86 THE JEWEL IN THE TOAD'S HEAD 



" common knowledge " in his day when he made the Duke 

 compare adversity to the toad with a magic jewel in its 

 head commonly known as " a toad-stone," although that 

 " common knowledge " was really not knowledge at all, 

 but — like an enormous mass of the accepted current 

 statements in those times, about animals, plants and stones 

 — was an absolutely baseless invention. Such baseless 

 beliefs were due to the perfectly innocent but reckless habit 

 of mankind, throughout long ages, of exaggerating and 

 building up marvellous narrations on the one hand, and on 

 the other hand of believing without any sufficient inquiry, 

 and with delight and enthusiasm, such marvellous narra- 

 tions set down by -others. Each writer or "gossip" 

 concerning the wonders of unexplored nature, consciously 

 or unconsciously, added a little to the story as received by 

 him, and so the authoritative statements as to marvels grew 

 more and more astonishing and interesting. 



It was not until the time of Shakespeare himself that 

 another spirit began to assert itself—gamely, that of 

 asking whether a prevalent belief or tradition is actually a 

 true statement of fact. Men proceeded to test the belief 

 by an examination of the thing in question, and not by 

 merely adducing the assertions of " the learned so-and-so," 

 or of " the ingenious Mr. Dash." This spirit of inquiry 

 actually existed in a fairly active state among the more 

 cultivated of the ancient Greeks. Aristotle (who flourished 

 about 350 B.C.), though he could not free himself altogether 

 from the primitive tendency to accept the marvellous as 

 true because it is marvellous and without regard to its 

 probability — in fact because of its improbability — yet on 

 the whole showed a determination to investigate, and to 

 see things for himself, and left in his writings an immense 

 ■series of first-rate original observations. He had far more 

 of the modern scientific spirit than had the innumerable 

 credulous writers of Western Europe who lived fifteen 



