The Non-Statistical Man by Raymond F. Jones Page B

“knew”.
    “Then you must also know that my own intuition has begun to function,” he said. “I didn’t understand what you were talking about before; now I do. I want to go along with you.”
    “I know that, too,” Magruder repeated, nodding. “I’ll be delighted to have you, of course. There is only one additional item we need mention: the price.”
    “You said nothing about price.”
    “When we talked before, you weren’t interested enough as a member of a statistical society. Your present job; it’s going to cost you everything that has value to you to warrant my quoting it. But now you need to know that your career as a statistician—”
    “I expected that.”
    “Your name; your position in the community; your home—everything, in fact, except your family. You have good fortune, indeed, in your wife.”
    Bascomb paled. “I don’t understand,” he murmured,. “You can’t; not now. Understanding will come later. The important thing is that you are ready to begin. You value sufficiently the power of intuition to be willing to pay the price of everything Statistical Society offers. There is no doubt about that, is there?”
    Bascomb looked across at the enigmatic Professor in staring silence. Nothing in his whole life had prepared him for so fantastic a conversation as this one. What did Magruder mean? How much did he actually know? If he could be so positive about some things, and yet have doubt about others, it was obvious he did not have hundred percent intuition. And one of the things he seemed not to know was Bascomb’s own private intentions in this matter. If that were true—and Bascomb felt almost certain of it—then this talk of a fantastic “price” was just that—fantastic.
    He had to gamble on it. He nodded his head slowly and said, “There is no doubt about it. I am ready to begin.” “Excellent!” exclaimed Magruder. He got to his feet energetically. “There are a good many things I have to show you. This indictment business is going to interfere considerably, and you can be a great help to me within a short time—”
    Hours later, Bascomb had a substantial lead in the direction he wanted to go. Magruder gave no sign of doubting Bascomb’s good faith, or sensing his real purpose.
    He explained the source of his medication—a small private capsule company—and gave Bascomb authority to place orders with a letter of introduction that would validate those orders. He admitted the false front of gobbledygook pseudo-scientific terms in his lectures.
    “That’s the way it has to be done,” he said confidentially. “The public would never swallow the actual facts. They’d rather have corporeal vibrations and ethereal streams, than try to understand that men made a mistake in the dawn of history which we now have to correct.”
    “But what kind of teaching is that?” Bascomb demanded in spite of himself. “How can they ever learn what intuition really is by such methods?”
    Magruder glanced sidewise at him. “How does a baby learn to see, or to smell, or to feel? Intuition’s like that. First order functions can’t be taught. They are blueprinted in the germ plasm from ages past, and the psyche reads the plans in the dark schoolroom of the womb. There, it learns how to make its own heart beat, and when it comes into the world, how its eyes are to function—and its lungs, stomach, and intuition. No—you don’t teach those things.”
    “But what do you do, then? Something happens—something happened to teach me how to use intuition.”
    “Did it? I think not. You learned how yourself—after I assisted in removing some of the obstacles imposed by a Statistical Society. The exercises free the imagery mechanisms of your mind, teach your body that it need not abhor certain inherent functions. The pills react biochemically to inhibit the fear component attached to these functions. A wholly artificial fear, you understand, which has been laboriously attached by