They spread wider and last longer, and by the time a society begins to meet the punishment due to the behaviour of its misguided constituents, those worthies have long since died in the odour of sanctity and a new generation is piously producing the incipient errors which will destroy its grandchildren. The vigour of our basic life processes sustains us through wide reaches of experiments and mistakes. A flourishing society can maintain more fools than any savage period could afford. We have to do in this book with several of the basic errors in our common concepts as to economics. We shall see how different are the facts of our economic life to-day from that inner world of concepts we carry in the brain and always take for facts while they remain there. The world is, to us, the sum of our concepts concerning it; and while the real facts relentlessly affect us, our supposed facts are of deadly importance because they modify our conduct. In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. They do not fit the facts; they are not provable as true, but very promptly provable as false; they do not agree with such true ideas as we have, nor even with each other; but all this gives no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies. In the face of every century’s accumulating facts of organic social relation we have peacefully maintained our original animal theory of individualism—the Ego concept. If bees had brains like ours, and the exquisitely organised modern bee could consciously maintain the state of mind of her remote prototype, the solitary bee, we might have some parallel to comfort our lonely height of foolishness. Well did the Greeks call an “idiot” the man who behaved as a separate individual and considered his personal advantage first. Consider the ruin and disorder of the hive if bees were “idiots.” That type of industry, of harmony, of peaceful wealth, could never have arisen under such misconception. We have many more root concepts, some basic, some collateral and derivative; all working, discordantly enough, against social progress. Several will be touched upon here; those most patently connected with the subject of the book, our Human Work. In pursuance of which subject it is necessary to lay down some of the facts as to the nature of society, its structure and functions; and to show how perverse, how inadequate, how deadly mischievous are the ancient theories which still stand in our minds in place of those facts. IV: SOME FALSE CONCEPTS _Summary_