The traditional superiority of the past, on the authority of statements open to no examination and no criticism, rapidly developed into ancestor worship and that whole great retroactive tendency of thought which is still so heavily dominant among us. In it we have deified inertia, as best instanced in China. Assuming that the crude theories of humanity’s youth were true, the brain tried to correlate them; to form some connected scheme of life based on such premisses. This was functionally impossible. No healthy brain could “make sense” of such postulates as these. As a consequence, normal brain action on such lines ceased. Abnormal brain action developed freely, its extreme being what we call fanaticism. Those who attended to the maintenance of ancient concepts soon found that any increase of mental activity led to the unsettling of their supposed truth; and so, with the best of intentions, used every possible means to discourage such activity. And as the average mind found itself forbidden to think on certain of the most important lines in life, and unable to think logically on such bases as were allowed, it simply accepted them as “unthinkable” and so admitted in the common stock of ideas these disconnected heaps of arbitrary statement. Our natural tendency to relate and connect our percepts and concepts in logical sequence, so as to form a rational collection agreeing with itself and with our behaviour, has been not only neglected but prevented; and this arbitrary disconnection of mental processes has been so thorough and universal that we have grown to expect what we call “inconsistency” in human action. Yet consistency is one of the brain’s most essential laws. We expect things to be consistent, we demand it. Talk disconnectedly to the most ordinary person and he soon cries, “What on earth are you talking about? I don’t see what that has to do with it!” And we all know how busy our brains are, trying to make out to ourselves that our own conduct is consistent. We are naturally consistent, but the unbroken centuries of violent insertion and compulsory retention of irreconcilable statements in the young brain have perverted natural action and trained us in an artificial inconsistency. This enforced maintenance of older concepts has for its result this: At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth. And as our conscious acts are modified by those ancient concepts, our acts are necessarily behind the times. Changing conditions constantly demand revision of the conduct of society, but if that conduct—so far as it is consciously ours—is based on unchanging ideas, there must be conflict. There has been, always. Take some well-known historic instance, as the French Revolution.