Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/560

544 ranks were confused; ere long both sexes abandoned all distinctive garb, men went into society in "frac" women in simple bodies.

We now come to the most important chapter in Ferrero's work, that which treats of mystic symbols. It is a minute analysis of the genesis and development of these symbols, of their primordial and consequential causes, of their importance, and of the evil caused by their false interpretation. The series of mystic symbols is produced by the phenomenon which Ferrero calls ideatic arrest, and which he explains in the following way:

"We here find ourselves confronted by an ideatic arrest—that is to say, the series of mental associations by which we have arrived at a conclusion of causality becomes restricted to those facts which furnish an immediate sensation, and therefore leave in the brain images and ideas that have a tendency to associate themselves, and to exclude such facts as do not produce a special state of consciousness except through reflection; a laborious mental process, which ordinary men, and even thinkers in fields which are not their habitual objects of research, avoid, by the law of least effort." It is thus with writings, thus with books, with formulas mysterious to the vulgar, with commands, with prayers. By the phenomenon of emotional arrest in religion, nearly everywhere and at all times, the adoration which should lilt itself up to God stops at the image which represents him. And Christianity, although inaugurated by Christ, the apostle of a spiritual religion, is at this day too often nothing else than a real idolatry, at least in the multitude. We cite Ferrero once more: "God is here confounded with his symbol; and the theory of emotional arrest explains such a confusion. No one has ever seen God, wherefore we can not have an image of him, unless we construct one ourselves by our own intelligence. Now, to construct mentally, without the aid of the senses, a graphic image, necessitates a considerable mental development. For this reason, even to-day, for nearly every person the word God corresponds in the consciousness only to a vague and nebulous image. Hence it comes that when the peasant sees the cross, which awakens in him a complexity of sentiments compounded of respect and terror, the idea or the image of God, through being a most indeterminate state of consciousness, associates itself weakly, or not at all, with his emotions. Wherefore there is at such times present to his consciousness only the sight of the symbol, the cross, and the sentiments relating to it, not the image of God; and therefore such sentiments can be directed only to the symbol, because that alone comes into the field of consciousness, and behind it there is not for the worshiper the image of God which it should represent. Now, as a symbol works only in so far as it has power to recall a