60 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n 



the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less 

 elevated character. 



So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we 

 refuse inter mortuos qucerere vivum ; we leave the 

 past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual 

 ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We 

 follow the evil example set us, not only by Bacon 

 but by almost all the men of the Renaissance, in 

 pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate 

 spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the Middle 

 Ages. It is accepted as a truth which is indisput- 

 able, that, for seven or eight centuries, a long 

 succession of able men some of them of trans- 

 cendent acuteness and encyclopaedic knowledge 

 devoted laborious lives to the grave discussion 

 of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of 

 intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of 

 a little modesty, a little impartial pondering over 

 personal experience might suggest a doubt as to 

 the adequacy of this short and easy method of 

 dealing with a large chapter of the history of 

 the human mind. Even an acquaintance with 

 popular literature which had extended so far as 

 to include that part of the contributions of Sam 

 Slick which contains his weighty aphorism that 

 "there is a great deal of human nature in all 

 mankind," might raise a doubt whether, after all, 

 the men of that epoch, who, take them all round, 

 were endowed with wisdom and folly in much 

 the same proportion as ourselves, were likely to 



