THE INTENTIONAL SHAPING OF HUMAN OPINION 593 



recovered. For the mother there was not the slightest doubt 

 that the magic of the old woman had turned the trick. 



Here was a fundamental idea governing the behavior of 

 this Itahan woman, an idea which,' one suspects, it would be 

 difficult to find among the average folk of our modern 

 western world. Formerly, of course, the Italian mother's 

 attitude was universal. How came it that the change was 

 made from the magic-idea to the now prevaihng physical- 

 cause-and-effect idea? 



The story goes back, of course, into ancient history when 

 men hke Thales, Democritus, Leucippus, Archimedes, 

 Hippocrates, and others refused to follow the prevaihng 

 ignorances and superstitions and made their independent 

 observations of the world. But the most dramatic episode in 

 the story, I venture to beheve, occurred about three hundred 

 years ago when the young Itahan Gahleo made his starthngly 

 simple experiment from the top of the Tower of Pisa. That 

 experiment was a direct challenge to the older truth-tech- 

 nique, which had rehed upon tradition and authority and had 

 made no effort, by observation, experimentation and 

 calculation, to discover the actual relationships existing in 

 the physical world. Out of Gahleo as we know, and largely 

 because of his actual experimentation, there grew the 

 brilhdnt activity of the succeeding three hundred years, 

 which included such men as Newton, Huyghens, Hehnholtz, 

 Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Einstein, and the rest, and which 

 generated a way of thinking about the world and of doing 

 things in it and with it wholly new in human history. 



The examination of what actually happened in this 

 case may perhaps give us a helpful clue to the question: 

 How can we intentionally reshape our governing thought- 

 systems? 



HOW OUR GOVERNING THOUGHTS MAY BE RESHAPED 



Starting with Galileo, let us look for the widening influence 

 of his challenging idea. In the first place, there was the 

 individual, himself, product, no doubt, of his environment, 

 but bringing into his environment something that was not 

 already there. What was this so-called environment? In one 



