Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/104

 humankind we dare declare with certainty that it sounded when the first antediluvian man demonstrated that it was easier to kill your enemy by hurling a stone than by tearing him limb from limb with teeth and hands. It echoed through the Roman Empire when the early Christians were being fed to the imperial managery for the sake of a conviction. It shrilled in Spain and Italy when Columbus maintained the possibility of reaching the East by sailing to the west. Benjamin Franklin, experimenting with the lightning, was an object of derision in certain quarters.

In our day we have the man who deplores every achievement of science. The automobile is held up to scorn; the airplane; radio communication. There seems to be a more or less invariable proportion of humanity which prefers the static state to the evolutionary. Just now certain of our neighbors are viewing the round-the-world flight of the army aviators with cynic eye. "What's the big idea?" they ask.

What then, is the big idea? Why do anything that has not been done before? What a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him. Our ancestors, who knew nothing of mechanical transportation, electric communication, and scientific hygiene and pathology, probably were as happy as we are. They did not miss these things. Why worry ourselves, then, with progress? All this complexity is disturbing. Why not let well enough alone and keep our airplanes safe in their hangars?

Because we are men. We are insatiably curious, insatiably ambitious. We are born with a mysterious, unreasoning urge to understand everything and conquer everything. We cannot help ourselves. A few of us—fortunately only a few—are static and satisfied. The rest of us want to go ahead, even at peril of peace and our very lives. Evolution is the "big idea." Never mind where the road leads. Let's follow it and see. Let's see what the aërial circuit of the earth will lead us to!

Have you ever thought that animals do not wonder where the road leads? They stay where food and safety are—and remain animals!

AVE you got a fetish, a charm to invoke success? Do you have a bad day if you happen to forget a "lucky piece" when you change from one vest to another? Are you like one man we knew who couldn't work in the same room with a red-headed stenographer? Or another whose peace of mind was ruined if he happened to step on a crack in the pavement when he walked to business?

Probably you have no weaknesses as pronounced as those we have indicated. Probably you pride yourself on your freedom from superstition. But if you think hard you will find, the chances are, that there is some psychic flaw in your commonsense policy of dealing with the day. It may be that the hammering of a typewriter annoys you and slows you up. Or you may not be able to do your best work when somebody is talking in the next office. Or you may not feel quite yourself unless you have time to smoke your own particular brand of cigar after lunch.

"But such things as that have nothing to do with superstition," you will protest.

They have, though. If you will analyze the matter, you will see that the man who cannot be comfortable at work without his lucky piece and the man who is distracted by near-by conversation are very much akin in their weaknesses. For it all comes down to a matter of concentration. The man who has lost his fetish and makes mistakes in his work, and the man who has missed his cigar and gets his dates mixed are really in the same boat. Neither the fetish nor the cigar have anything to do with their confusion directly. Their real trouble is that they are worrying, the one about his fetish, the other about his cigar, or the talk in the next room, and neither can give his whole mind to what he is about.

Practically all of us are superstitious in this sense. We have one, or several, minor weaknesses that get us into difficulties. It is really almost as absurd to be put out by the clatter of a typewriter as to be distracted by the loss of a lucky piece. Little annoyances play too great a part in the lives of most of us. They should be of no more importance than foolish superstitions. The man who does good work