The next step is a very interesting one for the student of psychical
pathology to note. It seems to be a disease as native and universal to
the human mind as is the decay of the teeth to the human body. It seems
as though we all must suffer somewhat from it, and most of us suffer a
great deal from it, though in a cool aspect we easily perceive it to be
a lesion of thought. And this second step is as follows:

The whole lump having been given its sacred title and erected into an
infallible authority, which you are to accept as directly superior to
yourself and all personal sources of information, there is attributed to
this idol a number of attributes. We give it a soul, and a habit and
manners which do not attach to its stuff at all. The projection of this
imagined living character in our authority is comparable to what we also
do with mountains, statues, towns, and so forth. Our living
individuality lends individuality to them. I might here digress to
discuss whether this habit of the mind were not a distorted reflection
of some truth, and whether, indeed, there be not such beings as demons
or the souls of things. But, to leave that, we take our authority--this
thing "Science," for instance--we clothe it with a creed and appetites
and a will, and all the other human attributes.

This done, we set out in the third step in our progress towards fixed
error. We make the idol speak. Of course, being only an idol, it talks
nonsense. But by the previous steps just referred to we must believe
that nonsense, and believe it we do. Thus it is, I think, that fixed
error is most generally established.

I have already given one example in the hierarchic title "Science."