Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [85]
Tragic Consequences of Free Mental Activity
The only associations of ideas of practical value are those that reflect the structure of reality. All others are not only worthless but misleading, a perpetual liability to people who entertain them. The associations of greatest practical value are those that express cause and effect and inherence and subsistence. By the first, we
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predict consequences by their antecedents; by the second, we recognize objects by their qualities. In either case, the constancy of the relationship is our only warrant of its soundness. If, when we see smoke, we can always trace it to a fire, we are justified in concluding that fire is the cause of smoke. If a globular, orange object with a certain peculiar texture and aroma always proves, on closer scrutiny, to be an orange, we take these properties to be adequate signs of an edible fruit.
In addition to these and a few other profitable modes of association, there are many more, equally or perhaps more congenial to the human mind, that only prolonged and often unhappy experience can expose as the specious delusions they are. Thus, we naturally associate any detached part with the whole from which it came. This is especially true of organic bodies; so that we readily associate hair or nail parings, or any excretion, or even any discarded particle of food or scrap of clothing that has been in intimate contact with a human body, with the body itself. And it is common experience that a slight alteration of a small part of a living body may produce profound changes in the whole, as when a scratch on a finger leads to an infection that may be fatal. What could be more obvious to naive intelligence than that appropriate treatment of such detached trifles cannot fail to affect the person so indissolubly connected with them in thought? In the long, dim centuries of the past, and continuing today among traditional peoples, an unbelievable amount of human energy has gone into the spells and magic rites applied to such morsels in the belief that the erstwhile owner would thereby come to some harm, perhaps sicken and die; and people who have known or even suspected that shorn locks of their hair, parings of their fingernails, or discarded scraps of their food have fallen into an enemy's hands have suffered agonies of apprehension that sometimes led to their death. Such tremendous waste and misery have resulted from the apparently trivial error of confusing a mental association with an organic connection!
Or consider the errors arising from false analogies. It is obvious that when one animal eats another, something, which today we call matter or energy, passes from the victim's body to that of
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its devourer. Is it so illogical to suppose that other properties of the victimits courage, cunning, fleetness, or strengthshould be transmitted with its flesh in similar fashion; so that by eating a lion's heart one might acquire boldness; from an antelope, fleetness; from a hare, timidity; from a brave man, courage; and perhaps even wisdom from a sage? Countless victims, human no less than animal, have had their throats cut or their hearts torn out as an oblation to this mistaken notion; while other creatures, possessed of qualities less admired, have in consequence of this same error been spared the fate to which their palatable flesh might otherwise have consigned them.
A false analogy