"I dismissed all interest in public affairs, and have regarded them ever since as a mere spectacle, mostly a comedy, rather squalid, rather hackneyed, whereof I already knew the plot from beginning to end. "
How was it, for example, that I could find no shred of respectable evidence that psychically the masses of mankind had budged a single peg in six thousand years?
Again, what about the enormous psychical “spread” between Socrates, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Akka, the Australian bushman?