ABSTRACT
The basic beliefs which shape our own common-sense world are, of course, rather different from those informing non-Western and pre-modern folk-lore. The latter are of an unashamedly 'religious', 'mystical', or 'metaphysical' character, while we 'wide-awake' modernists tend to blush at the very whisper of such ideas. Millstones sink more slowly when it is blancmange that they are being dropped into, but they reach the bottom in the end. And at the rock bottom is the old familiar world-taken-for-granted, the actual system of collective representations that we continually affirm. At the 'rock-bottom' is the commonly-taken-for-granted figuration of facts, which literally grounds a paradigm in a world of reality, of appearances. The vertices of the paradigm are the rules of responsibilities which keep the thoughts 'inside' from wandering off into forbidden regions. These are the 'proper channels', the commonly accepted notions about the correct ways of linking thoughts together.
