544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ranks were confused ; ere long both sexes abandoned all distinc- 

 tive garb, men went into society in " frac" women in simple 

 bodies. 



We now come to tlie most important chapter in Ferrero's 

 work, that which treats of mystic symbols. It is a minute anal- 

 ysis of the genesis and development of these symbols, of their 

 primordial and consequential causes, of their importance, and of 

 the evil caused by their false interpretation. The series of mystic 

 symbols is produced by the phenomenon which Ferrero calls 

 ideatic arrest, and which he explains in the following way : 



" We here find ourselves confronted by an ideatic arrest that 

 is to say, the series of mental associations by which we have ar- 

 rived at a conclusion of causality becomes restricted to those 

 facts which furnish an immediate sensation, and therefore leave 

 in the brain images and ideas that have a tendency to associate 

 themselves, and to exclude such facts as do not produce a special 

 state of consciousness except through reflection; a laborious 

 mental process, which ordinary men, and even thinkers in fields 

 which are not their habitual objects of research, avoid, by the 

 law of least effort." It is thus with writings, thus with books, 

 with formulas mysterious to the vulgar, with commands, with 

 prayers. By the phenomenon of emotional arrest in religion, 

 nearly everywhere and at all times, the adoration which should 

 lilt itself up to God stops at the image which represents him. 

 And Christianity, although inaugurated by Christ, the apostle of 

 a spiritual religion, is at this day too often nothing else than a real 

 idolatry, at least in the multitude. We cite Ferrero once more : 

 " God is here confounded with his symbol ; and the theory of 

 emotional arrest explains such a confusion. No one has ever seen 

 God, wherefore we can not have an image of him, unless we con- 

 struct one ourselves by our own intelligence. Now, to construct 

 mentally, without the aid of the senses, a graphic image, necessi- 

 tates a considerable mental development. For this reason, even 

 to-day, for nearly every person the word God corresponds in the 

 consciousness only to a vague and nebulous image. Hence it 

 comes that when the peasant sees the cross, which awakens in him 

 a complexity of sentiments compounded of respect and terror, the 

 idea or the image of God, through being a most indeterminate 

 state of consciousness, associates itself weakly, or not at all, with 

 his emotions. Wherefore there is at such times present to his 

 consciousness only the sight of the symbol, the cross, and the 

 sentiments relating to it, not the image of God ; and therefore such 

 sentiments can be directed only to the symbol, because that alone 

 comes into the field of consciousness, and behind it there is not 

 for the worshiper the image of God which it should represent. 

 Now, as a symbol works only in so far as it has power to recall a 



