Thus a belief in luck necessarily tends to underrate mere knowledge—study, accuracy. The woman who says she “has no luck with her bread” is not likely to go to a cooking school. Take the full extension of this same concept about luck—chance—fate—and you get fatalism, the logical consequence of which is seen in those backward and inert nations where it rules. They may make good fighters, but never good inventors—discoverers—creators; they endure life, but do not promote its development. Religious history gives us plenty of “awful examples” of the power of one radically wrong concept to fill the mind with error, and the world with blood and tears. Our disinclination to accept a statement which does not agree with those previously held is the brain’s physical rejection of an impression claiming to belong to a certain group, but finding no connection there. If forced to accept it as incontrovertibly true, we must then throw out all the others and wholly rearrange that group of concepts. This is where we say “Ah! that alters the case,” when some patent fact forces us to “change our minds.” If forced to accept facts indisputably true, but as far as we can see irreconcilable, there can be no mental action whatever on that subject. They are held by force in the brain, but do not grow there and do not lead to any further grouping of concepts. This state of mind is familiar to the guessers of charades. “My first is this,” “my second is that”—“my whole is so and so”—and the brain seizes these detached assertions and seeks for some possible arrangement in which they will “make sense” as we call it—or else “gives it up.” If the riddle has been misstated, it is impossible to guess it. And this is the first great difficulty in what has been so long called the riddle of human life—it has been misstated. No wonder we have had to give it up. The value of that proper relation of ideas we call consistency is this: A brain with all its concepts in natural sequence and order transmits energy in a smooth, continuous stream. The brain with inconsistent concepts, lodged in thought-tight compartments, loses energy in cross-currents, contradictions, _culs-de-sac_; and the resultant conduct is weak and uncertain. Each root idea tends to modify conduct its way; and if the root ideas do not agree neither does the conduct. Often it results in mere inhibition—we see this act to contradict that—cannot reconcile them—and so do nothing. The basic concepts of early man were wrong. His observation was necessarily narrow, his deductions most partial, his whole position one of repeated errors, as is so generally true of all extreme youth. These errors of the undeveloped brain would have given way in course of normal development to better thinking, as the child’s missteps lead on to better walking, but for the ill-founded Grandpa theory.