59 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



claim to-day should ever become the common property of the scientific 

 world. 



This might pass, however, if that moral and religious awakening 

 which you hope from the spiritualistic manifestations were really to 

 be expected from them, according to the teachings of history and the 

 laws of human nature. I almost hesitate to say to you that the moral 

 deepening of religion has continually kept pace with the doing away 

 of rude representations of the divine in forms of sense, and that, along- 

 side weak-minded unbelief, the worst enemy of morality has always 

 been superstition. 



These are things long well known to you. You indeed declare the 

 phenomena to which you refer to be realities, and therefore different 

 from the objects of superstition. But every superstition has done 

 that. Not upon whether one believes in certain phenomena or not, 

 but only upon the objects in which one believes, can the corrupting 

 effects of superstition depend. The moral barbarism produced in its 

 time by the belief in witchcraft would have been precisely the same, 

 if there had been real witches. We can therefore leave the question 

 entirely alone, whether or not you have ground to believe in the spirit- 

 ualistic phenomena. "We can content ourselves with considering the 

 question, whether the objects of your belief show the characteristic 

 signs which we find in those objects of belief which, according to the 

 testimony of history and of social psychology, we must call prejudicial 

 to the moral development of man. This question, after the intimate 

 relation which we have shown to exist between spiritualism and the 

 most corrupt forms of so-called superstition, can only be answered in 

 the affirmative. The reasons for this demoralizing influence, as you 

 as a psychologist will easily perceive, are also perfectly apparent. The 

 danger of estrangement from earnest work, devoted to the service of 

 science or of a practical calling, which I have already touched, is to be 

 included here, if indeed in a subordinate place. Of far greater impor- 

 tance are the unworthy conceptions of the condition of the spirit after 

 death, which these phenomena awaken, and which find their analogy 

 only in the so-called animism of the most degraded races. But most 

 pernicious of all appears to me the caricature which the spiritualistic 

 system, in the form in which you represent it, makes of the rule of a 

 higher order of the world, by making men of, at the very least, most 

 ordinary intellectual and spiritual endowments the bearers of super- 

 natural powers, thereby sealing them as the chosen instruments of 

 Providence. In all these features, and above all in the materialization 

 of the ghosts, there is betrayed a grossly materialistic tendency, of 

 which, as I am glad to believe, most of the German spiritualists are 

 not conscious. They are only the pitiable victims of exotic Shamans, 

 who have transplanted to Europe the animistic conceptions which 

 have not entirely disappeared in their home. From a philosojmer 

 this materialistic character of spiritualism ought not to have remained 



