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SUPERSTITION UNIVERSAL: Just as, up to a point, each man's filth smells sweetly to him alone, so, likewise, does each nation's superstitions appear feasible to it alone, the religious beliefs of certain other nations appearing little more than childish by comparison. Yet people are everywhere 'the double and equal of man', to cite Baudelaire, and thus prone to the creation or maintenance of similar religious hypotheses themselves, if for no other reason than their common humanity.

Now occasionally it happens that a religiously-inclined individual actually 'sees through' the play of illusions he had previously taken for truths, that he becomes disillusioned with the superstitions of his community and, without fully realizing that people are everywhere alike, anxious to compensate himself for this loss by adopting what he then considers to be the superior and more rational beliefs of another nation. So off he goes, with a distinctly supercilious air, to the fresh pastures of Oriental, African, or Latin American superstition, much consoled by the assumption that he has 'seen through' the superstitions of his native land and, as a reward for this, is now about to embark upon the study of a superior culture.

But to just what do you suppose all this will lead? Either he will become disillusioned with the new beliefs or, what's worse, fall a prey to them. And if the latter, then rest assured that his understanding of human nature, with its rational/irrational oscillations, will remain forever incomplete.