THE MODERN OCCULT. 465 



affect the life of man," and should not renounce his faith by adding, 

 "but it would be foolish to venture beyond our present understanding, 

 foolish to stop eating, until we gain more goodness and a clearer com- 

 prehension of the living God." And if he is a mental physician he must 

 be a mental surgeon, too, and not plead that, "Until the advancing age 

 admits the efficacy and supremacy of mind, it is better to leave the ad- 

 justment of broken bones and dislocations to the fingers of surgeons." 

 But it is unprofitable to consider the weakness of any occult system 

 in its encounters with actual science and actual fact. It is simply as a 

 real and prominent menace to rationality that these doctrines naturally 

 attract consideration. As illustrations of present-day occult beliefs we 

 are naturally tempted to inquire what measure of (perverted) truth they 

 may contain; but the more worthy question is, How do such perversions 

 come to find so large a company of 'supporting listeners'? For to any 

 one who can read and be convinced by the sequence of words of this 

 system, ordinary logic has no power, and to him the world of reality 

 brings no message. No form of the modern occult antagonizes the 

 foundations of science so brusquely as this one. The possibility of 

 science rests on the thorough and absolute distinction between i,he sub- 

 jective and the objective. In what measure a man loses the power to 

 draw this distinction clearly and as other men do, in that measure he 

 becomes irrational and insane. The objective exists; and no amount of 

 thinking it away, or thinking it differently, will change it. That is 

 what is understood by ultimate scientific truth; something that will en- 

 dure unmodified by passing ways of viewing it, open to every one's veri- 

 fication who can come equipped with the proper means to verify — a 

 permanent objective to be ascertained by careful logical inquiry, not to 

 be determined by subjective opinion. Logic is the language of science; 

 Christian Science and what sane men call science can never communi- 

 cate because they do not speak the same language. 



It would be unfortunate if in emphasizing the popular preeminence 

 of Christian Science, one were to overlook the significance of the many 

 other forms of 'drugless healing' which bid for public favor by appeal 

 to ignorance and to occult and superstitious instincts. Some are allied 

 to Christian Science and like it assimilate their cult to a religious move- 

 ment; others are unmistakably the attempts of charlatans to lure the 

 credulous by noisy advertisements of newly discovered and scientifically 

 indorsed systems of 'psychic force,' or some personal 'ism.' For many 

 purposes it would be unjust to group together such various systems, 

 which in the nature of things must include sinner and saint, the mis- 

 guided sincere, the half-believers who think 'there may be something 

 in it,' or 'that it is worth a trial,' along with scheming quacks and adepts 

 in commercial fraud. They illustrate the many and various roads trav- 



TOL. LVD.— 30 



