bodies too distant to be reached are never correctly apprehended. Accuracy of sense decreases as the square of the distance increases. Sun and stars, clouds and sky, are in fact very different from what they seem to the senses.

In matters not vital to action, exactness of knowledge loses its importance. Any kind of belief may be safe, if it is not to be carried over into action. It is perfectly safe, in the ordinary affairs of life, for one who does not propose to act on his convictions to believe in witches and lucky stones, imps and elves, astral bodies and odic forces. It is quite as consistent with ordinary living to accept these as objective realities as it is to have the vague faith in microbes and molecules, mahatmas and protoplasm, protective tariffs and manifest destiny, which forms part of the mental outfit of the average American citizen to-day. Unless these conceptions are to be brought into terms of personal experience, unless in some degree we are to trust our lives to them, unless they are to be wrought into action, they are irrelevant to the conduct of life. As they are tested by action, the truth is separated from the falsehood, and the error involved in vague or silly ideas becomes manifest. As one comes to handle microbes, they become as real as bullets or oranges and as susceptible of being manipulated. But the astral body covers only ignorance and ghosts vanish before the electric light.

Memory pictures likewise arise to produce confusion in the mind. The record of past realities blends readily with the present. Men are gregarious creatures and their speech gives them the power to add to their own individual experiences the concepts and experiences of others. Suggestion and conventionality play a large part in the mental equipment of the individual man.

About the sense impressions formed in his own brain each man builds up his own subjective universe. Each accretion of knowledge must be cast more or less directly in terms of previous experience. By processes of suggestion and conventionality the ideas of the individual become assimilated to those of the multitude. Thus myths arise to account for phenomena not clearly within the ordinary experiences of life. And in all mythology the unknown is ascribed not to natural forces, but to the action of the powers that transcend nature, that lie outside the domain of the familiar and the real.

It has been plain to man in all ages that he is surrounded by forces stronger than himself, invisible and intangible, inscrutable in