dispelling myths. There are two ways in which our natural beliefs are corrected: one the contact with fact, as when we mistake a poisonous fungus for a mushroom and suffer pain in consequence; the other, when our beliefs conflict, not directly with objective fact, but with the opposite beliefs of other men. One man thinks it lawful to eat pork, but not beef; another, beef but not pork. The usual result of this difference of opinion has been bloodshed; but gradually there is beginning to be a rationalist opinion that per- haps neither is really sinful. Modesty, the correlative of polite- ness, consists in pretending not to think better of ourselves and our belongings than of the man we are speaking to and his belongings. It is only in China that this art is thoroughly understood. I am told that, if you ask a Chinese mandarin after the health of his wife and children, he will reply: “That contemptible slut and her verminous brood are, as your Magnificence deigns to be informed, in the enjoyment of rude health.” But such elaboration demands a dignified and leisurely existence; it is impossible in the swift but important contacts of business or politics. Step by step, relations with other human beings dispel the myths of all but the most suc- cessful. Personal conceit is dispelled by brothers, family conceit by schoolfellows, class-conceit by politics, national conceit by de- feat in war or commerce. But human conceit remains, and in this region, so far as the effect of social intercourse is concerned, the myth-making faculty has free play. Against this form of delusion, a partial corrective is found in science; but perhaps the corrective can never be more than partial, for it may be that without some credulity science itself would crumble and collapse.
II
Men’s personal and group-dreams may be ludicrous, but their col- lective human dreams, to us who cannot pass outside the circle of hu- manity, are pathetic. The universe as astronomy reveals it is very vast. How much there may be beyond what our telescopes show, we cannot tell ; but what we can know is of unimaginable immensity. In the visible world, the milky way is a tiny fragment; within this frag- ment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat un-
