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Anyone who has followed the history of a particular science finds in its development a textbook case for understanding the oldest and commonest events in all "knowing and perceiving." There, as here, the rash hypotheses, the fabrications, the good, stupid will to "believe," the lack of suspicion and of patience develop first of all - our senses learn late and never learn completely to be subtle, true, and cautious organs of discovery. With a given stimulus, our eye finds it more comfortable to produce once more an image which has already been produced frequently than to capture something different and new in an impression. To do the latter requires more power, more "morality." To listen to something new is embarrassing and hard on our ears; we hear strange music badly. When we hear some different language, we spontaneously try to reshape the sounds we hear into words which sound more familiar and native to us: that's how, for example, in earlier times, when the German heard the word arcubalista he changed it into Armbrust  [arcubalista . . . Armbrust: crossbow ]. Something new finds our senses hostile and reluctant, and in general, even with the "simplest" perceptual processes, the emotions like fear, love, hate, including the passive feeling of idleness, are in control. - Just as a reader nowadays hardly reads the individual words (let alone the syllables) on a page - he's much more likely to take about five words out of twenty at random and "guess" on the basis of these five words the presumed sense they contain - so we hardly look at a tree precisely and completely, considering the leaves, branches, colour, and shape; we find it so very much easier to imagine an approximation of the tree. Even in the midst of the most peculiar experiences we still act in exactly the same way: we make up the greatest part of experience for ourselves and are hardly ever compelled not to look upon any event as "inventors." What all this adds up to is that basically from time immemorial we have been accustomed to lie. Or to express the matter more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: we are much more the artist than we realize. In a lively conversation I often see in front of me the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined according to the idea which he expresses or which I think has been brought out in him that this degree of clarity far exceeds the power of my ability to see: - thus, the delicacy of the play of muscles and of the expression in his eyes must be something I have made up out of my own head. The person probably had a totally different expression or none at all.