To such dreary absurdities as this the Open Court newspaper at Chicago is devoted, and it has a bevy of well-educated friends and supporters—well-educated as the world goes,—and graced with literary capacity and culture, but educated into blindness and ignorance of the scientific phenomena of psychic science,—unwilling to investigate or incapable of candid investigation. The coterie sustaining such a newspaper are precisely in the position of the contemporaries of Galileo, who refused to look through his telescope or study his demonstrations.
It is not from any scientific spirit or scientific acumen that this materialistic coterie avoid psychometric and spiritual facts. The newspapers which ignore or sneer at such knowledge are easily gulled in matters of science. A writer in the Open Court upon the possibilities of the future, which he presents as being confined “strictly to legitimate deductions from present knowledge,” exhibits an amount and variety of ignorant credulity which ought not to have gained admission to an intelligent journal. He speaks of an unlimited freedom of submarine navigation and navigation of the air which would not have appeared possible to any but the most superficial sciolist. He also speaks of an electroscope that will telegraph rays of light (!) and enable us thereby to see our most distant friends, and of stowing in a small compass electricity enough to exterminate an army. This imaginative ignoramus adds, “Give to our present biped acquaintance the ability to exterminate armies with a lightning flash, added to the power of sailing at will through the air or of passing at will and in safety beneath the ocean waves, and he would depopulate the earth.” The writer gives much more of this Munchausen stuff which is not worthy of notice except as an illustration of the feeble scientific intelligence with which many newspapers are edited. The editor of a really scientific journal referred to this article in the Open Court “as a proof of the danger of a little knowledge.”[1]
Review of the New Education.
BY SAMUEL EADON, M.A., M.D., PH.D., F.S.A., ETC.
I have read very carefully the third edition of the “New Education,” and feel impelled, in order to satisfy my conscientiousness, to write a short article relative to the impressions which the reading of the book produced in my mind.
It is a work of extraordinary merit. Like George Combe’s “Constitution of Man,” it is highly suggestive; the fascination of the author was such that I could not help but write. To know its value and appreciate its lofty moral outpourings, people must buy the book and read for themselves. The first thought would be that it is the production of an original thinker who had the courage to utter opinions fearless of results, however antagonistic to the common-herd notions.
In all ages, the human understanding, the reasoning faculties, have ever been considered to hold the supremacy in the scale of development, of culture, and of advance toward a higher form of civilization; the moral faculties were thought next in order, and then the propensities common to all animal natures held the third or inferior position. This view of human nature has been handed down from an elder antiquity and still retains its hold largely in the universities and great public schools of the present day.
If this view of the nature of man be a correct one, there ought to be a vast intellectual brotherhood of mankind; but it is not so. From the days of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, this culture of the intellectual power has been continuously pursued, but with very slender results; for were this kind of education pursued for 100,000 years, the morale of society would be little better than it is at the present time.
Dr. Buchanan takes quite a different view and makes the moral or ethical faculties supreme, in development and culture, the intellect being the instruments for acquiring facts and the propensities the steam to bring about the desired results. According to his views of man, our emotional faculties are of a higher or more God-like order than our intellectual powers. The intellect being the hand-maid to the emotions, to feel the force of truth is higher in mental excellence than to perceive it. Depth of emotions is the climax of spiritual power.