What worries me is that common sense seems to be dwindling to the point of extinction. The minds of men whom our contemporaries consider educated are regressing to the level of the most ignorant peasant on a Mediaeval manor. There is something terrifying in the spectacle of men who hold degrees in the genuine sciences and assemble vast arrays of elaborate scientific equipment to “prove” the authenticity of a “Holy Shroud,” and thus make it necessary to assemble more equipment and conduct long and painstaking research to prove what any half-way educated and rational man would have known from the very first. And the same sotie is performed whenever some prestidigitator claims that he can bend spoons by thinking about them. Is there any limit to the gullibility of “highly qualified scientists”? I sometimes have a vision of scores of great scientists and tons of elaborate and very expensive laboratory equipment assembled about a pond into which they drop horsehairs to determine whether the percentage that turn into tadpoles is significant by the binomial formula. If hairs from Standard-breeds don’t work, get some from Appaloosas. Then try Percherons and Arabians: their hairs may make tadpoles better. And no one can say that the hairs of horses do not turn into tadpoles until you have made exhaustive scientific tests of hairs from every known breed of horses – and then someone will turn up to prove that the negative results are all wrong, because tadpoles come from the hairs of horses who eat the variety of four-leaved clover that grows in a hidden valley in Afghanistan, so the assembled scientists and their equipment will start all over.
