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And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are themselves in essence negated generally in virtue of some pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific "doctrine of a universe" as when we read that "in a universe . . . there cannot be any room for independent and creative wills, actually thwarting the Good Will."
All the absurd physical metaphors, such as youth and age, living and dying, are, when applied to nations, but pseudo-scientific attempts to conceal from men the awful liberty of their lonely souls. In the case of America, indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and essential. America, of course, like every other human thing, can in spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses.
They make marble of pasteboard and diamonds of glass. Adulteration on adulteration, moans M. Véron, all is adulteration! The problem of aërial navigation seems at present to be agitating as many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many years ago, or the philosopher's stone at a more remote period.
Somebody dreadful thought! might get himself severely bitten, mauled, mangled perhaps to death, merely by obeying a piece of pseudo-scientific advice. That he, Doctor Unonius, might never be reproached with the disaster, might never even hear of it, in no degree mitigated his responsibility.
This view of life is the last, and founded upon it is the Christian teaching, which is a guide for the whole of our life and lies at the root of all our activity, practical and theoretic. Yet men of what is falsely called science, pseudo-scientific men, looking at it only in its externals, regard it as something outgrown and having no value for us.
It is history indefinitely better proved, and therefore indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern guesswork on imaginary "Teutonic Institutions" before the eighth century or the still more imaginary "Aryan" origins of the European race, or any other of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for historical truth.
Among literary historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school, Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude, however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake.
It subjected credulous mankind to the last of indignities, in forcing it to listen to that doctrine of infinitesimals and potencies which is at once the most epigrammatic of paradoxes, and the crowning exploit of pseudo-scientific audacity.
Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the mere outward semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific collections of facts which never rise to be classifications of phenomena forms to his idea the acme of erudition.
Nicolai then proceeds to criticise the pseudo-scientific notions from which our modern intellectuals deduce justifications for war. Above all he disposes of fallacious Darwinism and of the misuse of the idea of the struggle for existence. These notions, imperfectly understood and speciously interpreted, are by many regarded as furnishing a sanction for war.
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