m the perusal of "Erbert" Spencer. Face to face
with chaos, one knows not where to begin the work of building up an
orderly mind; nor will the self-taught genius brook a hint of possible
ignorance, or endure the discussion of dull presuppositions, without
much pawing of the ground and champing on the bit: "What I want," he
says, "is a plain answer to a plain question." And when you explain to
him that for an answer he must go back very far and become a little
child again, and must unravel his mind to the very beginning like an
ill-knit stocking, he looks at once incredulous and triumphant as who
should say: "There, I told you so!" Yet the same critical incompetence
that makes these simple folk quite obtuse to the true and adequate
solution of their problems (I am speaking of cases where such solutions
are possible), makes them perfectly ready to accept any sort of
counter-sophistry or paralogism. A most excellent and genuine "convert"
of that class told me that he had stood out for years against the
worship of the Blessed Virgin, till one day it had occurred to him that,
as a cause equals or exceeds its effect, so the Mother must equal the
Son. Another, equally genuine, professed to have been conquered by the
reflection that he had all his life been saying: "I believe in the Holy
Catholic Church," and he could not see the use of believing in it if he
didn't belong to it. If their faith in Catholicism or in any other
religion depended on their logic, men of this widespread class were in a
sorry plight. Like many of their betters, these two men probably
imagined the assigned reasons to be the entire cause of their
conversion, making no account of the many reasonable though non-logical
motives by which the change was really brought about. Hence to have
abruptly and incautiously corrected them, would perhaps but have been to
reduce them to confusion and perplexity, and to "destroy with one's
logic those for whom Christ died."

That we do not sufficiently realize the dialectical incompetence of the
uneducated is partly to be explained by the fact that they often get
bits of reasoning by rote, much as young boys learn their Euclid; and
that they frequently seem to understand principles because they apply
them in the right cases, just as we often quote a proverb appropriately
without the slightest idea of its origin or meaning beyond that it is
the right thing to say in a certain connection. As we ascend in the
scale of educat