Fact and Fable in Psychology. Joseph Jastrow
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respectable salon, speaking socially, or a "company of educated charlatans," speaking scientifically. His class does not constitute a large proportion of modern occultists, but they present a prominent form of its intellectual temperament. "There are also people," says Mr. Lang, "who so dislike our detention in the prison-house of old unvarying laws that their bias is in favor of anything which may tend to prove that science in her contemporary mood is not infallible. As the Frenchman did not care what sort of a scheme he invested money in, provided that it annoys the English, so many persons do not care what they invest belief in, provided that it irritates men of science." Of such is the kingdom of alchemists and their brethren.
VI
Astrology, Phrenology, Physiognomy, and Palmistry have in common a search for positive knowledge whereby to regulate the affairs of life, to foretell the future, to comprehend one's destiny and capabilities. They aim to secure success, or at least to be forearmed against failure by being forewarned. This is a natural, a practical, and in no essential way an occult desire. It becomes occult, or, more accurately, superstitious, when it is satisfied by appeals to relations and influences which do not exist, and by false interpretation of what may be admitted as measurably and vaguely true and about equally important. When not engaged in their usual occupation of building most startling superstructures on the most insecure foundations, practical occultists are like Dr. Holmes's katydid, "saying an undisputed thing in such a solemn way." They will not hearken to the experience of the ages that success cannot be secured nor character read by discovering their unreal or mystic stigmata; they will not learn from physiology and psychology that the mental capabilities, the moral and emotional endowment of an individual are not stamped on his body in such a way that they may be revealed by half an hour's use of the calipers and tape-measure; they will not listen when science and common sense unite in teaching that the knowledge of mental powers is not such as may be applied by rule of thumb to individual cases, but that, like much other valuable knowledge, it proceeds by the exercise of sound judgment, and must as a rule rest content with suggestive generalizations and imperfectly established correlations. An educated man with wholesome interests and a vigorous logical sense can consider a possible science of character and the means of aiding its advance without danger and with some profit. But this meat is sheer poison to those who are usually attracted to this type of speculations, while it offers to the unscrupulous charlatan a most convenient net to spread for the unwary. In so far as these occult mariners, the astrologists and phrenologists et id genus omne, are sincere, and in so far represent superstition rather than commercial fraud, they simply ignore, through obstinacy or ignorance, the lighthouses and charts and the other aids to modern navigation, and persist in steering their craft by an occult compass. In some cases they are professedly setting out, not for any harbor marked on terrestrial maps, but their expedition is for the golden fleece or for the apples of the Hesperides; and with loud-voiced advertisements of their skill as pilots, they proceed to form stock companies for the promotion of their several enterprises and to dispose of the shares to credulous speculators.
It would be a profitless task to review the alleged data of Astrology or Phrenology or Palmistry, except for the illustrations which they readily yield of the nature of the conceptions and of the logic which command a certain popular interest and acceptance. The interest in these notions is, as Mr. Lang argues about ghosts and rappings and bogles, in how they come to be believed, rather than in how much or how little they chance to be true. It must be remembered also that our present interest is in the occult factors of these composite systems; they each contain other factors,—in part incorporations of vague and distorted scientific truths, in part dogmatic overstatement of results of observation, which, if reduced to the proportions warranted by definite evidence, dissolve into insignificance or intangibility, in part plausible or specious argumentation, and in still greater part mere fanciful assertion. And if we proceed to examine the professed evidence for the facts and laws and principles (sit venia verbis) that pervade Astrology or Phrenology or Palmistry or dream-interpretation, or beliefs of that ilk, we find the flimsiest kind of texture, that will hardly bear examination, and holds together only so long as it is kept secluded from the light of day. Far-fetched analogy, baseless assertion, the uncritical assimilation of popular superstitions, a great deal of prophecy after the event (it is wonderful how clearly the astrologer finds the indications of Napoleon's career in his horoscope, or the phrenologist reads them in the Napoleonic cranial protuberances), much fanciful elaboration of detail, ringing the variations on a sufficiently complex and non-demonstrable proposition, cultivating a convenient vagueness of expression, together with an apologetic skill in providing for and explaining exceptions, the courage to ignore failure and the shrewdness to profit by coincidences and half-assimilated smatterings of science, and with it all an insensibility to the moral and intellectual demands of the logical decalogue,—and you have the skeleton, which, clothed with one flesh, becomes Astrology, and with another Phrenology, and with another Palmistry or Solar Biology or Descriptive Mentality or what not. Such pseudo-sciences thrive upon that widespread and intense craving for practical guidance of our individual affairs, which is not satisfied with judicious applications of general principles, with due consideration of the probabilities and uncertainties of human life, but demands an impossible and precise revelation. Not all that passes for, and in a way is knowledge, is or is likely soon to become scientific; and when a peasant parades in an academic gown the result is likely to be a caricature.
VII
To achieve fortune, to judge well and command one's fellow-men, to foretell and control the future, to be wise in worldly lore, are natural objects of human desire; but still another is essential to happiness. Whether we attempt to procure these good fortunes by going early to bed and early to rise, or by more occult procedures, we wish to be healthy as well as wealthy and wise. The maintenance of health and the perpetuity of youth were not absent from the mediæval occultist's search, and formed an essential part of the benefits to be conferred by the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. A series of superstitions and extravagant systems are conspicuous in the antecedents and the by-paths of the history of medicine, and are related to it much as astrology is to astronomy, or alchemy to chemistry; and because medicine in part remains and to previous generations was conspicuously an empirical art rather than a science, it offers great opportunity for practical error and misapplied partial knowledge. It is not necessary to go back to early civilizations or to primitive peoples, among whom the medicine-man and the priest were one and alike appealing to occult powers, nor to early theories of disease which beheld in insanity the obsession of demons and resorted to exorcism to cast them out; it is not necessary to consider the various personages who acquired notoriety as healers by laying on of hands or by appeal to faith, or who, like Mesmer, introduced the system of animal magnetism, or, like some of his followers, sought directions for healing from the clairvoyant dicta of somnambules; it is not necessary to ransack folk-lore superstitions and popular remedies for the treatment of disease; for the modern forms of "irregular" healing offer sufficient illustrations of occult methods of escaping the ills that flesh is heir to.
The existence of a special term for a medical impostor is doubtless the result of the prevalence of the class thus named; but quackery and occult medicine, though mutually overlapping, can by no means be held accountable for one another's failings. Many forms of quackery proceed on the basis of superstitions or fanciful or exaggerated notions containing occult elements, but for the present purpose it is wise to limit attention to those in which this occult factor is distinctive; for medical quackery in its larger relations is neither modern nor occult. Occult healing takes its distinctive character from the theory underlying the practice rather than from the nature of the practice. It is not so much what is done, as why it is done, or pretended to be done or not done, that determines its occult character. A factor of prominence in modern occult healing is indeed one that in other forms characterized many of its predecessors, and was rarely wholly absent from the connection between the procedure and the result; this is the mental factor, which may be called upon to give character to a theory