An Intellectual Revolution xvii 



not believe in witchcraft and saw the evil that it 

 brought, wrote to this effect : 



The day will never come when the common ruck 

 of men will cease to believe in witchcraft. If the 

 lawyers and judges of our modern sixteenth-century 

 France, men trained to sift evidence and learned in 

 science, can be so far deceived as to send thousands of 

 victims to their deaths for impossible crimes, how can 

 we ever hope that the common man will avoid these 

 errors ? 



Yet, ask a ten-year-old boy of our time whether 

 he thinks it likely that an old woman would or 

 could change herself into a cow or a goat, and he 

 will almost always promptly reply: "Certainly 

 not." (I have put this many times to the test of 

 experiment.) What enables the unlearned boy 

 to decide right where the learned judge decided 

 wrong? You say it is the "instinct" of the boy. 

 But the instinct of the seventeenth-century boy 

 (like the learning of the sixteenth, or seventeenth- 

 century judge) taught him the exact reverse. 

 Something has happened. What is it? 



It is probably the unconscious application on 

 the part of the boy, of the inductive method of 

 reasoning (of which he has never heard, and could 

 not define), and the general attitude of mind 

 towards phenomiena which comes of that habit. 

 Again, to quote myself: "He forms by reasoning 

 correctly (on the prompting of parents, nurses, and 

 teachers) about a few simple facts — which impress 



