t. The inner meaning of things concerned them
very little. Their conception of cause and effect, or of the constancy
of nature, was rudimentary. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred," said
an old bricklayer of the village, baffled by some error in his
work--"ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll come right same as you
sets it out, but not always." Puzzles were allowed to be puzzling, and
left so; or the first explanation was accepted as final. The "mistis in
March" sufficiently accounted for the "frostis in May." Mushrooms would
only grow when the moon was "growing." Even with regard to personal
troubles the people were still as unspeculative as ever. Were they poor,
or ill? It merely happened so, and that settled it. Or were they in
cheerful spirits? Why, so they were; and what more could be said?

It was largely this simplicity of their mental processes that made the
older people so companionable. They were unaccustomed to using certain
powers of the brain which modern people use; nay, they were so unaware
of that use as to be utterly unsuspicious of such a thing. To be as
little psychological as possible, we may say that a modern man's thought
goes on habitually at two main levels. On the surface are the subjects
of the moment--that endless procession of things seen or heard or spoken
of which make up the outer world; and here is where intercourse with the
old type of villager was easy and agreeable. But below that surface the
modern mind has a habit of interpreting these phenomena by general
ideas or abstract principles, or referring them to imaginations all out
of sight and unmentioned; and into this region of thought the peasant's
attention hardly penetrated at all. Given a knowledge of the
neighbourhood, therefore, it was easy to keep conversation going with a
man of this kind. If you could find out the set of superficial or
practical subjects in which he was interested, and chatter solely on
that plane, all went well. But if you dipped underneath it amongst
fancies or generalizations, difficulties arose. The old people had no
experience there, and were out of their depth in a moment. And yet--I
must repeat it--we should be entirely wrong to infer that they were
naturally stupid, unless a man is to be called stupid because he does
not cultivate every one of his inborn faculties. In that sense we all
have our portion in stupidity, and the peasant was no worse than the
rest of us. His particular deficiency was as