B104

B103 <=> B105 [BTG XIII Fantasy perceived as reality, p. 104]

“But, as a matter of fact, when I was on that planet for the last time and, having heard of the said writer, once went myself especially to see him, on quite another matter, he was according to my understanding not only like all the other contemporary writers there, that is to say, extremely limited, and as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin would say: ‘able to see no further than his nose,’ but as regards any knowledge of the real psyche of the beings of his planet in real conditions, he might safely even be called ‘totally illiterate.’

“I repeat that the story of this writer is a very characteristic example showing the extent to which, in the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, particularly in the contemporary ones, the realization of ‘being-Partkdolg-duty’ is absent, and how their own subjective being-convictions formed by their own logical deliberations are never, as in general it is proper to three-brained beings, crystallized in them, but only those are crystallized which depend exclusively only upon what others say about the given question.

“It was only because they failed to realize ‘being-Partkdolg-duty,’ which realization alone enables a being to become aware of genuine reality, that they saw in the said writer some perfection of other which was not there at all.

“This strange trait of their general psyche, namely, of being satisfied with just what Smith or Brown says, without trying to know more, became rooted in them already long ago, and now they no longer strive at all to know anything cognizable by their own active deliberations alone.

“Concerning all this it must be said that neither the organ Kundabuffer which their ancestors had is to blame, nor its consequences which, owing to a mistake on the part of certain Sacred Individuals, were crystallized in their ancestors and later began to pass by heredity from generation to generation.

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