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The organic method is to relate each perception to those previously received. The brain is of its own nature logical. Impressions made upon it are sorted and stored in definite connection. This may be noted in ordinary conversation, as when the hearer discovers that the stream of talk he understood to concern Jane was really about Mary. “Oh!” says he, with a sense of physical un-ease as of one who has stepped down where there was no step, “I thought you were talking about Jane!” and there is a pause while he hastily pulls out all those statements from group “Jane” in his mind, and rearranges them in group “Mary.”

By this natural power of relating impressions, called consistency, we are able to form a connected scheme of things and work rationally thereunder. If any of these impressions are incorrect, it leads to further error; and if the false impressions be those of main importance, the whole fabric of mental association will be wrong.

Thus a belief in luck necessarily tends to underrate mere knowledge—study, accuracy. The woman who says she “has no luck with her bread” is not likely to go to a cooking school. Take the full extension of this same concept about luck—chance—fate—and you get fatalism, the logical consequence of which is seen in those backward and inert nations where it rules. They may make good fighters, but never good inventors—discoverers—creators; they endure life, but do not promote its development. Religious history gives us plenty of “awful examples” of the power of one radically wrong concept to fill the mind with error, and the world with blood and tears.