The boy, interested, demanded more of Pandora and the horrible creatures. “Is it a true story?” he asked when his father had given such further details as he managed to remember and invent. “Yes,” Theodore told him, “I believe it is a true story. It was so long ago that we cannot tell exactly how it happened: I may not have told it you quite rightly, but on the whole it is a true story.... And the wicked people—our wicked people who brought ruin on the world—were much like Pandora and her box. It was the same thing over again; they wanted to know so strongly that they forgot everything else; they had only the longing to find out and it seemed as if nothing else mattered.” “Weren’t they afraid?” the boy asked doubtfully, still puzzled by his father’s odd smile. “Afraid of what would happen to them?” “No,” Theodore answered. “Until it was too late and they saw what they had done, I don’t think many were afraid. Here and there, before the end, some began to be frightened, but most of them didn’t see where they were going.” “But they must have known,” his son insisted, frowning. “God told them He would punish them if they tried to learn His secrets.” “Yes,” Theodore assented—with the orthodox truth, more deceptive than a lie, that meant one thing to him and another to the world barbarian. “Yes, God told them so; but though He said it very plainly not many of them understood....” They were talking, he knew, across more than the gulf between the mind of a child and a man; between them lay the centuries, the barrier of many generations. To his son, now and always, dead and gone chemists and mathematicians must appear in the likeness of present evildoers—raiders of the territory and robbers of the property of God; to his son, now and always, inventors and spectacled professors in mortar-boards would be greedy, foolish chieftains who planned war against Heaven as a tribe plans assault upon its rivals. These were and must always be his “wicked,” his destroyers of the Golden Age; his life and outlook being what it was, how should he picture the war against Heaven as pure-hearted, instinctive and unconscious? “Why not?” the child persisted, repeating the question when his father stroked his head absently. “Because ... they did not know themselves. If they had known themselves and their own passions they would have seen why knowledge was forbidden.” “Yes,” said the child vaguely—and passed to the matter that interested him. “Why didn’t the others make them understand? You and the other good ones?” “Because,” said Theodore, “we ourselves didn’t understand. That was the blunder—the sin—of the rest of us. We didn’t seek after knowledge, but we took the fruits of other men’s knowledge and ate.” (Unconsciously he made use of the familiar hereditary simile.)