Joseph Jastrow

“ It is well, at least occasionally, to remember that our conceptions of science and of truth, of the nature of logic and of evidence, are not so universally held as we unreflectingly assume or as we hopefully wish. Almost every one of the fundamental, basal, and indisputable tenets of science is regarded as hopelessly in error by some ardent would-be reformer. One Hampden declares the earth to be a motionless plane with the North Pole as the centre; one Carpenter gives a hundred remarkable reasons why the earth is not round, with a challenge to the scientists of America to disprove them ”

“ From this survey of the methods by which opinion comes to be established and disseminated, we emerge with an appreciation of how it arises that the history of belief—not unlike history in general—is an affair of war and peace; that it deals, on the one hand, with the accounts of the warfare of the scientific method with its rivals, and, on the other, with the internal development, the institutional absorption, and the colonization of its own spirit among outlying cultures. “Logic,” Mr. White reminds us, “is not history. History is full of interferences which have cost the earth dear. ”

“ The weakness, alike of education and of psychology is, in Dr. Hall's opinion, largely due to the comparative neglect of those interests that the study of adolescence discovers and illuminates. Education and psychology are in danger of becoming scholastic because they are fashioned too much in the study and by the book, and reflect too little knowledge of the world and of the byways as well as of the highways of life. It is, after all, but a small part of psychology that can profitably concern itself with how the mental processes of the adult consciousness can best be presented and explained. ”

“ Across a gap of twenty centuries it finds the touch of nature that renders the whole world kin, and repeats approvingly the sentiment of Lucian: “To defend one’s mind against these follies a man must have an adamantine faith, so that, even if he is not able to detect the precise trick by which the illusion is produced, he at any rate retains his conviction that the whole thing is a lie and an impossibility.” ”

“ It would be a most dangerous principle to admit that the treatment of disease and the right to ignore hygiene can become the perquisite of any religious faith. It would be equally unwarranted to permit the principles which are responsible for such beliefs to take shelter behind the ramparts of religious tolerance, for the essential principles of Christian Science do not constitute a form of Christianity any more than they constitute a science; but, in so far as they do not altogether elude description, pertain to the domain over which medicine, physiology, and psychology hold sway. ”

“ Eagle-like, this system spreads its wings and soars free from the bonds of sense or earth-bound realities, free from human logic and the errors of mortal mind, free from the material impediments which the Author of nature has inconsiderately set in our paths, free to make things so by thinking them so, free to set method and learning and experience at naught. ”

“ It is particularly the obligation of the torch-bearers of science to illuminate the path of progress, and to transmit the light to their successors with undiminished power and brilliancy; the flame must burn both as a beacon-light to guide the wayfarer along the highways of advance, and as a warning against the will-o'-the-wisps that shine seductively in the by-ways. ”

“ It thus seems proper to speak of the combined logical and psychological weaknesses that tend to the acceptance of unreal evidence and of irrelevant explanation as credulity; and the problem of problems, alike in the voyages of discovery and in everyday cruising on waters great and small, is to equip the pilot so that he may steer his course by right belief and not by credulity. The intellectual mariner’s compass, for all purposes alike, is the method of science; but none the less pilotage is an art. ”

“ The Khondi sets up the iron arrow of the war god in a basket of rice, and judges from its standing upright that war must be kept up also, or from its falling that the quarrel may be let fall too; and when he tortures human victims sacrificed to the earth goddess he rejoices to see them shed plentiful tears, which betoken copious showers to fall upon his land. ”

“ In an age when many marvelous things have been accomplished, some of them on the surface as unexpected and as unconnected with other knowledge, indeed as seemingly contradictory of such knowledge, as the ostensible miracles and startling paradoxes that are paraded as demonstrable truth, it is natural enough that the man in the street should be bewildered and not know what to believe nor whom to believe. ”

“ It is well enough in shaping your ideas to hitch your wagon to a star, yet the temporary utility of horses need not be overlooked; but shooting arrows at the stars is apt to prove an idle pastime. If we are willing to forget for the moment that the same development of logic and experiment that makes possible the mental and material equipment of the modern chemist, makes impossible his consideration of the alchemist's search, we may note how far the inherent constitution of the elements, to say nothing of their possible transmutation, has eluded his most ultimate analysis. ”

“ On the other hand, the men of books and apparatus are charged with the pursuit of fads, of a contempt for journals and ledgers, of an ignorance of business ways, and an incapacity to deal executively with men and things. The truth is that there are all shades and grades of men in both careers; and the important things to be observed are tendencies and their causes, not individuals and their peculiarities. It is these tendencies that are reflected in opinion and conduct indirectly, and directly in the relations that are entertained and acted upon, of theory to practice. ”

“ Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease—Disease, sin, evil, death, deny Good, omnipotent God, Life."
"What is termed disease does not exist." "Matter has no being." "All is mind." "Matter is but the subjective state of what is here termed mortal mind." "All disease is the result of education, and can carry its ill effects no farther than mortal mind maps out the way." ”

“ As if the fact of taking a broader and wiser view than the common crowd disqualifies a man from knowing what the view of the common crowd happens to be, and from estimating it at the proper value for practical purposes.” These various opinions, when judiciously strained, leave a weighty deposit of truth; and they have a direct bearing upon the issues of right and wrong belief. ”

“ True seeing, observing, is a double process, partly objective or outward—the thing seen and the retina,—and partly subjective or inward—the picture mysteriously transferred to the mind's representative, the brain, and there received and affiliated with other images. Illustrations of such seeing with the "mind's eye" are not far to seek. Wherever the beauties and conformations of natural scenery invite the eye of man, does he discover familiar forms and faces; the forces of nature have rough-hewn the rocks, but the human eye detects and often creates the resemblances. ”

“ To complete the collection of types of credulity, we should have an instance in which a system of interpretation of facts—not a mere narrative—in itself startling and contradictory to ordinary experience, gains widespread credence, and that in spite of pronounced inconsistency with verifiable observation and common sense. These conditions are remarkably well satisfied by the recent promulgation of the doctrines of Christian Science. Even in this field of intellectual effort the land of the free and the home of the brave has contributed an article worthy to compete with the foreign product. ”

“ Certainly the waves of popularity of one cult and another reflect the potent influence of contagion in the formation of opinion and the guidance of conduct. When we look upon the popular delusions of the past through the achromatic glasses which historical remoteness from present conditions enables us to adjust to our eyes, we marvel that good and great men could have been so grossly misled, that obvious relations and fallacies could have been so stupidly overlooked, that worthless and prejudiced evidence could have been accepted as sound and significant. ”

“ Neither the logical requirements of philosophical thought nor the actualities of the practical life, when rightly interpreted, appear to be seriously antagonistic to—indeed are wholly compatible with—the absorption of the principles rooted in the scientific analysis of belief. This infusion of the blood of science permeates the organic structure of the belief-attitude, and creates a sturdy affinity for right belief and a deep-seated aversion for the intellectual manners that error, attractive to credulity, is apt to bear. ”

“ It is one thing to be open-minded, and to realize the incompleteness of scientific knowledge, and to appreciate how often what was ignored by one generation has become the science of the next; and it is a very different thing to be impressed with coincidences and dreams and premonitions, and to regard them as giving the keynote to the conceptions of nature and reality, and to look upon science as a misdirected effort. Such differences of attitude depend frequently upon a difference of temperament as well as upon intellectual discernment. ”

“ Important periods in the history of science are as likely to be characterized by changes in attitude towards the accepted body of knowledge, as by the extension of its realm through new discoveries. The contrast between the undeveloped and the advanced stages of a science is as well realized by noting the totally different mode in which facts are viewed, as by observing the vast increase in the range of recorded fact. The alchemist and the chemist have far more in common in the way of operations and material than in their conceptions of the purposes and the method of their pursuits. ”

“ There is no obligation resting upon the physicist any more than upon the psychologist to make large sacrifices for the pursuit of ill-defined residual phenomena, and certainly not for the refutal of far-fetched theories and suggested supernatural notions. Physicist and psychologist alike contribute most to the advancement of their science by an open-minded but systematic pursuit of definite, significant, and logically fashioned problems.
Let it not be inferred from the emphasis placed upon this contrast that Psychical Research is in itself to be condemned or to be regarded as useless. ”

“ Such application of an established scientific principle may prove to be a jewel of worth in the hands of him who knows how to cut and set it. The difference between truth and error, between science and superstition, between what is beneficent to mankind and what is pernicious, frequently lies in the interpretation and the spirit as much as, or more than, in the fact. ”

“ That these interests are diverse is obvious; yet they fall naturally into a few groups or types, of which the occult interest is probably the most widespread. This, in its pronounced form, proceeds upon a suppressed or acknowledged conviction that the world which science reveals is but a torso of reality; that its very head—that which gives significance and expression to the whole—may be missing, and can only be restored from isolated fragments, themselves to be found by rare good fortune. The key to the riddle of existence is to be sought in the personal significance of events ”

“ The story of the conquest of a realm of fable by a campaign of enlightenment is always a tale of interest. The opening of a new vista directs one's gaze outward over unexplored areas. It may be, as our seventeenth-century chronicler tells us, that "we are all Indians and Salvages in what we have not accustomed our senses," and that, "what was Conjuring in the last age is Mathematiques in this"; but our more extensive acquaintance with the course of discovery and the demonstration of truth has given us a more logical sense of the probable and the improbable ”

“ Science cannot possibly consider all hypotheses, but only legitimate ones. To explain coincidences and the success of experiments in thought-transference by assuming that there is a demon, whose special business it is to make people have uncanny feelings when their relatives in distant places are dying or in danger, and to suggest to the guesser what is in the mind of the party of the second part in the experiment, is certainly not an hypothesis worthy of consideration by science ”

“ To achieve fortune, to judge well and command one's fellow-men, to foretell and control the future, to be wise in worldly lore, are natural objects of human desire; but still another is essential to happiness. Whether we attempt to procure these good fortunes by going early to bed and early to rise, or by more occult procedures, we wish to be healthy as well as wealthy and wise. ”

“ Certainly more than one chapter of the history of human error could be profitably devoted to those due to an unwarranted use of the argument by analogy.
We may begin by taking a flying excursion into that body of superstitions and folk-lore customs which no nation, however high or low in the scale of civilization, is without. The widespread custom of carrying baby upstairs before being taken to the lower floors of the house, so that he may be successful in life and participate in its ups rather than its downs, rests upon baby-logic indeed. ”

“ It is not necessary to go back to early civilizations or to primitive peoples, among whom the medicine-man and the priest were one and alike appealing to occult powers, nor to early theories of disease which beheld in insanity the obsession of demons and resorted to exorcism to cast them out; it is not necessary to consider the various personages who acquired notoriety as healers by laying on of hands or by appeal to faith, or who, like Mesmer, introduced the system of animal magnetism, or, like some of his followers, sought directions for healing from the clairvoyant dicta of somnambules ”

“ As we turn from the objective to the subjective conditions of deception, we enter the true domain of psychology; for the most scientific deceiver is he who employs least external aids, and counts most upon his power of captivating the intellect. Just as we interpret appearances by the forms they most commonly assume, so it is our average normal selves that interpret them. A variation in our sense-organs or in our judging powers will lead to illusion. The effects of contrast may serve as apt illustrations. When passing from a dark to a light room the light seems glaringly bright ”

“ Deeper than the language of words, and underlying their use and formation, is the habit of comparing object with object, of tracing resemblances and noting contrasts. It would seem that in the primitive use of this process there is lacking the distinction between the resemblances more strictly inherent in the objects and those originating in the mode of viewing them; subject and object are still merged in a vaguer realm of perception where myth and science, poetical fiction and evident fact, are as yet undifferentiated and mingle without let or hindrance. ”

“ I refer particularly to the use of metaphor and symbolism, which, like the children's make-believe with their dolls or fairies, is none the less on the boundary line between the real and the fictitious. Myth equally readily passes from the unconscious to the conscious stage, and much of what is plausibly interpreted as an argument by analogy, seems equally well an intentional use of symbolism and myth. That savages, at least in all but the lower stages, appreciate the use of myth is beyond all doubt. ”