Again, education has been likened to leaven. When it is honest it is very much like yeast. Before the culture is introduced the solution of ideas is in equilibrium. The mind has simply accepted what was poured into it by parents, teachers, priests, and politicians. In the solution there is reflected a compact, “still,” neatly ordered little system of knowledge. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” Duty is clear, all is conventionally arranged, truth is eternal and logic can prove it. Human rights are decreed by the founders of the republic. The course of destiny is disclosed to reason and faith and the promise sealed in divine revelation. At this stage, most minds are carefully sealed up or a prophylactic is stirred in, for if those sugary solutions are exposed to a live spiritual culture they begin to “work.” Then they are spoiled for certain purposes. With the fermentation there is sometimes foam and gas; but a chemical change is taking place, brewing a mind with a “kick” in it. It is interesting that bread and wine and education are all made by a similar process; hence an educational Volsteadism has often been enforced so that many of the best minds have had to be “home brewed.” Professor Dewey somewhere speaks of education as freeing the mind of “bunk.” It is a large task. No one wholly succeeds. I never saw a completely “debunked” individual. Strive as we may to eradicate it, there is always in our thinking an amount of error, of wish-fancy accepted as objective fact, of exaggeration, special pleading, self-justification. Many of our beliefs are not founded in reason at all, but are demanded by some unconscious and repressed impulse in our nature. Men make a virtue of their faith when in fact they are _victims_ of it; they can no more help believing certain things than a neurotic can stop a compulsive habit. It is said that it is easy to doubt and that to believe is an accomplishment. It is not so. It is easier to believe than to doubt. The things we must train ourselves to doubt are as a rule just the things we wish to believe. It is children and savages and the illiterate who have the most implicit faith. It is said that unbelief is sin. This is not so; it is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself. Nietzsche said that this trait is characteristic of “higher men.” It was Huxley, as I remember it, who considered that man could in nothing fall so low as when he deliberately took refuge in the absurd. Even with a rationalist like Huxley doubt is not merely a function of the intellect. Under certain circumstances it is a moral necessity.