SOME ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS

New Zealand Tablet, 23 September 1920, Page 9

SOME ABERRATIONS OF SCIENTISTS

(By Henry E. O'Keeffe, C.S.P., in "America.) When I was a youth I heard Ingersoll lecture one Sunday night at the old Harrigan and Hart Theatre on Broadway, New York. I cannot remember his subject, but my memory serves me in such wise that I can even to this day hear him pouring out in affluent verbiage his 'shattering ridicule on the believer in spirits, ghosts, or goblins. Afterward I learned that he had caught a tiny something of the spirit of Voltaire's cynicism, without Voltaire's brilliant literary fluency or genius. Later it was obvious to me that Huxley, who was then in fashion, had largely influenced him. Huxley, too, was attempting to bring to destruction all revealed truth. He did but scorn the philosopher who would people our planet with invisible spirits and affirmed that he would not believe that the circumpolar seas were full of sea-ser-pents unless he had seen them with his own eyes. But behold there has come to our shores an eminent British physicist whom but five years ago we revered as we once revered Kelvin. He comes with what he calls a new revelation. He assures us, although at times his terminology is vague, that the unseen is & real, and declares that the fact that you cannot see a thindoes not prove that the thing does not exist. But "S. IS ,^f at , the hum °rous person in the comic opera, the Mikado," would term "a pretty state of things." lnmk,_ too, it has all come within a few years—confusing twist in the world of thought. Huxley is at one pole of scientific induction while Lodge is at the other. & It is_ a far cry, too, from Gibbon, who referred the genesis of even religion to an illusion, an idea that thrived even m the tunes of the Roman Empire GibminfS 6< \ h We l er ; aS did SOme of the utilitarian S .1 >Hlos ?P he l s ' thafc it was a useful illusion. Hut nevertheless the Roman philosopher bought it a false fo X'iH tx. R ° man saw it necessary al& ' " the aGSthete believed h a thi »S to be thinke^futl^ 01 ! had , S ° r pUlarised ®* idea that tninkers full of accurate information, historical Xld m ITk te JUd | m , ent to ° k * U P and ™*« t nmre ;^ia^ a \ illusi ° n with »? times he would indicate that even political TZ' f civilisation can. be referred to this useful ill ? < •it remained a not on verity but falsity not Tin 1S« * fou I ndation ' m individual subjectivism "tt~" .'J ec «ve reality but Woom and beautf6T tTe deli * ht the >t all is not only 7 invite TS' the ta P- root of Lecky's wonderment? the J"* not . exist - Hence , ment at the overpowering charity of

the Catholic Sisterhoods, the preternatural influence of the celibacy of the clergy, the plausible system of moral jurisdiction and other sociological ~ phenomena which are mere commonplace realities* to .us. , ,„„ ..";. "But a wider thinker, "perhaps, than : Lecky f was John Stuart Mill. .He"cherishes not merely as a philosopher but. as an economist the far-reaching social value of this illusion named religion. Herbert Spen- v cer opined in the same manner, but his rigid methods of ratiocination and lack of charm of literary style do not provoke the same obvious evidence for the scholar. •■'■"/:•' '••■■-.'.'■'-"' a'* ,-■■••■, '-■:'■. ■■'. ~'.. :.-..-.. , -, . y.-.. ' There then appeared in the sky that unique immoralist with all his translucent brilliancy, Friederick Nietsche. He concentrates his cruel, flaming light upon the logical absurdities of these British sophists. He waxes more merciless than ever, and with artless sarcasm depicts the foolishness of morality, if it is founded on a sublime fancy. He goes still further and asserts that if religion and morality are illusions, then they are not useful but inimical to humanity. He arrives at the conclusion that immorality, disillusion, and the destruction of the weak and the survival of the fittest are the real necessities for strengthening the civilisation of mankind. So the World War was to him not only a national but a universal necessity that the race might, slough off its weaker elements and create that new type of superman for its future security. It was, thought he, not might over right, but might had the only right even against the weak. It was a kink in the process of thought. He stretched the principles of the British philosophers until they snapped. The result of the war knocked this opinion into a cocked hat, as it did the illogical beliefs of the British dialecticians. Men could not, or rather would not, spill their blood in verdant valleys, or leave the hearths of home for an illusion, however useful it might be in times of peace. Men, however valiant, must die for an ideal, but it had to be objectively real, not false, else sham and pretence .would triumph over candor and truth. But by another curious twist the malign influence of bad logic did not stay merely in the domain of thought, Karl Marx, that exiled Jew living in a London garret, took it into the world of action. His genius applied it orf the high scale of internationalism, to every laborer with his liorny hands of toil, to every factory girl with her pinched and pallid face. His cry, which is even now ringing throughout the economic world, was to the masses, suffering what he conidered to be genuine grievances; his'rallying cry to them was: "Act, act, for you have nothing to lose but your chains, religion is a useless illusion and morality is a matter of enlightened expediency." The great Socialist drew the aberrations of the British and German thinkers to their consistent and practical conclusions. The downward course of high thinking and ethical doctrine became easy: Facilis descensus avernt. 1 But now another astounding cataclysm of reasoning has come to pass. The war which smashed into a thousand pieces all these unsound and ingenious forms

of dialectics, has, because of the multitudinous loneliness of death', goaded man on to the other extreme of Spiritistic belief. With him, now, all seeming unreal illusions are not only useful but they are real Was there ever such an abruptly violent change in the whole history of thought? I do not know. _ Sir Oliver .Lodge, who only a few years ago explained psychical phenomena in terms of the material has now turned his thought upside down, and is explaining material phenomena in the terms of the psychical. But if this distinguished scientist turned a somersault, enterprising, and baneful journalists with turgid and venal fictionists have also stood on their heads and are beholding a partial, fragmentary, disS™ of the ever-ancient and ever-new doctrine of the Communion of Saints. . With that kind of knowledge which Paul of Tarsus believed puffeth a man up, they are telling' us that the supernatural is a

reality. I. This fis a truth which is so a parcel of the integral system of Catholicism that is has been taken as a matter of course for centuries.

The reality of the supernatural is as vital to the little children in our household of the Faith as is the existence of stewed prunes.

Moreover, the definite hope for personal immortality is as old as Epictetus, Marcus. Aurelius, Socrates, Plato, and other noble pagans, and older by many a long century. These marvellous discoveries of modern Spiritists were formulated in those splendid productions of the early Fathers of the Church, ages and ages ago. The searching judgments of Thomas Aquinas, with the discriminations and practical principles of ascetic theology, for the divination of angelic from diabolic spirits, are as old as the hills. The regulation of private from public revelation was as rigidly measured by a fixed standard of the Church, far away in the past, as it would be now, at the seance of a fashionable Spiritistic medium. It is the horrible lack of this norm of moral authority that will bring psychical havoc and disaster. In this, Sir Oliver is our colossal enemy. Sincere and susceptible himself, he will breed a generation of Spiritistic vipers who will poison and eat down to the root and stock of all moral effort. It was that great Pope Leo I. who emphasised the terrible warning that the Oriental superstitions debauched ancient Rome and Greece. Already criminal personal conceit and absurd individual fancy are creating a psychical literature so confusing that if you peruse it earnestly you cannot tell whether you are on your head or our heels. This is the mighty difference between the sane, ascetic literature of the Church concerning heaviugly and devilish spirits and the pestiferous aberrations of these religiously insane mediums. There is no species of mental disorder which will more profoundly-and in a facile and plausible fashion produce such debilitating effect on morals, and such neurological disturbances for the highly organised body. The tragic pathos of Sir Oliver Lodge's life is pitiable, but his terribly wicked influence is worthy only of rebuke.