Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something suspiciously bovine about them. - J. B. Priestley

I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities. It is precisely the 'hard-headed and realistic' who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses. They serve prison sentences behind walls and doors they only imagine are there.

In our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.
On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse.

The very newspapers that celebrate the latest conquest in their largest print also keep asking us what is the matter with Woman nowadays, when she has so much she never had before. The answer is that she is tired of having to live with neurotic, immature conquerors.