Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are
conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and modern
fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than men were in
the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of fortunetellers, magicians,
miracle workers, agents of communication with the dead, discoverers of
the elixir of life, transmuters of metals, and healers of all sorts, as
the Middle Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we will not take
our miracles in the form that convinced the Middle Ages. Arithmetical
numbers appealed to the Middle Ages just as they do to us, because they
are difficult to deal with, and because the greatest masters of numbers,
the Newtons and Leibnitzes, rank among the greatest men. But there are
fashions in numbers too. The Middle Ages took a fancy to some familiar
number like seven; and because it was an odd number, and the world was
made in seven days, and there are seven stars in Charles's Wain, and for
a dozen other reasons, they were ready to believe anything that had a
seven or a seven times seven in it. Seven deadly sins, seven swords
of sorrow in the heart of the Virgin, seven champions of Christendom,
seemed obvious and reasonable things to believe in simply because they
were seven. To us, on the contrary, the number seven is the stamp of
superstition. We will believe in nothing less than millions. A medieval
doctor gained his patient's confidence by telling him that his vitals
were being devoured by seven worms. Such a diagnosis would ruin a modern
physician. The modern physician tells his patient that he is ill because
every drop of his blood is swarming with a million microbes; and the
patient believes him abjectly and instantly. Had a bishop told William
the Conqueror that the sun was seventy-seven miles distant from the
earth, William would have believed him not only out of respect for the
Church, but because he would have felt that seventy-seven miles was
the proper distance. The Kaiser, knowing just as little about it as
the Conqueror, would send that bishop to an asylum. Yet he (I presume)
unhesitatingly accepts the estimate of ninety-two and nine-tenths
millions of miles, or whatever the latest big figure may be.