So far as the facts of
personality, of the environment and of memory are different, by so far
the rules of the code are difficult to apply with success. Now every
moral code has to conceive human psychology, the material world, and
tradition some way or other. But in the codes that are under the
influence of science, the conception is known to be an hypothesis,
whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the past or bubble up
from the caverns of the mind, the conception is not taken as an
hypothesis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted
without question. In the one case, man is humble about his beliefs,
because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is
dogmatic, because his belief is a completed myth. The moralist who
submits to the scientific discipline knows that though he does not
know everything, he is in the way of knowing something; the dogmatist,
using a myth, believes himself to share part of the insight of
omniscience, though he lacks the criteria by which to tell truth from
error. For the distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error,
fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of
credibility.
The myth is, then, not necessarily false. It might happen to be wholly
true. It may happen to be partly true. If it has affected human
conduct a long time, it is almost certain to contain much that is
profoundly and importantly true.
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