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Updated: May 12, 2025
The latter was the most enthusiastic and noisy, the former decidedly the most numerous and influential. Science, or rather pseudo-science, always exerts a mysterious attraction of an exceedingly powerful nature over the generality that is, the more ignorant portion of the human race.
Meanwhile the Thirty Years War had destroyed the prosperity of central Europe and there was a sudden but very general interest in "alchemy," the strange pseudo-science of the middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into gold.
It may astonish some that Luis de Leon toyed with the pseudo-science of astrology: it cannot have surprised his judges for, on April 18, 1572, while still bewildered as to the cause of his arrest, he had stated to them in writing that he had read a compilation on astrology which had been lent to him by a student named Poza, a licentiate in canon law.
"One must read him as one reads all those curious old mediæval authors, who are full of pseudo-science and theories based on fables. His great charm to me is his style, which is singularly rich and chaste.
Long ago I ceased much to admire M. Mauclair's writing: his theorizing and pseudo-science now strike me as silly, and his judgements seem lacking in perspicacity. But whatever I may think of it now I shall not forget what I owe that book.
The same deadly poison of pseudo-science has infected the body politic. But Darwin and Huxley always saved themselves by inconsistency from the ruthless application of their doctrines. The common sense of the community has shrunk from extreme logic. In a country of free discussion and of free institutions doctrines are counteracted by other influences. Theories are tested by life.
I do not say that Phrenology was one of the Pseudo-sciences. A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one.
We all know that without uprightness, without self-respect, without sympathy and mutual aid, human kind must perish, as perish the few races of animals living by rapine, or the slave-keeping ants. But such ideas are not to the taste of the ruling classes, and they have elaborated a whole system of pseudo-science to teach the contrary.
Abandoned forever are all those futile attempts at compromise, in a vain and painful endeavor to translate the record of Creation into the language of a pseudo-science now rapidly being outgrown, and to adapt the plan of salvation to the false standards of an artificial age that seems to be rapidly disintegrating before the Church's very eyes.
Our contemporary economics is, however, still a foolish, pretentious pseudo-science, a festering mass of assumptions about buying and selling and wages-paying, and one would as soon consult Bradshaw or the works of Dumas as our orthodox professors of economics for any light upon this fundamental matter.
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