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fraught with more tragic consequences was that between a human kingdom and the world. Until recently, many a kingdom was governed by an autocrat who carried out his will by means of edicts, was terrible to his subjects when thwarted, but could be placated by gifts, supplications, or displays of groveling humility. The whole visible world, with all the invisible spirits supposed to dwell therein, often seemed to immature intelligence to be just such a kingdom on a vaster scale, ruled by an even more powerful monarch who remained unseen, accomplished his purposes by fiats, and prostrated his subjects by plague, earthquake, flood, or famine when incensed with them but who could be appeased by gifts, supplications, and expiatory rites. How many victims have groaned, how many altars have reeked with flesh and blood of man and beast alike, in consequence of this mistaken but not unnatural analogy!

It is needless to multiply examples. Works on anthropology and even history abound with them, and similar ''vulgar errors" continue to lurk among the less educated inhabitants of enlightened modern nations. Here it will suffice to point out that confusion so innocent in intention, but often so terrible in its consequences, is the natural, inevitable result of the mind's newly acquired capacity to associate its thoughts in fresh combinations, the value of which can be tested only in the hard school of experience. Like many another novelty, free intelligence entered the world bringing confusion and discord in its train, and a long process of harmonization,

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still far from completion, was needed to undo the harm wrought, heal the lesions it caused, and combine the new with the old in a higher, ampler synthesis.

The human mind liberated itself from the benevolent despotism of fixed patterns of behavior only to fall into the destructive anarchy of false and too often mischievous notions. Thus began the turbulent era of the growing pains of intelligence, which has continued uninterrupted for certainly no less than fifty thousand years, and possibly a good many millenia more. If their cranial capacity may be taken as an index, people of late Paleolithic times had minds capable of forming as many, or almost as many, connections between ideas as ours can. The ways in which the raw elements of experience could be grouped were many. These associations might arise as a result of casual juxtapositions of events in space or time, or of superficial resemblances, or of fortuitous similarities between words. Accidental connections between ideas led to innumerable false conclusionstoo many to be corrected in the lifetime of one individual, even a thinker as capacious and indefatigable as Aristotle himself. The errors made by prehistoric people do not prove that their innate mental ability was less than ours, for the best contemporary minds might fall into them without the guidance of the past, transmitted by the written and spoken word. A large part of the tedious process of reaching truth consists in breaking wrong connections between ideas, perpetuated by the society in which we live, while sound connections are strengthened and disseminated. As we accomplish this gigantic task, intelligence comes of age. To complete the work, the cumulative efforts of many generations of thinkers are needed. Yet the quest of truth can never stop; in a developing world, it is endless.

The Curse of Curiosity

A natural outgrowth of the ability to associate ideas in patterns not controlled by heredity or concrete experience is curiosity. As presented to us by the external world, events occur in finite series which are causal or relational, and the middle terms of such series

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are joined on both sides to others. But the extreme members of these series lack an associate on the outer side. They seem to stand with one hand gripping a companion and the other groping blindly in the void, feeling for a friendly hand-clasp. Beyond the last object visible on the horizon must be something else that vision fails to reveal. Beyond