United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nothing is a safer test of the cultural development of a society than the instinct for the difference between religion and superstition. Mysticism is a systematized superstition. It never undermines the true interests of society more than when it goes to work with pseudo-scientific tools.
And so this verbal rambling continues; so the search for mind in matter goes on, with a seriousness scarcely equalled in any other line of strife. There is nothing more certain to permanently bewilder a vocal student than to deluge him with pseudo-scientific twaddle about the voice. And this for the simple reason that he comes to learn to sing, not for a course in anatomy.
These two parents, wide apart in point of view, after all act much alike, and both very differently from the pseudo-scientific parent, who acts from dogmatic conviction and is sure he is right. He talks of developing his child's self-respect and good sense, and leaves him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and development which the child does not possess.
The supposed arrest of the brain of the Bantu at the age of puberty owing to the closing of the sutures of the skull at an earlier age than happens with Europeans is another popular notion for which a sort of pseudo-scientific authority may be quoted from encyclopædias and old books of travel.
Where miracles are needed, miracles will occur. Except for a few queer people, nourished on "Maria Monk" and suchlike anti-papal pornography, I doubt if there will be any Protestants left among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current will probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of the faith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish as Theosophy.
My own Irish eighteenth-centuryism made it impossible for me to believe anything until I could conceive it as a scientific hypothesis, even though the abominations, quackeries, impostures, venalities, credulities, and delusions of the camp followers of science, and the brazen lies and priestly pretensions of the pseudo-scientific cure-mongers, all sedulously inculcated by modern 'secondary education, were so monstrous that I was sometimes forced to make a verbal distinction between science and knowledge lest I should mislead my readers.
A philosophy of religion, apart from the comparative science of religions, and apart also from a disinterested and general philosophy of history, must always be more or less arbitrary and factitious. It is only pseudo-scientific, this reduction of human life to three spheres industry, law, and religion. The author seems to me to possess a vigorous and profound mind, rather than a free mind.
Psychotherapy has come too much into the neighborhood of superstition and humbug. Where miracles are performed, the man of science prefers to leave the field. The less one knows about those groups of problems, the less one is able to see the sharp demarcation line between true scientific studies, for instance, in hypnotism, and the pseudo-scientific fancies of psychical research.
A very different basis for patriotic sentiment is furnished by the scientific or pseudo-scientific theories about race, which have become very popular in our time.
If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than the authoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for the classifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief literary forms that subserve sociological purposes.
Word Of The Day