UTILITARIAN SCIENCE. 79 



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 environ- 

 ment 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 per- 

 sonal 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 equip- 

 ment 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 



