BROCK CHISHOLM 
freedom of thought has been treated as a public enemy and 
strongly suppressed, yet freedom of thought constitutes man’s 
primary instrument for survival. 
Fortunately man’s inherent drive to use his intellectual 
equipment, his mind, is so great that suppression of independent 
thinking, no matter how ruthless, has never been complete, and 
heretics have always risen to challenge orthodoxies, even at 
risk of their lives. The human race owes most of its valuable 
progress to its heretics, the people who insisted on changing 
belief and behaviour patterns to fit tested new experience and 
knowledge, independently of the ancestral or authoritarian 
dictates. 
In very recent generations, at least in many parts of the 
world and in the fields of knowledge allotted to the physical 
sciences, freedom to think independently of custom or tradition 
has been firmly established, but this freedom was not gained 
easily or quickly. Orthodoxies had extended their paralysing 
controls even into astronomy, physics, chemistry, anatomy, 
geology, and many other branches of knowledge, and had 
forbidden new interpretations of the experiences being gained 
by observation and research in such fields. It has taken many 
centuries to force relinquishment of the belief that revelation 
and faith can provide an appropriate authority in human 
knowledge, and the job is not yet completed. Many people 
continue to hold many untrue and irrational beliefs simply 
because they were taught them in their childhood or by a loved 
and respected person. For example, many hotels have no floor 
or room numbered 13 because too many of their patrons would 
not use any floor or room so numbered. Such an example may, 
at first glance, seem irrelevant to this discussion, but it does 
illustrate the kind of misuse of the function of the mind which 
produces most of man’s major problems and now threatens his 
existence. 
This type of misuse is the uncritical acceptance of parental, 
ancestral or local patterns of thinking simply because they were 
learned early in life and so classified as “‘good”’, which deter- 
mines truth in the minds of many people. Use of such patterns 
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