152 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



patriotist, anti-bellumist. He is anti-restraintist, and would abolish the im- 

 prisonment of criminals, and the confinement of lunatics. If criminals must be 

 imprisoned, in spite of his efforts to prevent it, they must at any rate be pampered. 

 They must be allowed to have pianos and newspapers, beer and skittles. He 

 is anti-scientist or anti-Christian ; he is an astrologer, a neoteric Buddhist, a 

 flat-earth crank, a spiritualist, a telepathist ; in short, the faddist holds any 

 opinion and advocates any cause of action you please so long as it is opposed to 

 the general sense of the community." 



Science Progress analysed this type in an article entitled " Irrationalism " 

 (July, 1914). " Anything that runs contrary to generally received opinion appeals 

 to him with irresistible force, and he is ready to adopt it without any consideration 

 of the evidence : in fact, he is constitutionally incapable of weighing evidence, of 

 suspending his judgment, or of entertaining doubts. . . . The faddist has a very 

 remarkable conscience. To any infraction of the fad his conscience is morbidly 

 sensitive : it quivers with hyperesthesia ; but in the treatment of the adversaries 

 of his fad it is shockingly callous. Rather than permit the slightest infraction of 

 his fad he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his wife and children, and even, within 

 limits, his own comfort. One distinguished anti-alcoholic faddist electrified the 

 world by proclaiming that if his wife were dying and a drop of alcohol would save 

 her life, he would not allow her to have it. He did not make the same promise 

 for himself, if he should be in the same desperate condition. ... In support of 

 his fad, the faddist will conscientiously lie, perjure himself, slander and traduce 

 his antagonists with eagerness and relish. . . . He condemns with ferocity the 

 'vivisection' of a rat, even though the vivisection may be but the infliction of a 

 scratch or a prick ; but he glories in practising moral vivisection on his opponent. 

 He is a sentimentalist and a humanitarian, and has all the cruelty of these 

 characters." We thank Dr. Mercier for this last epigram, and commend it to the 

 legions of such humbugs in Britain. " It is largely because faddism is the 

 occupation of the idle that it has pretty well disappeared since the war broke 

 out " ; but we still see it in the innumerable old ladies who drag about horrid little 

 curs to defile our streets, and who still subscribe to the anti-vivisection societies. 



The religious temperament is also well dealt with. This word religion has 

 come to mean something quite different from what it meant originally. It really 

 means the sense of duty instilled into men by the untold ages of their develop- 

 ment ; it has come to mean belief in various hypotheses. We resist this false 

 definition ; for duty is greater than any belief, and God, however we may define 

 Him, has said so. The author distinguishes between the religious temperaments 

 which consist in self-sacrifice and vicarious sacrifice respectively. "Those 

 examples of the religious temperament that tend to self-sacrifice provide us with 

 some of the most beautiful and admirable specimens of human character, just as 

 those that tend to vicarious sacrifice provide us with some of the worst." That is 

 why the Emperor William, who has the latter religious temperament, demands the 

 sacrifice of his subjects. Dr. Mercier speaks God's truth when he says that "The 

 monk and the nun who renounce the pleasures and comforts of what they are 

 pleased to call the world, and who renounce them, not in order to be of service 

 to their fellow men and women, but in order to shirk the burden and the battle of 

 life, and to secure for themselves a better future in the world to come, do not 

 command our admiration or our sympathy. They are engaged in a commercial 

 transaction, which they believe will turn out to their profit, and we admire them 

 no more than we admire the trader who embarks on a speculation for the sake of 

 the return that it will bring ; or if we do, the admiration is rather for their 



