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Our disinclination to accept a statement which does not agree with those previously held is the brain’s physical rejection of an impression claiming to belong to a certain group, but finding no connection there. If forced to accept it as incontrovertibly true, we must then throw out all the others and wholly rearrange that group of concepts. This is where we say “Ah! that alters the case,” when some patent fact forces us to “change our minds.”

If forced to accept facts indisputably true, but as far as we can see irreconcilable, there can be no mental action whatever on that subject. They are held by force in the brain, but do not grow there and do not lead to any further grouping of concepts. This state of mind is familiar to the guessers of charades. “My first is this,” “my second is that”—“my whole is so and so”—and the brain seizes these detached assertions and seeks for some possible arrangement in which they will “make sense” as we call it—or else “gives it up.” If the riddle has been misstated, it is impossible to guess it. And this is the first great difficulty in what has been so long called the riddle of human life—it has been misstated. No wonder we have had to give it up.