coherent sense; which _stets verneint_
the conclusions, and even the axioms, which are clear as day to us; and
is a 'knowledge of evil' side by side with the knowledge of good.

But examples of this 'primitive thought', when we come to analyse them,
all seem to resolve themselves into one or other of the ordinary sorts
of fallacy, as our own logic-books expound them. If the study of them
proves anything at all, it is the familiar aphorism that, while there is
only one right way of doing and thinking, there are countless ways of
going wrong. Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) that
the world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages of
reason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was no
word either for the devil or for sin in their language. For the Greek
all human wrongdoing came under the one simple category of [Greek:
hamartia], 'making a mistake', or better 'making a miss'. It is the
slang of target-practice, for the correlative [Greek: otochazein], used
of all happy guesses at truth, is likewise only the word for '_aiming_
straight'.

But why make mistakes? Why these failures of co-ordination between
design and execution, between nature's truth and man's theory and
practice? Why this declining from the best into sloppy or antiquated
work, to name only two main sorts of technological fallacy? Again the
answer comes down, past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist. It is only
in superficial appearance that 'though reason is common to all, most men
live as if they had a way of thinking of their own',[5] Heraclitus'
momentary despair anticipating Levy-Bruhl almost verbally. Once
penetrate, with Heraclitus himself, below the surface, and 'all men have
it in them to understand themselves and to think straight'.[6] It is
failure to think, not some distinct and illogical sort of thinking, that
is the cause of the trouble: the lapse of that 'organized common sense'
which is the content of all 'science'.

Such disorganization of common sense, 'idiotic' thinking, in the
Heraclitan sense of an [Greek: idia phronesis], can be as cumulative,
fallacy on fallacy, and as elaborately wrong, as the fabric of knowledge
is cumulatively and elaborately right. 'Hath this man sinned, or his
parents, that he was born blind?' That is the tragedy of primitive
culture: for the brains are there and the eyes; only they have never
seen anything straight, because in the world they were bred up in