THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



SEPTEMBEE, 1900. 

 THE MODERN OCCULT. 



By Professor JOSEPH JA8TROW, 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. 



IF that imaginary individual so convenient for literary illustration, 

 a visitor from Mars, were to alight upon our planet at the present 

 time, and if his intellectual interests induced him to take a survey of 

 mundane views of what is "in heaven above, or on the earth beneath or 

 in the waters under the earth," of terrestrial opinions in regard to the 

 great problems of mind and matter, of government and society, of life 

 and death — our Martian observer might conceivably report that a lim- 

 ited portion of mankind were guided by views that were the outcome 

 of accumulated toil, and generations of studious devotion, representing 

 a slow and tortuous, but progressive growth through error and super- 

 stition, and at the cost of persecution and bloodshed; that they main- 

 tained institutions of learning where the fruits of such thought could be 

 imparted and the seeds cultivated to bear still more richly, but that 

 outside of this respectable yet influential minority there were endless 

 upholders of utterly unlike notions and of widely diverging beliefs, 

 clamoring like the builders of the tower of Babel in diverse tongues. 



It is well at least occasionally to remember that our conceptions of 

 science and of truth, of the nature of logic and of evidence, are not so 

 universally held as we unreflectingly assume or as we hopefully wish. 

 Almost every one of the fundamental and indisputable tenets of 

 science is regarded as hopelessly in error by some ardent would-be re- 

 former. One Hampden declares that the earth is a motionless plane 

 with the North Pole as the center; one Carpenter gives a hundred re- 

 markable reasons why the earth is not round, with a challenge to the 



