Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Defective Logic in the Discussion of Religious Experience (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1911-10-26).pdf/1

606 their cuts. Among the twelve advertisements ranked higher by the men than by the women, only two can be grouped under the heading of irrelevancy—No. 20, a mother and naked child, and No. 36, two children. This preference for the irrelevant among women confirms the early work of Gale upon attention value. He states that “the female attention was more susceptible to irrelevancy, as it was also to cuts, than was the masculine attention.”

Another difference that might be mentioned here is the preference of the men for the so-called “copy ads.” Of the twelve advertisements preferred by the men, three were “copy ads” and four were “half copy and half cut ads.” Only one of the advertisements preferred by the women could be considered as approximating a “copy ad,” and there the main interest, apparently small, I should judge, would lie in the three small cuts. We should conclude, then, that women are more interested in irrelevant matter and in cuts than are men.

In conclusion, let me repeat that we have in this “order of merit method” a system of handling very complex material, and in all the cases in which it has been possible to check up its results with known conditions it has shown a high degree of reliability. Many questions of conduct, esthetics, morals, and religion, which have been too complex to be handled experimentally in the past, can be investigated to advantage by this method.

 

NE wishes that Professor Ames had been content to draw only the conclusions which follow legitimately from the premises of his interesting and vigorously written book. In common with Irving King and other recent writers, he holds, in general, that the religious consciousness is social in nature and in origin. In particular, he argues that religious ceremonials are the crystallizations of social habits, that sacrifice is the perpetuation of the ceremonial, social meal (Ch. VII.), that prayer is an immediate “exclamatory impulse … one factor in the larger ceremonial activity“ (Chs. VIII., IX., XV.), that taboo can be explained without reference to divine authority (Ch. IV.), and that religion differs from magic only as