Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/610

592 to-day should ever become the common property of the scientific world.

This might pass, however, if that moral and religious awakening which you hope from the spiritualistic manifestations were really to be expected from them, according to the teachings of history and the laws of human nature. I almost hesitate to say to you that the moral deepening of religion has continually kept pace with the doing away of rude representations of the divine in forms of sense, and that, alongside weak-minded unbelief, the worst enemy of morality has always been superstition.

These are things long well known to you. You indeed declare the phenomena to which you refer to be realities, and therefore different from the objects of superstition. But every superstition has done that. Not upon whether one believes in certain phenomena or not, but only upon the objects in which one believes, can the corrupting effects of superstition depend. The moral barbarism produced in its time by the belief in witchcraft would have been precisely the same, if there had been real witches. We can therefore leave the question entirely alone, whether or not you have ground to believe in the spiritualistic phenomena. We can content ourselves with considering the question, whether the objects of your belief show the characteristic signs which we find in those objects of belief which, according to the testimony of history and of social psychology, we must call prejudicial to the moral development of man. This question, after the intimate relation which we have shown to exist between spiritualism and the most corrupt forms of so-called superstition, can only be answered in the affirmative. The reasons for this demoralizing influence, as you as a psychologist will easily perceive, are also perfectly apparent. The danger of estrangement from earnest work, devoted to the service of science or of a practical calling, which I have already touched, is to be included here, if indeed in a subordinate place. Of far greater importance are the unworthy conceptions of the condition of the spirit after death, which these phenomena awaken, and which find their analogy only in the so-called animism of the most degraded races. But most pernicious of all appears to me the caricature which the spiritualistic system, in the form in which you represent it, makes of the rule of a higher order of the world, by making men of, at the very least, most ordinary intellectual and spiritual endowments the bearers of supernatural powers, thereby sealing them as the chosen instruments of Providence. In all these features, and above all in the materialization of the ghosts, there is betrayed a grossly materialistic tendency, of which, as I am glad to believe, most of the German spiritualists are not conscious. They are only the pitiable victims of exotic Shamans, who have transplanted to Europe the animistic conceptions which have not entirely disappeared in their home. From a philosopher this materialistic character of spiritualism ought not to have remained