MODERN EVOLUTION, 



153 



Heine's Travel-Pictures. " A few years ago Bullock 

 dug up an ancient stone idol in Mexico, and the 

 next day he found that it had been crowned during 

 the night with flowers. And yet the Spaniard had 

 exterminated the old Mexican religion with fire and 

 sword, and for three centuries had been engaged in 

 ploughing and harrowing their minds and implanting 

 the seed of Christianity." The causes of error and 

 delusion, and of the spiritual nightmares of olden 

 time, being made clear, there is begotten a generous 

 sympathy with that which empirical notions of 

 human nature attributed to wilfulness or to man's 

 fall from a high estate. Superstitions which are the 

 outcome of ignorance can only awaken pity. Where 

 the corrective of knowledge is absent, we see that 

 it could not be otherwise. Where that corrective 

 is present, but either perverted or not exercised, pity 

 is supplanted by blame. In either case, we learn that 

 the art of life largely consists in that control of the 

 emotions and that diversion of them into wholesome 

 channels, which the intellect, braced with the latest 

 knowledge, can alone effect. 



Therefore, discarding theories of revelation, 

 spiritual illumination, and other assumed supra- 

 mundane sources of knowledge, sufficing causes of 

 abnormal mental phenomena are found in abnormal 

 working of the mental apparatus. The investiga- 

 tion of hallucinations (Lat. alucinor, to wander in 

 mind) leaves no doubt that they are the effect of a 

 morbid condition of that intricate, delicately poised 



