intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine
edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him,
and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce
him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer.



I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present
work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able
to embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of
hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional
handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas
before me, for I wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut
off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. Of their
unprecedented dislike for novelty in the domain of the intellect I
have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into
the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the
United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a
right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything--not only
in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters
of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen
who, in the face of an organized public clamour(usually managed by
interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan
B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief
railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the
municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron
Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in the town
Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes
such a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never
mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less