The Heritage of Ignorance
I
ARTEMUS WARD defined ignorance not as lack of knowledge but as ‘ knowing so many things that ain’t so.’ An acrid contention, it is not a little discouraging to those among us who are always stirred by the prospect of ever better and ever higher education. For if we accept the old humorist’s trenchant thrust as a statement of truth — and a closer consideration will show that accept it we must — we come to the conclusion that it is infinitely more difficult to dispel man’s ignorance than to impart knowledge.
In other words, if human ignorance consisted simply in a lack of information, our task as educators would be reduced to reciting clear-cut statements of fact which the ignorant would then learn, accept, and use. This is evidently not the case. What actually characterizes the process of education, sometimes more and sometimes less obviously, is a double procedure: first, we dispel the ‘ knowing so many things that ain’t so,’ and then, if this task be successfully completed, we embark upon the relatively simple business of imparting the new information. Frequently we encounter so many difficulties at the first stage that little or no time, strength, or opportunity is left for the second, and the battle for enlightenment is then temporarily lost or its victory postponed. History, always generous on this score, offers us a number of illustrations.
Aristarchus of Samos, the ‘Copernicus of Antiquity,’ about 250 B. C. originated the conception that the earth moves around the sun and not vice versa. Yet eighteen centuries later when Copernicus, on the basis of more solid fact and sounder thinking, arrived at the same conclusion he was in great danger of being tried as a criminal; Giordano Bruno, espousing the heliocentric theory, finally did lose his life in the bonfire of the Inquisition; and, almost nineteen centuries after Aristarchus, Galileo stood humiliated by the powers that be for propounding the same views. Old and blind, as if truly punished by the Lord for having looked into that devilish glass, his telescope, the construction of which he had perfected just before he lost his eyesight, Galileo left this world a convict of the Inquisition, with his immortal Dialogue buried under the heavy tombstone of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and not to be resurrected from the officially dead until one hundred and eighty years after his corporal death. As to the scientific conscience of Galileo, this was ordered to be eased by a weekly recitation of the seven penitential psalms for a period of three years.
Why all this? Obviously not because the contemporaries of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, or Galileo lacked the necessary information, but because they knew so many things that were n’t so. This state of ‘knowledge,’ actually a refractory, aggressive, and intolerant state of mind, frequently proves to be many times stronger (in brutal force, of course) than any curiosity, no matter how aggressive it may be, of scientific men.
It would be a mistake to dispose of this problem merely by saying that it is all a matter of the past, that the wellknown struggle between science and theology is not quite a fair illustration, that during the time of the Inquisition the world was uniquely pathological, and that now it is more or less cured of its ailment by the genius of Newton, Boyle, Darwin, Pasteur, and so forth. It would be a mistake even if we were totally to disregard the Hitlerian bonfires on which so many books have recently been burned. For without the red of the official fires, and without the scarlet of blood spilled for scientific discovery, ignorance is still as strangely persistent in modern times as it was many ages back.
Let us cite an instance. It is almost universally accepted to-day that Freud’s outstanding contribution to psychology is his discovery of the unconscious. By means of clinical illustrations, he demonstrated that man has an unconscious and that this unconscious plays a decisive rôle in the formation of mental diseases. Yet Paracelsus, at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, stated that it was foolish to assume that children possess no imagination and contended that certain mental diseases in children or adults are due to the unconscious activity of the imaginative faculty. It took not less than four hundred years before at least a few people acquiesced in the expression of this thought as it was rediscovered by Freud.
Another instance: when, at the close of the past century, Freud, fresh from the clinic of Charcot in Paris, presented to the Viennese Neurological Society his observation of hysteria in men, the presiding officer, a scholarly neurologist, permitted no discussion of the paper. Evidently Freud’s ‘ heretical ’ statement conflicted with tradition. Although Charles Lepois in the seventeenth and again Astruc in the eighteenth century made similar observations on hysteria in men, it seemed impossible even at the dawn of the present century to abandon the ‘ logical ’ view that hysteria is the monopoly of women — a traditional belief inherited from the Greeks. Twenty-five centuries ago the Greeks thought of the womb as a nomadic organ which traveled about the woman’s body and, when visiting parts where it did not belong, produced hyst-eria — a disease, therefore, which was inconceivable in man. This premise established, it functioned as one of Bacon’s ‘idols’ of human logic, a prejudice that has become unconscious and automatic and from which human minds have refused to budge.
Man has seldom found objection to the production of new practical and seemingly useful things, be it a new drug with which ‘to poison out disease as we smoke out vermin’ (the words are Oliver Wendell Holmes’s), a new vehicle, a new tool of destruction, or a new shoe-polishing gadget, but he seems always to have been bent on defending his ignorance by means of logic against the enlightenment which the discovery of scientific facts carries in its wake. Francis Bacon apparently had this in mind when he objected to the ‘fructiferous’ trends in science taking priority over the ‘luminiferous’ ones, which latter were and always are threatened with assassination by the hired man of the human mind — traditional logic. There is certainly a striking similarity between the president of the Viennese Neurological Society of almost yesterday and the professors of Padua about whom Galileo wrote to the astronomer Kepler: —
’I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or the moon, or my glass! Why must I wait so long before I can laugh with you? Kindest Kepler, what peals of laughter you would give forth, if you heard with what arguments the foremost philosopher of the University opposed me, in the presence of the Grand Duke, at Pisa, laboring with logic-chopping argumentations as though they were magical incantations wherewith to banish or spirit away the new planets (the satellites of Jupiter) out of the sky.’ (The translation is by Professor A. Wolf.)
Why the state of ‘ knowing so many things that ain’t so’ should exercise such a tyrannic censorship over the ’luminiferous ’ trends of man is a question which would require many tomes to answer, if any adequate answer is at all to be found. But if we acknowledge the fact that ignorance does exercise an automatic, almost invisible, though very real and effective censorship over man’s thoughts and activities, we have made a serious step forward. The powers that be, or, to borrow a phrase from Milton, the various ‘Franciscan and Dominican licensers,’ are not the cause of the perennial unfreedom of man’s thought, but rather they are expressions, corporal and institutional incarnations, of man’s own mysterious weakness. Hence we may say, paraphrasing another word of Milton about the Italians, that it is this weakness that has ‘dampt the glory of human wits.’
It is one of man’s propensities to look outward for the causes of his own weakness; we are all prone to see the obstacles to free acquisition of knowledge in the political strength of organized theology of the past, in the selfish ambitions of various political groups or military cliques of modern times, or in an individual — a Hitler or a Mussolini. Yet, if we could temporarily withdraw to some point of vantage, we might perhaps gain a perspective, otherwise sadly vitiated, and catch a glimmer that would suggest a possible answer to the question as to why humanity censors its thoughts at the very time that it appears to be ready to accept a new idea. Is there such a point of vantage? If there is, and if we are to find it, we must proceed with the utmost caution, to avoid stumbling into the pitfall where opinion is mistaken for fact, as the schoolman of the Middle Ages and the theologian of the Renaissance were wont to do.
II
When examples of our present-day ignorance were looked for, reference was made, not to astronomy or to physics, but to modern psychology. This choice was not dictated merely by the professional bias of the writer — a bias which undoubtedly influences one’s trend of thought —but was based rather on objective considerations. Psychology is very much in the mind of almost everyone to-day; in the drawing-room and at the dinner table, when we are not discussing communism, fascism, and the next war, we are chattering about Freud, or any of the hybrids of psychoanalysis. Philosophers, medical men, industrialists, mathematicians, salesmen, or chemists all tend nowadays to drift into a palaver on human behavior from marriage to murder, from the psychology of propaganda and salesmanship to love or the chemical reactions which supposedly underlie man’s mental activity and social behavior. There is little doubt that we live in what might be called a psychological age, even though it does appear that our chief practical interests rest in industry and mechanics. Every period of human history has its point of cultural emphasis: the Greeks were preoccupied with the problem of rational, logical philosophy; the late Middle Ages with a synthesis between sophistry and revelation, then with witchcraft, and finally with theology as opposed to a special type of heresy we now call science; the slogan of the eighteenth century was pure reason, until the close of the nineteenth century it was science, and now since the opening of the twentieth century it is psychology (primarily social).
Every important period of history has also had its own ‘enemy,’ psychologically speaking. The Greeks had theirs, as did the Dominican Friars of the fifteenth century, Aristotle had to flee possible prosecution and he left Athens ’lest injury be done to philosophy’; the slowly moving centuries which succeeded Imperial Rome fought vigorously the demonstration of any new fact that was not revealed or not properly deduced by means of a perverted Aristotelian logic. To-day, driven by the inertia of science of matter, we are apparently unable to find a place for what we loosely call the human psyche. On the one hand, we seem to have become totally liberated from the chains of authoritarian theological science: we are neither frightened nor repelled by the discovery of a new planet, the theory of relativity, the stratosphere or television. We hail new discoveries as corroborations of the greatness of man — that is, ourselves. On the other hand, we are still as puzzled as we were in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, if not more so, by the problem of the soul. At the height of the Renaissance, curiosity was awakened to the immense temerity of attempting (from Cornelius Agrippa to John Locke) to penetrate the mystery that surrounded the question of the soul, but with tradition exclaiming ‘Noli me tangere!‘ the scientist was driven to anatomy, astronomy, chemistry, or physics — all virginal fields which appeared safer than that which was later to become known as psychology. It would seem, as someone has said, that we are still in the period of Renaissance, that we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to what was begun four and five centuries ago. True, we have developed what some day promises to deserve the name of scientific psychology and a medical specialty called psychiatry, but we are none the less groping in the dark. We still wonder where and what this soul is (we call it psyche to-day, or the psychic apparatus) for which we search in the test tube, in the electric responses of a frog’s leg, in the brain tissue, in various glands. We seem to shy off looking directly at the psychic reactions of man; rather (and perhaps therefore) do we labor under the misconception that either the psyche is none of our business or it does not exist at all. We work in our laboratories as if chemical reactions were all that existed, and the psyche were something material, some chemical substance, a sort of ectoplasm.
In this almost universal trend it is not difficult to detect an old, essential prejudice. We seem unable to divest ourselves of this assumption which, impressive merely because it is couched in the respectable terms of such earnest scientific disciplines as chemistry, physiology, or anatomy, makes the development of modern medical psychology so difficult and arouses so many passions where psychological or psychiatric problems are involved. Yet, paradoxically, psychiatry as a topic grows daily in popularity and the problem of human psychology holds the centre of interest while everyone looks everywhere — into the stomach, the brain, the glands — except into the human mind (the psyche) for a solution to his various problems, if a man is sad, dejected, anxious, he is offered a change of air, sedative pills, a change of scenery, or the admonition ‘ Get hold of yourself’ to cure him of something which has nothing to do with the seashore, veronal, golf, or that metaphysical rather than scientific concept — free will.
As one peruses old medical books and compares those of Hippocrates with the books of later centuries and even many of to-day, one is impressed by the sameness of advice, despite the fact that the explanations offered for using the same remedies have changed and the general approach to a disease has taken on the cast of greater authority through the use of more precise scientific terminology. One is impressed by the invisible tradition of ‘knowing so many things that ain’t so.’ Thus even to-day the woman who feels out of sorts and somewhat tense, is restless and physically below par, says that she is feeling ‘bilious’ and proceeds to take a cathartic or a ‘ liver pill.’ She is not aware that in doing so she faithfully follows the prescription of the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, who twenty-five centuries ago considered the seat of the soul to be in the liver and the black bile, therefore, the cause of sadness — hence melancholia or atrabilia. This invisible tradition gradually crystallized toward the close of the fifteenth century into the following authoritative and incontrovertible principle: The soul is by definition perfect and immortal; hence, it is invulnerable, inviolable; hence, it cannot be sick, because to be sick means to become imperfect, and what is perfect by definition cannot become imperfect through accident; hence again the simple conclusion: since the soul is perfect and can never be sick, it is never sick. The body alone can become sick, and it is the body that should be treated. In other words, let the domicile of the psyche (the body) be in good condition and the psyche will take care of itself, as it always does by definition and not through demonstration. This led to the acceptance, some four hundred years ago, of the principle that a patient in whom physical remedies and drugs were of no avail, or in whom a mental illness appeared to be chronic (that is, incurable), was not sick, but possessed by, or sold out to, the Devil.
This sounds ludicrous to the modern ear. Yet not more than seventy-five years ago the same principle was still advocated by the leaders of the medical profession (the Devil, of course, was no longer in the vocabulary of the learned gentlemen), and to-day in many quarters it has changed only to the extent that the discussion of the basic invulnerability of the soul has been dropped. We still proceed along the same purely anatomo-physiological lines, or such poor substitutes as vague economico-sociological considerations. When those who attempted to establish a scientific psychiatry on a broader basis started to study the psyche as any other natural phenomenon, and came finally to the conclusion that a great number of neuroses and severer forms of mental diseases are curable by psychological methods, they were met with what amounted to derision. In many respects American psychiatry has advanced much further than European, yet only recently, in a leading American publication devoted to psychiatry, an article appeared under the title, ‘The Cult of Curability’—an obvious even though oblique admission that in matters pertaining to the psyche we may not speak of curability. Thus it should be clear that our ignorance of the human psychic apparatus has been and in many respects still is based on a traditional misconception, as it were, invisibly inherited and tenaciously although perhaps unwittingly followed, obviously to the detriment of our genuine knowledge.
Apparently, the old principle ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ has still a great fascination for men, though it obscures their vision. While it is true that there are some few mental diseases which are due to bodily disintegration, we should not overlook the very healthy mind of a Herbert Spencer, who suffered from a painful physical disease most of his productive life, or the sanguinary and criminal psychopathy of a Henry VIII, who enjoyed the health of the proverbial horse. It is this traditional misconception that not only has kept psychopathology out of scientific medicine — or led medicine to turn a cold shoulder to true psychopathology — but has also delivered most of the psychological problems from time immemorial to the priest of the primitive temple, to the priest of the church, to the philosopher, to the charlatanic layman, to the questionable proponent of the ‘commonsense’ doctrine, or to the journalistic commentator on everyday events. This is the reason why the philosopher Kant, sincerely believing that the great pioneer of public health, Hufeland, was quite out of order when he was interested in mental disease, urged him to leave the mentally sick in the hands of the philosophers. It is for the same reason that the present-day layman accepts without resistance the advice of a surgeon or an internist in matters of physical disease while he counters almost every suggestion of the psychiatrist with a ‘logical,’ ‘commonsense,’ ‘rational’ theory of his own. We do seem to avoid systematically learning the true psychological facts, preferring the traditional knowledge of things that ain’t so.
We can now say that the first prerequisite to finding our point of vantage is getting rid of an assumption to which we have been clinging, either openly with the support of formal logic, or inferentially with the support of our silent but efficacious prejudices. We must realize that the human being for some reason — which reason we may never know — inwardly assumes that what exists, or what he thinks exists, is unalterable. It is this assumption, dictated by an inner human need, which aroused the opposition against Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo. Galileo pleaded with the objectors of his day, attempting to explain to them that the marvels, the beauty, the mystery, and the glory — in short, the perfection that is our world was in no way impaired when one recognized its changeability. Galileo’s pleadings were of no avail because in those days it was as difficult for man to admit of a change in the relationship between celestial bodies as it is to-day to admit that what we call human psyche is a natural phenomenon which can be subjected to analysis, to a cold consideration of its biological nature, and that such a study would in no way impair the greatness of human religion or the genius of a Shakespeare, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, or an Einstein.
It is not necessary to outline here the methods of such a study or the findings which it yields. What is important is plainly to realize that what we call human mind is merely a biological characteristic of the Homo sapiens, that therefore it is the subject of a number of natural laws rather than master of these, and that what we call mind is not our intellect alone, but all our feelings, conscious and unconscious, all the inner drives which guide our thinking.
Let us look at a certain species of termites, the Eutermes. This has a subspecies called the syringe termite or the nasicornus. The nasicornus, without eyes and without ears, possesses only a syringe-like nose for the bulk of its head, yet is the most efficient defensive soldier of the community. As Maeterlinck has informed us, by means of this formation on, or in place of, their heads these termites ‘project on their foes from a distance of two centimetres — at a guess, for they have no eyes — a sticky liquid which paralyzes them, and which the ant, their immemorial enemy, dreads even more than the mandibles of the other soldiers; this elaborate weapon, a kind of perambulating artillery, is so markedly superior to the other that it enables one of these termites, the Eutermes monoceros, to organize expeditions in the open, notwithstanding its blindness, and to make sorties en masse by night in order to collect from the trunks of coconut trees the lichen of which it is so fond. A curious magnesium photograph, taken by E. Bugnion in Ceylon, shows an army on the march, flowing like a brook for many hours between two rows of smartly lined-up soldiers who have their syringes turned outwards, so as to frighten the ants away.’
Evidently, in its process of evolution the community of termites was led to develop (to invent) a particular mode of self-defense, a special poison gas. Man also boasts of such an invention. The fact that in order to achieve it man had to use his mind, the science of chemistry, and the complex armamentarium of his technological equipment may be looked upon as another method of biological adaptation. There are those who feel, perhaps, that this reduces man to the level of a termite and therefore casts aspersions on his inventiveness, his scientific genius, and what not; there are others, however, who would feel that man’s greatness is not impaired a whit if his scientific and social functioning is regarded as a highly specialized expression of development according to biological laws.
What interests us here is not the ethico-sociological implications of the fact, but the scientific value of understanding human beings. Such an approach helps us, first, to rid ourselves of the assumption that the human psyche is more perfect than the human body, and, second, permits us to inquire boldly into the mental mechanisms which are at play when man thinks, feels, or acts. This is exactly what modern psychology based on psychoanalysis does. Known in this country under various euphemistic labels, such as dynamic psychology, psychodynamics, or deeper psychology, modern psychology deals empirically and pragmatically with the problems of the human psyche; it studies the psychology of the child and of the primitive man not, as has been done for ages, in order to see how much more intelligent we are than the babe, nor how much more clever we are than the Papuan, but in order to find which psychological forces we civilized grown-ups have in common with the babe and the savage. This is also the method used by the medical or biological research worker who studies rats, guinea pigs, and monkeys in order to see what physiological characteristics man has in common with them.
Here, then, is our point of vantage, the foothold we were seeking from which to observe the causes that ‘dampt the glory of human wits’ and led humanity to defend its ignorance with a vehemence far greater than that with which it has ever fought for genuine knowledge.
Let us turn to a few specific illustrative considerations.
III
A small boy, three years of age, sits with his parents in the rear seat of an automobile, obviously enthusiastic about the sensations caused by the motion of the car. The countryside is hilly and the road follows the curves of the landscape. Each time the car begins to climb or descend the boy exclaims, ‘A hill!’ A sudden rather steep descent, and the passengers, the boy included, instinctively throw themselves backward to counteract the downward pull. ‘It is a strong hill!‘ exclaims the boy. Just as the biologist learned to see many a mystery of life in the microscopic dots and filaments observed in a single living cell, so does the psychologist see in this amusing exclamation of a tot of three many a mystery of the human mind. By what singular twist of primitive imagination did the boy arrive at the conclusion that the hill was ‘strong’? He obviously measured the strength of the hill by the effort he was forced to make to keep his body balanced in a vertical sitting position; he had to use strength and objectivized this strength by endowing the hill with the property which he himself possessed; he projected his strength into the hill. We call this mental mechanism projection.
This single mechanism enters into incalculable normal and abnormal human reactions. Should a person be the bearer of unusual charges of hatred and aggression of which he himself is afraid, he frequently becomes unaware of his own hatred and hostility and seeks in the outside world the causes of his discomfort — that is, he projects his hostility outward. If he carries his projections too far he develops persecutory delusions: people don’t like him, they look at him in a queer fashion, detectives are after him, somebody wants to kill him, the whole world is against him. There is as little essential psychological difference between such a severe case of paranoia and the boy’s ‘strong’ hill as there is chemicophysiological difference between the normal sugar content of the blood and severe diabetes.
Man thus projects not only his efforts and apprehensions but also his aspirations. Idealizations, dreams of perfection, the great variety of elaborated conceptions of Heaven and Hell, the deeply seated belief in immortality, the profound faith in a better future of business, state, or humanity, are all magnificent or tragic offsprings of the primitive mentality which utilizes the mechanism of projection. In itself it is a natural manifestation of man’s drive to master and to reconstruct the world; depending upon various psychological contingencies, it is this mechanism which leads the individual to become a Napoleon or a chronic dementia prœcox.
Let us look into another curious and yet quite ordinary mental mechanism. A baby who sucks its thumb when not fully satisfied with the bottle has found a substitute for the bottle; it displaces the feeling it has for the bottle to the thumb. This simple and universal phenomenon demonstrates the mechanism of displacement. The primitive mind displaces some of its fears to small things and thus endows them with magic meanings. Vicissitudes of life complicate the picture in the adult, but the propensity to displace feeling from one thing to another persists. Our language recognizes this in the expression ‘taking it out on the dog.’ The disgruntled salesman who has been reprimanded for inefficiency by his boss remains obediently silent, but the anger which he dare not vent against the boss accumulates and finally breaks through at the lunch counter when he curses at the man who serves him an allegedly unpalatable sandwich. The salesman displaces his anger to the waiter, not deliberately, but automatically and, he honestly believes, justifiably. He did not say to himself, ’I cannot tell the boss where to get off, but I shall tell it to the waiter in the lunchroom.’ It is an unconscious combination of displacement and projection, as if to say, ‘I am not inefficient; it is the waiter!‘
The frequency with which a human being automatically looks into the outside world to find material to justify his own state of mind is obvious from this last example. Our poor salesman is actually convinced that the sandwich is not good; without this conviction he would be unable to find the proper outlet for his anger against his boss — an outlet which in his own mind is valid and acceptable. In other words, he rationalizes.
The number of different mental mechanisms is large enough to produce complex and variegated combinations of human reactions. However, on the basis of the two mechanisms which have been outlined here, it is not difficult to see that human knowledge finds its greatest enemy in that inner perception of one’s needs which the individual projects and displaces to the outside world. Since these projections and displacements come from the very depth of man’s emotional needs, they carry with them a sense of incontrovertible conviction which is not easy to shatter. These displacements and projections weave themselves into endless postulates and opinions. They are man’s own inventions, they are what the psychiatrist calls fantasies coming from the unconscious emotions and are created with extraordinary condensed spontaneity. Strangely enough, these fantasies color, influence, and frequently dominate and control the intellect whose supposed function is to control them. Thus ‘knowledge of so many things that ain’t so’ is born, nurtured, developed, and clung to with all the tenacity which is characteristic of a biological need. It is this perverted need that real knowledge seeks to combat. Hence the perennial conflict within man between fact and fancy, a conflict which comprises civilization, science, mental disease, war, revolutions, religion, and philosophy.
Man is therefore chiefly interested in scientific investigation of material nature, since this helps him not only to gratify his curiosity but — and this primarily — to gratify through the outside world his own fantasy of and aspiration for mastery and omnipotence. It is quite evident that he is least of all capable of using his own emotions and his own sense of weakness as the subject matter for his own scientific study, for he cannot relinquish the conviction that his own projected fantasies are realities, and he cannot give up the fantasy of his own perfection, of having been created in the Lord’s own image. Realizing how man combines his selfaggrandizement with projections and unwittingly repeating a thought of Saint Augustine, Voltaire remarked: ‘If it is true that the Lord created man in His own image, man returned the compliment.’ That is why matters psychological have been bound up throughout the history of humanity with magic, revelation, religion, and speculative philosophy, and that is why there has been and still is so much opposition to psychiatry and particularly to psychoanalysis.
Real knowledge, then, begins only with man’s realization of his own imperfection. Instead of realizing it, man projected his fantasy of perfection into the universe and found himself laboring under the concept of preëstablished harmony, a concept which Oliver Wendell Holmes once called a contrivance of the philosopher Leibnitz. It is this projection that kept psychology as its own untouchable property, building up a gigantic heritage of ignorance — a heritage held so jealously in trust by this ‘contrivance ’ that it did not begin to totter until psychopathology entered upon ‘the morning of its medical life’ in our own days.