FOR the best part of my lifetime I have been watching the kind of things which we human beings will allow others to put into our minds. Good fortune had given me the chance to observe not only in the field of national politics, and with intimate contacts with public men and the voters who elect them, but also in the realm of the law. For nearly twenty years I have seen a great deal of the working of the press and of the use of propaganda; for fifteen years one of my hobbies has been to run down the facts about spiritualism and other supernatural or occult "mysteries." I have a vast amount of data on the kind of mind fodder to which even the men and women who claim education and intelligence allow free entry.

      I have come to this conclusion: If a stranger came to the average human being and handed him a lot of shiny green leaves covered with a blue powder and said "Eat this!" the average human being would at least inquire where the stranger obtained this oddity and what it was, before it was taken and swallowed. Our stomachs are held precious.

The Power of Assertion

BUT if a casual acquaintance came to the average man and said, "By all means keep a parrot in your house! A parrot has on its feathers a certain germ. It has been discovered by a famous bacteriologist of Vienna that these germs float about in the air and destroy the germs of rheumatism and infantile paralysis," then a lot of us, with bright, glad faces, hungry for knowledge, will chorus, "Is that so? I must tell the neighbors." In other words, the same degree of caution about swallowing for the stomach does not extend to the things we gulp into our minds.

      If I write my accumulated evidence of the gullibility of the modern, supposedly civilized mind, I do not desire merely to give amusement; I am hoping the evidence may tend to show that grave disorders may arise from the assertions by printed or spoken words which the human being of modern times takes in through his eyes and his ears as readily as a violent illness may arise from things he takes into his mouth. If I can contribute to prevention I have done a day's work.

      I remember once discussing with Sir Gilbert Parker, the novelist, who had a British propaganda post during the war, the subject of concerted drives to make people believe things. He said:

      "It is a task requiring a great deal of conscience. Not only must the propagandist stick to the truth but he must labor energetically to put truth within reach of human minds, at least as fast as human minds swallow the first lies they can gather up."

      At this point I hear the voices saying:

      "Oh, he means human beings who are below par in mental equipment. He means the stupid, half-baked persons who are now called morons. We know what a moron is. A moron is one of those persons who have minds which never grow up, which remain the minds of children; it's the class of human beings the psychologists have pretended to discover. We have always known them; we used to call them stupids. Of course they are fertile soil for planting any nonsense."

      But I do not mean morons. On the contrary, I mean clergymen and bankers, business men and statesmen, presidents of ladies' national clubs, societies and federations. I mean to include even those persons who would be shocked and offended if you said to them casually, "How much of all you believe is so?"

      Let us try you! The chances are ten to one that you believe that women on the farm go queer or insane more than the rest of us. You have heard that they are lonely, isolated. Of course it must be so. It has been said in this country for a century. Everyone knows about it. Most everybody has heard it. The woman on the farm! Loneliness! Insanity! But it is not so! On the contrary! The National Bureau of Mental Hygiene has looked into this. More people per thousand go insane in cities than in the country! And in the country the men go insane much faster than the women!

The Mind Reader

THAT is the kind of untruth you believe because of the mere power of assertion. But you are no worse than a man who was once a candidate for the presidency of the United States. One day I sat with him when a stranger, Doctor Somebody, a grave, whiskered old rascal, came in to discuss psychology with the great man. The doctor prepared to demonstrate the powers of mind reading. He asked the great man to write on several small pieces of paper ten various questions. The great man did so, taking pains to mention matters of which "the doctor could not possibly have heard." The doctor then directed him to roll up these pieces of paper into pellets, and then the doctor handed these pellets to our great leader and asked him to distribute them through his pockets.

      "And now," quoth the doctor, "in the right-hand side pocket of your coat is the following question: "Is my Aunt ——'s grave properly tended?" The doctor went on through the ten questions, exhibiting a startling accuracy in what he called mind reading.

      When he had gone I said, "You do not believe that was mind reading?"

      The presidential aspirant replied, "I have to believe it. There is no other explanation. I have thought it over and over and I am convinced."

      We were interrupted, and one of my minor regrets is that I allowed a man of his prominence to go to his grave believing perhaps in the strange powers of Doctor Somebody. The trick is one of the old ones in the thought-transference, mind-reading, spiritualism world.

      When the pellets are rolled up they lose their identity. The victim cannot tell one from another. The sharper merely sneaks one blank pellet into the lot and takes out one with a question on it. He does this by sleight of hand and reads it furtively. Then he points to a pocket where one pellet has been placed and reads off the question which was on the stolen pellet. "Now hand it to me," he says; and when he gets it he changes it for the pellet he has stolen and read. The victim reads the pellet, which he supposes came from the right-hand side pocket, but while he is doing so the doctor reads the question on the second pellet. So he goes on from one to another until he has finished. He tells the question which the victim supposes is on the last one and throws it into the wastebasket. It is the blank pellet!

      The accident of a long-distance telephone call which prevented my explaining at the moment something which "could only be explained by supernatural powers" allowed a good and intelligent man to go to the end of his life believing in a piece of claptrap merely because, like most of us, he had swallowed the false idea that there can be only one explanation!

Falsity Welcomed

      I have observed — and perhaps you will, if you have not already — that, like this false belief that there can be only one explanation, there are certain definite doors, carelessly left open, through which we allow particular kinds of error, lies, distortions and untruths to come in and take up a more or less permanent residence in our minds. It would be a good plan to examine these doors and then put Common Sense at each one as a guardian to ask any information applying for entry to show some kind of credentials.

      The mental door widest open and least guarded by human beings is the door which gives entry to all the falsity we wish to believe. Going back over the variety of men and women I have known, I think that I can see that not only the uneducated but, perhaps even more, the educated and distinguished mind falls a victim to this silly weakness of believing as much as possible of the things which, regardless of their worth or truth, none the less feed the wish to believe. I have seen an American banker, who has had and will have much to do with European reconstruction finance, painstakingly scrutinizing evidence which appeared to conflict with his beliefs. To that extent he is conscientious and careful. But I have seen this same man filled up to the brim by misrepresentations out of the mouth of a European statesman, who by chance or design told the banker what the banker wished to believe. I remember a justice of the United States Supreme Court who told me with candor that his one disqualification, the one factor which made him feel that he could never reach the height of clear-mindedness he desired to attain, came from his early training in the South, which had taught him, as he expressed it, "to welcome any evidence which tended to prove that he was right yesterday."

      I know a manufacturer who has been a conspicuous success by following a certain business policy. Until ten years ago he was undoubtedly right. Now the conditions in the industry having totally changed, instead of being 97 per cent right he is 98 per cent wrong. He takes into his mind all he can find of "information" which fits his persistent wish to believe that he has been right and is right now. He takes in enough of this stuff every day to keep him baying along the wrong scent, and ten years from now probably he will be off on the hills of failure with dark coming on, still nursing his wish to believe. Certainly it is not only the ignorant or the morons who are victims of this strange vice of mankind.

      If anyone will do a little thinking about it, it is clear that the wish to believe is founded not on one cause but on several. Undoubtedly the great cause is the ego — the conceit of the human mind. If there is anything which we love and cherish it is our own opinion. We wish to think that our opinion, formulated and expressed yesterday, was right. And so one finds whenever there appear two antagonistic political groups that each one gradually fills up with untruths or distortions, welcomed with apparent joy, because the falsities serve to support the opinion of each side. As each group accepts more and more untruth, according to its wish to prove itself right, there accumulates in the individual and the mass more and more intolerance. Intolerance is the most carefully reared baby of the wish to believe.

A Campaign Trick

      The conflict in America about the virtues and vices of the League of Nations is a case in point. I have had considerable contact with this conflict, and nothing astounds me more than to find how eager is anyone who is on one side or the other, to swallow false evidence because of his desire and hunger to believe anything which supports his own opinion. I spoke recently on a public occasion on the subject, and the resentment of those who were on the other side was well expressed by an indignant woman, who wrote to me:

      "How can you debase yourself by bringing up these old worn-out facts? It made me positively ill."

      I might have answered her that what made her ill was her wish to believe. Her real illness was in a mind which only desired to feed on statements, true or false, which would make her wriggle with the pleasure arising from saying to oneself or to others, "Wasn't I right? Didn't I tell you so?" This desire to prove that one has been right is, unfortunately, the foundation for the political and religious conviction, not of those who have worked out intelligently their beliefs, but of the great mass of men and women, both low and high in the scale of so-called education.

      I have seen this weakness used in the field of American politics. Whenever I have had a chance to manage a campaign I have tried to get as many persons as possible to sign something. Once a man indorses an opinion with his signature, he never forgets the registry. He can be depended upon usually to open the doors of his mind to anything which proves he was right in giving his indorsement, and he will often close his mind to anything which tends to prove he was wrong. He is a fixture! He has been inoculated by the wish to believe. The only astounding feature of this is that the man with the disease does not know he has it.

      There is another cause for the wish to believe. It lies in the very apparent fact that men and women like to believe that other men and women are as bad as or worse than they are themselves. It may not be pleasant to admit this characteristic. It may not be agreeable to confess that we take limitless distortions and sensational matter into our minds because of the wish to believe that others less good or less smart have been caught and exposed as wicked or foolish.

      One of the largest owners of newspapers in the United States was saying to me the other day that in addition to the hopeful fact that wickedness is more rare and comes into crises and therefore is better news than goodness, we have another explanation for our liking for the yellow in our journals. It is the wish to believe that someone else has slipped. The power of the blackmailer is rendered increasingly dangerous because the victim senses that the public has this wish to believe, that it will prefer mud to whitewash. Preference is perverted by the hunger to believe that other feet than the reader's have stumbled.

      This force, operating to make you believe that which often isn't so, is the explanation why three successive Presidents of the United States have been victims of widespread libels. Beginning with Roosevelt, who, being as temperate as any sane man should be, was whispered as a drunkard, there followed a nation-wide affliction of a story besmirching Wilson. Harding, at the end of his presidential campaign, bore in dignified silence a slander viler than the others. In my political experience I have been astonished by the class of persons who will indulge their wish to believe like thirsty drunkards.

      A prominent banker was responsible for the story that Roosevelt in his later years came to a Harvard reunion and was found by the banker in a drunken stupor on a couch at a certain hour of the day in a clubhouse. I took pains to run this story down and I believe fully that the banker's wish to believe was so strong that he had convinced himself that he was giving honest testimony. The investigation, however, showed that Roosevelt was talking with Governor Charles Evans Hughes, of New York, at the hour named and that at the precise time it was the banker himself who was stretched out on the club couch.

      One of the great detectives of this country has been quoted recently as saying that he could get it on any man if set to do the task. He may have had a cynical belief, based on his rather unfortunately selected experience with mankind, that there is a skeleton in every closet; but if he is right, he is right in part because of the public's ready desire to believe in any alleged exposure. The mere alleged exposure is more potent than proof of innocence. Of course, if the exposure is of some charge which is beyond the scope of our own little weaknesses, then there is less wish to believe. Why? Because in that case we do not compare instinctively our greater shrewdness or greater virtue with the awkwardness or weakness of another.

      Most of us, not being potential murderers, regard the exposure of a charge of murder with an impartial attitude and sometimes with a hope that the charge is not true. But in the case of commoner human breakdowns we wriggle inwardly with delight that someone else has had hypocrisy or pretense torn away and is standing as an exhibit of what we might have been had we ourselves not been more agile or more conscientious.

      This characteristic is akin to our laughter when we see a man fall on the icy sidewalk; we are glad in each case that it was not we who slipped. And the contrast of our own position and that of others being delightful, we want nothing to interfere with our wish to believe that the contrast is there. This form of wish to believe is the chief reason for the existence of the village gossip, for the popularity of certain women, titled or otherwise, in the capitals of Europe and the cities of America who feed our wish to believe by their slanders; it is the chief reason for the leaning of ears toward the voice of the insider, even when the insider is something of an incorrigible liar.

Love of Scandal

      There exists today, in one of the capitals of Europe, a famous white-haired old lady, of a distinguished appearance, whose tongue is such a contrast to her respectable mien, whose vulgarities in her supposed exposures of the moral slips of others and whose lies even are so daring in contrivance and are so tickling to the wish to believe, that smart society of two continents goes to her table. The food is not poisonous. That is one reason for the presence of guests. The conversation is, and that's another reason. Nothing could better illustrate the difference in the attitude of men and women between the things they will take into their stomachs and the things they will take into their minds.

      The third principal reason for the wish to believe, which admits so much that is not so into our minds, is our ardent desire to believe anything which takes off our individual shoulders our load of personal responsibility. We may as well face the fact that we dearly love to know of any new forces which may control our lives and for which we are not personally answerable.

      When psychoanalysis comes along with the suggestion that we are not to be regarded in the old ignorant way as responsible individuals, mankind gives a whoop of joy and sends for all the literature. Every idle wife becomes an amateur psychoanalyst; the new discoveries revealing human defects, which cannot be attributed to old-fashioned blame, are discussed by every twittering group. For every truth about psychoanalysis there are twenty lies!

      Why is all this glad welcome? It is because we have passed a milestone in scientific discoveries about human ills. Up till psychoanalysis came we could only escape responsibility for ills of our bodies. This we did successfully by shutting our eyes to the fact that 90 per cent of our physical ills come from our abuse of the human body and by exercising our wish to believe that if we failed to be cured the whole difficulty could be laid at the door of the undeveloped knowledge or the inadequacy of doctors. Who would believe that now along comes a chance to put our crimes, follies, sins and stupidities up to the doctors? What could we wish to believe more than that? Fascinating subject!

      And now come also the real discoveries about the influence upon bodily and mental and temperamental welfare of the glands. Sound the brasses! Let us exaggerate the whole business, talk about it, receive false testimony about it. Why? Because we wish to believe in still another escape from personal responsibility. When one is cross in the family it's the ductless glands! We find another way to escape!

      Furthermore, passing to a different field of escape, nearly all the victims of the whole complicated diet of the occult, on which we feed so eagerly, are victims, not so much of the fraudulent or hysterical delusions that are offered them as they are victims of their own wish to believe. A search for abnormal forces over which man has no control is a great distraction from daily conflict with known forces which calls for individual responsibility and tests that responsibility. We welcome anything which allows us to check, in the anteroom of the mysterious, the realities, including our personal responsibility for correct thought or conduct in a normal world.

The Angels of Mons

      To be frank about it, our wish to believe makes us open our mental arms to gather in a whole seething mass of untruth. We turn from one craze to another with this wish to believe. We wish to believe that we can pass personal responsibility over to the doctor or to repressed childhood, for which parents may be blamed; or to repressed emotions, chargeable to husbands or wives, who "fail to understand our natures," or to the effect of glands on temperaments or to the psychiatrist or to spells, magics, automatic writings, materialization of spirits.

      From the exaggerations we give to reports of scientific discoveries, down to the nonsensical hocus-pocus which proves that we have not graduated yet from the savage class, we go on wishing to believe, hoping to pass responsibility. It is not the supply of silly crazes which pushes nonsense into our minds; it is the demand for something which will give us escape from reality or take the responsibility off our shoulders which pulls nonsense into our minds. It is the wish to believe.

      The best sense ever expressed on this subject was by an old negro maid, who saw her mistress packing up to go to a sanitarium.

      "Wha yo goin', missy?"

      "I am going to a rest cure. I've had a breakdown, I'm going away from everything," was the reply.

      "Yas'm," said the mammy. "But, honey, don't forget, you won't get away from yo'self!"

      When a wave of desire to escape to unrealities fills a world, as it did during the war and after, remarkable instances of the persistence of wish to believe arise. In these instances not only will the wish accept false evidence but it will stalwartly reject any quantity of true evidence which shows the absurdity of the false.

      During the war a young man in England wrote a purely fiction story about a British regiment at Mons, which, being left cut off by a retreat, was saved by the sudden appearance of angels who with drawn swords drove back the enemy and made an angelic rescue. The author made no pretense that the story was true; he offered it and it was published as the product out of the whole cloth of his own imagination. So far as I can trace it, the story was told to some London preacher and the London preacher made a sermon about it, treating it as if it were a fact. It traveled along like a prairie fire. Some other publication found a petty officer who when interviewed was willing to admit, with becoming modesty, that he had been present when the angel host, disappointing all the pacifists, had leaped to arms.

      Now the author was somewhat proud of his inventive powers. To make out that the thing had really happened robbed him of the credit for having invented it. Furthermore, the author of the Angels-of-Mons story, having been to Sunday school in his youth, had a regard for the truth. He endeavored to spread the truth about the story. He wrote letters to the papers about it. The truth therefore went galloping off after the lie. Catch it? Never! The wish to believe was all on the side of the nonsense. It was not more than four months ago that I met in Italy a lady with an intense wish to believe any story which would bolster up a belief in spiritism. She still believes the story of the Angels of Mons. She knows all about the denials of the author.

      "But," she says, "you must remember that the author, whether he knows it or not, was only the agent to whom the truth was revealed so that it could be spread!"

      Houdini, the handcuff king, whose acquaintance I made in Boston some years ago, had a special performance. He would allow himself to be handcuffed, boxed and thrown into the harbor. A few moments later he would arise, swimming, to the surface.

      "It is a better performance than any spirit medium ever gave," I said to a man who, although he is an educator, attends séances and is convinced he has established communication with his mother.

      "Certainly it is," was the reply, "because, although Houdini pretends to use natural methods in order to mystify people, what he really does is a dematerialization!"

      What are we to do about it!

What Mr. Harding Said

      A member of my family worked out a clever burlesque of so-called automatic writing. She has the rare ability to do two things at once and with practice it has developed. She can read aloud from a book or carry on an animated conversation and at the same time with apparent inattention to the movement of her pencil write a clever "spirit" message adapted to the sitter. Sometimes in order to play a joke on those who are believers, when several persons have been present she has written for each one privately a message. Each one addressed has testified that the message received showed a miraculous insight into their affairs or a wonderful suggestion for a solution of a problem. Then it is disclosed that she has written exactly the same message to each of the dozen or half dozen dupes!

      But does this stop the wish to believe? Not at all. As a result of these performances, disclosed as a mere piece of trickery, the rumor spread rapidly that this young woman was a marvelous psychic. She had to stop doing her parlor trick, which was only intended to expose the nonsense of automatic writing; she could not otherwise avoid a reputation for having powers which she disclaims, disproves and burlesques. She has learned that there are no limits to the wish to believe!

      Those of us who are intelligent enough to want to go through life admitting to our minds only the dependable truth must keep awake to the fact there is just as much danger in wishing so much to make new discoveries in ideas that we swallow untruth as there is in wishing so much to support our opinions of yesterday that we gulp down false evidence.

      Said President Harding to me on one occasion, "There is a kind of fad for believing in anything in which no one has ever believed before."

      Of course that is true. There is a fetish for new mental freedom. It may be a good thing if it is based on the careful gathering of truth; but it is a bad thing, and increases the error in the world, if it is based on the current idea that beliefs held by mankind heretofore are, for that reason alone, more probably wrong than right. Those who gallop into a foam trying to shake off what they call the smothering ideas and conventions of yesterday are always stumbling into two kinds of holes.

New Ideas Ages Old

      One of those pitfalls is dug for all those who ardently wish to believe that there is much to be found that is new in human ideas. There is not. If a man invents a new retriever collar button or a radio set to go inside a man's hat, he sometimes can be safe in assuming that he has a new idea. New ideas as to the material world are often really new. But this is doubtful about beliefs. When youth has an idea of emancipation or idle ladies wish to abolish marriage or a great neurologist advocates that mankind shall toss off its complexes by expressing rather than suppressing his sinful thoughts, usually a wise person can arise and show that Roman youth went out to the Baths of Caracalla and read poetry about the same old emancipation and that nothing much resulted except a preparation to get a good licking from the Goths or various virile and unemancipated peoples. And other wise persons will find that in Egypt or China idle ladies tried their freedom and that there followed an era where they sold themselves back into idleness at a basement mark-down. And some other wise man will point out that the confessional had been removing complexes thousands of years before anyone had ever heard of Freud or Jung. Peace societies reared and plunged in Asia before America was discovered. Japan had a single-tax movement before printing was invented. Alexander, Czar of Russia, called a disarmament conference. The League of Nations idea is older than the use of gunpowder. The Iroquois Indians adopted woman suffrage in our Northeastern States before a white woman had ever come over the horizon. Medicine men in African jungles, before the day of Livingstone and Stanley, knew how to do the same tricks of fire handling and communicating with the spirit world which now surprise an eminent English author and an even more aged English scientist.

      The second hole is the idea that anything new must be more true than something which is old. Even if the new thought is new, there is no particular virtue in it because of newness. Very often it is advanced with all this parade of newness so that it may appear to have advantage in a conflict with an old thought. A man or woman who wants to tell you that it is better for the soul that human beings should sleep in the daytime rather than in the nighttime will probably write a preface saying that the reason people sleep in the nighttime is because they have the conventional rut or sheep-mind or habit mentality.

      Of course, there is such a thing as the sheep mind, but it may not be the sheep mind which makes us sleep nights rather than days. We may choose the night because we conclude that Nature intended it, or that days have too much light for sleep, or for some perfectly adequate reason. But the partisans of the new idea will always talk about opposition which comes from conventional thinking.

      There is no good in denying that, next to the wish to believe, the sheep mind is the greatest contributor to making mankind believe what is not so.

      I remember talking to one of the most successful advertising men the United States has ever known. I accused him of having made a fortune in encouragement of the sheep mind. He denied it, but he added:

      "I sometimes think that modern life is really creating a sheep mind in us. When I was a boy I grew up on a farm. Men and women did their own thinking. They had to. They weighed things. They sifted the false from the true, nonsense from what was worthwhile. Now life is speeded up so there isn't much time to think. So we let others do the thinking for us. We read and take everything in. We read newspapers, electric signs, books; we see cartoons, rotogravure pictures, the movies. We listen to speeches on the radio. It is the easy way.

      "There was a time when artisan labor produced all our material things. The thing produced was made carefully and had individuality. Now we wholesale the production of everything. Your hat, shoes and neckties are made by the same type of machines that made mine, and as time goes on the tendency will be to standardize everything. If anyone can control an industry he can dictate what mankind may buy, wear or use. And now ideas, opinions and thought can be manufactured too. The housewife does not make up her own fabrics; it's too much trouble. Then why should she make up her own mind? You do not fail to buy ready-made gloves. Why should you avoid accepting ready-made opinions? Indeed, it is harder for some persons to make good opinions than to make good gloves."

The Sheep Squad's Work

      "Well," I exclaimed, "if that tendency goes on either some man who can control the market will create all opinions or else all opinions will tend to come down to the dead level of the mob."

      "Take your choice," he said. "But I think it may be better if the day comes that some one good magnate of ideas may control the printed word, the press, the movies, the radio. I should like his advertising account. I'd write a slogan: 'Let us make your ideas for you; your opinions will take care of themselves!'"

      Of course no one really wants to buy his ideas, or even to be given his ideas. But perhaps nearly all of us are drifting faster in these times toward the sheep mind. The sheep mind has attended us since prehistoric days; it was bad enough when we had time to think for ourselves. It convinced everyone for a long time that the world was flat; after the late war it jazzed everyone into the idea that a new world had come, although we now see that, in spite of the talking idealists, who had the world stage, it is the acting idealists who must now go painstakingly to work on — the same old world.

      I saw an experiment tried as a result of a discussion I started about the sheep mind. The subject of the experiment was a Wall Street personality of ability, power and — let us not forget it — of strong individuality. This man had refused vehemently to join a certain organization. We enlisted a sheep squad. It was arranged that at least twice a day he should be seen by certain of his friends who had been recruited. They came into his office, they met him in his club they ran across him at dinner parties. Conversation about the organization he had refused to join was natural, and by agreement the most that was said to him was, "I should think you'd be in this movement. I'm going in." No argument was put forth no reasons were given — and the great man joined!

      Even the strong individual minds have difficulty in withstanding repetition. No one knew this instinctively better than Roosevelt. If anyone takes the pains to review his campaigns they will see, as I always used to see, that Roosevelt had his great successes in spreading an idea when he plucked one string — repetition. He would state something. He would parallel this statement. He would state it again. Of course, he was aided often by being right; but those who used to say, "Why does he harp away on that?" failed to weigh the power of repetition.

      If repetition may break down the defenses of a strong, self-thinking mind, then the sheep mind has no chance at all.

      If anyone wishes evidence of the sheep mind he can go back a few years. The sheep galloped off after the strenuous life. Then along came Charles Wagner, almost forgotten now, with The Simple Life, and the herd halted and went over into another field. We have galloped until our tongues hung out after Tagore and Wells and New thought and internationalism and the literature of discontent — all in succession. In each case the reason we covered ourselves with foam could not have been because we had found anything that we could think out to a conclusion and knew how to knit into our daily lives. In each case, if we look backward we see that this new vital thing had not changed life so that any of us can notice it. In our excitement over a new author or a new movement, few of us ever acted on the discovery or have changed our condition in response to any particular passing fashion of ideas and opinions. We merely ran to a fire; we were exhibiting the sheep mind.

      We exhibit it every day, not only in our excitements but in our dullness. In our hysteria over newness we put distortions and untruths into our sheep mind, but we keep carefully packed away in our sheep mind endless junk accumulated from thousands of yesterdays. If one ever deliberately goes into his own sheep mind, this rummage-sale material, as anyone can see, is divided into four classes: False ideas we have accumulated ourselves, false ideas that tradition handed down to our generation, false ideas that have hardened by time into fashions or fads, and finally false ideas which are so old they have become instincts.

The Discredited Hunch

      The easiest task to tackle first is sweeping out the nonsense we have accumulated or received from tradition or superstition to store in the sheep mind. A definite job can be done. I remember once undertaking, when I had just graduated from a university, such a definite job on my own mind in coöperation with one of the finest minds I ever knew. This other person and I had taken in the common sheep-mind idea that there might be something in hunches. We both confessed to experiencing certain apprehensions of evil or convictions that something was about to happen or expectations of certain beneficial events.

      I said to the other person, "Of course, if these things are any good, if they come from anything except indigestion, they will stand the test of being registered before the event. Therefore let us each promise to send to the other in writing every hunch we get. At the end of a year let us see what hunches are worth."

      We did this. We registered endless apprehensions and intuitions, and we wrote beside each one what our cool judgment believed regardless of the intuitions. The cool judgment was right in 87 per cent of the cases. The hunches, with a single exception, were in error. Then came forth the remarkable fact that almost the only hunch either of us could remember before we began to check the list was the one which had been right! We faced the fact that the one hunch which is right is remembered and used to build up faith in hunches, whereas the hundreds which are wrong are completely forgotten.

      Ever since then, whenever I begin to have hunches I take some exercise or go on a simpler diet. It was a real shock to me during the war to find that a public official, one charged with tremendous responsibilities, stated openly to a group of friends that he had always acted on hunches and that no one could convince him that he should not now devote his intuitions to the services of his country.

      Another waste carried in the sheep mind is the accumulation, apparently unlimited, of ideas picked up here and there from fads or crazes which make a special appeal to the ego. Few of us are free from the idea that we possess personal differences from the majority of mankind which put us into a special class. Most of us have the load of believing that we require special consideration, or special environment, or special diet — ideas we have picked up without the slightest scientific or even roughly experimental test. We accept these conclusions into our sheep mind without ever examining their credentials. Of course, a part of this is due not only to the sheep mind, which takes ideas from others without any test, but also to the wish to believe.

Judgment and Prejudice

      The fact is that mankind, delicate as its bodily and mental machinery may be, is astonishingly uniform. When millions of men, for instance, are assembled in a draft for war and submitted to uniform treatment as to clothing, diet, environment and daily routine as to sleep and activity — down go hundreds of thousands of beliefs in personal idiosyncrasies! The man who believes that woolen irritates his skin learns that his skin forgets it. The man who is unable to go to sleep without putting his feet in hot water learns that his feet and circulation forget it. The man who believes that his stomach requires a diet of nuts finds that his stomach forgets it. The old expression is that nonsense is knocked out of them. Most of that nonsense has been taken in originally by a sheep mind, aided by the wish to believe that one's dear, precious body and one's dear, precious personality are distinguished and peculiar. With these notions picked up roughly from some fad of a group or cult or movement, we burden ourselves with endless inconveniences and tend to become a nuisance to our families and friends.

      I once knew a woman who was made deathly ill by eating veal. Her husband, by a conspiracy with the cook, served veal every few days to her for six months as pork or chicken patties or corned-beef hash, and she was never so well. When she was convinced that she had been through this experience she went abroad where veal is served everywhere and ate it with gusto. One of life's nuisances thrown overboard!

      A curious and dangerous fetish of the sheep mind is the persistent idea that there is virtue in gorging at meals.

      "Come, dear," says the mother to the child, using the voice of centuries of error, "You must finish what is on your plate. You aren't ill, are you?"

      This notion that gorging — perhaps the greatest enemy of modern mankind — is an assurance of well-being persists in face of every fact that science and human experience may bring. Degeneration of kidneys and intestines, useless loads on the heart, and even malnutrition can be traced to it. And yet the sheep mind clings to the idea that stuffing food is a measure of human well-being, and each new generation is educated even in childhood by this sheep-mind idea.

      We think our tastes are delicate and that we can distinguish, and our sheep mind fights hard against disproof. Women almost universally will assert that handmade lace is infinitely superior in appearance to machine-made lace and that they can tell genuine pearls from fake, or diamonds, emeralds and rubies from imitations. Anyone can test the correctness of this belief by experiments in his own family. If the experience follows mine it will prove that whatever may be the virtues in owning real things, the assertion that women can tell real from false breaks down over and over again when the test comes.

      Nor are men free from such false convictions. The best fields for experiments have always been wines and tobaccos. In the old days a certain agent for a famous brand of European champagne lost a large wager when he was blindfolded and asked to pick out his own wine from others by the taste only. To cap the experiment a California champagne was brought in and poured out into nine of the ten glasses. He picked one of the nine containing California wine as his own!

      The sheep mind depends much more on the labels of this world than it is ever willing to admit. It likes labels. It accepts an error when prominent names are subscribed and appear on the stationery and rejects a truth when the truth is underwritten by unknowns. So likewise it learns to depend not only on the labels of ideas but the labels on bottles and other things; but it will not give up its pretense of discrimination even in fields where that pretense can be disproved. The women who wish to make a counter challenge to males can pick upon men who assert ability to tell the cigarette they smoke from others. It is only necessary to buy other kinds of the same length, shape and general quality, blind-fold the male and let him try to pick out his smoke.

      Again, the sheep mind of the male makes him go through the world believing that a light wrapper on a cigar makes a mild cigar, whereas it is the filler which measures the strength. A cigar manufacturer tells me that back in the 70's and 80's the sheep mind of the male in America measured the virtues of cigars by the presence or absence of a dark red-brown juicy wrapper. That was easy for the cigar men, because wrappers could be stained a desirable color. When the flapdoodle came in about the pretty, light-yellow greenish-brown mild wrapper the cigar manufacturers were hard pressed, because any bleaching process weakens a wrapper's durability. An attempt was made to show that the filler and not the wrapper measures strength and goodness. No use! The sheep mind was off on a stampede. It had formed, as it does every day, a fashion or fad or craze or hobby out of untruth. It still wastes tons of ink and tons of paper and infinite energy a year writing "Very truly yours" at the bottom of letters. It still chatters on about progress and civilization in terms of better things instead of asking itself whether we are producing better men. It is the old sheep mind.

Junk Shop Minds

      It is so old, indeed, that it has ingrained into us fundamental instincts which we carry along uselessly. Once upon a time a snake bit a man and the man died. This started the idea that all snakes were deadly and therefore loathsome. The sheep mind drew back and telegraphed a shudder to the body whenever any snake was seen. We still carry that instinctive shudder, though we may know that the particular snake is harmless, and though we may have to admit upon reflection that the particular snake is not only harmless but beautiful in coloring and of almost unparalleled grace in movement.

      No doubt this instinct, no doubt some fads and fashions and superstitions are harmless enough. It is not important that a man's sheep mind may keep him from walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror. It is not often necessary to walk under a ladder, and it is so desirable that mirrors shall remain unbroken that one can almost trace the threat of seven years' bad luck to some clever woman who wanted awkward hands to keep away from her looking-glass. But unfortunately, unless you and I keep watch of unprovable stuff and nonsense, it will assume lies as facts and slip wholesale opinions into our lives which we cannot defend because we never opened the package in which they were delivered, to examine them. We can leave the nonsense there just as it was addressed to our sheep mind by yesterday opinion or by majority belief and go to our graves with the burden of it. Or we can chuck it out.

      To keep taking in beliefs, however, and then chucking them out is a waste. We hear of the waste of hiring employes who are misfits, so that soon they must be replaced. We hear of these wastes as the wastes of labor turnover. We would deplore the constant purchasing of goods which, having little utility, must soon go to the ash barrel. And yet there is a scandalous waste in the turnover of beliefs and a certain amount of damaging humiliation in a mind which cannot pack itself progressively and flexibly, but requires constant unloading and repacking.

      Anyone can learn to take account of one's own stock and to junk the worthless dead weight and the irritating nonsense.

      And looking at tomorrow, why not ask every time a belief rings whether it is your wish to believe or your sheep mind or your own good thinking that is running to answer the door?

      It is easy to spot the wish to believe and the sheep mind in your neighbor or your wife.

      What about yours?

(THE END)