Why in Man’s Reason Fantasy May Be Perceived as Reality

CHAPTER XIII

Why in Man’s Reason Fantasy May Be Perceived as Reality

MY DEAR and kind Grandfather, be so kind as to explain to me, if only in a general way, why those beings there are such that they take the ‘ephemeral’ for the Real.”

To this question of his grandson, Beelzebub replied thus:

“It was only during later periods that the three-brained beings of the planet Earth began to have this particularity in their psyche, and just this particularity arose in them only because their predominant part, which was formed in them as in all three-brained beings, gradually allowed other parts of their total presences to perceive every new impression without what is called ‘being-Partkdolg-duty’ but just merely as, in general, such impressions are perceived by the separate independent localizations existing under the name of being-centers present in the three-brained beings, or, as I should say in their language, they believe everything anybody says, and not solely that which they themselves have been able to recognize by their own sane deliberation.

“In general, any new understanding is crystallized in the presence of these strange beings only if Smith speaks of somebody or something in a certain way; and then if Brown says the same, the hearer is quite convinced it is just so and couldn’t possibly be otherwise. Thanks merely to this particularity of their psyche and to the fact that the said writer was much spoken about in the said manner, most of the beings there at the present time are quite convinced that he is indeed a very great psychologist and has an incomparable knowledge of the psyche of the beings of his planet.

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