Her eager mind leaped at this. Here was a happy little formula. And at every succeeding specimen, whether a wolf or a puma or a walrus or a whale, with monotonous insistence she asked, “Is it real and stuffed?” To which I replied, each time, with patient repetition, “Yes, real and stuffed.” It satisfied her perfectly until we came to the figures of Indians and Eskimos. Here a new formula had to be devised, that they were “Not real, but made to look like it.” These trifling statements made the museum, for her, a rational and not too terrifying place. Once in a while, if you are fond of self-scrutiny, you will catch yourself in the very act of creating or parroting some useful formula. Formulæ swarm in the mind just as birds do in an orchard. And though they destroy some fruit, they also help to exterminate lesser vermin which might do much harm. For the most part we are all mercifully unaware of our dependence on them. Secondly, then, once formulæ are made, another subtle trick of the mind enters into function. Man’s sovereign faculty of pretense works upon them. He persuades himself that these little rites and short-cuts are not really made by himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s capacity for pretense, I dare say, has been the only thing that has kept him going in a rough, bruising world. He has found, throughout history, that the percolation of certain fictions into affairs made order and government more easy. Indeed the number of generally accepted fictions in currency is not such a bad test of civilization: the more such harmless pretenses, the pleasanter life is. The divine right of kings was one great fiction that had a long serial career and gradually tapered off. Oliver Cromwell “Garred kings ken they had a lith in their necks”; the Prince of Wales’s horses seem to have suggested the same thing. That adorable old shrew, Thomas Hobbes, whose wise and racy survey of human foibles might almost have made any subsequent palaver unnecessary, had people patience to read “Leviathan” nowadays, is copious in instance of men’s love of standing “in awe of their own imaginations.” We are all quick to believe anything, he remarks, from teachers who can “with gentleness and dexterity take hold of our fear and ignorance.” Whereas any truth, no matter how rationally arrived at, that counters our passion and interest, we naturally reject. “I doubt not but,” says the darling old cynic, “if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed.”