Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/136

124 In the second place, there was a known cause of the effect produced in a powerful electric disturbance of an attenuated gaseous medium. There was something here which might very conceivably possess an action resembling that of light upon a photographic plate, and, seeing that ordinary light rays can pass through various solids, it was not taxing belief unduly to state that the X rays could pass through solids impermeable to ordinary light. If intelligent persons will only use the full measure of their intelligence in discriminating between authenticated and unauthenticated announcements, between consistent and inconsistent statements, between alleged facts that have a history behind them, and appear in some natural order of development, and others that have as little previous history and as little in the way of development as "the shield that fell from heaven," they will be all the better for it. They will gain in intellectual power, and, as a result, will be less at the mercy of the manufacturers of the marvelous. It may be a little difficult to exercise discrimination to this degree, but who can deny that the effort to do so would be eminently beneficial? The late Mr. Bagehot once wrote an instructive article on The Emotion of Belief, in which he showed to how large an extent emotion is responsible for belief. It is so to altogether too large an extent: when people believe, they are very often indulging an emotion instead of completing an intellectual process. This emotion is continually demanding nutriment and stimulus; and we need to be on our guard if we would not be continually believing simply for the sake of the pleasure accompanying the act.

We therefore see a good moral associating itself very closely with Prof. Jordan's jeu d'esprit; and there is consequently reason to hope that, when the returns are all in, the balance will be on the right side.

of The Nation, writing from Geneva, thus reports in regard to the Third International Congress of Psychologists lately held in that city: "The fact that the papers on 'hypnotism' were less than in earlier congresses, in proportion to the entire number, and that there were a bare half dozen on thought-transference and telepathy, shows the general tendency of psychology. The hypnotic period is past even in France. . . . As to telepathy, I think there is a real decay of interest in the subject, much as this is to be deplored." We must confess we do not feel like deploring the decay of interest to which the correspondent alludes. There would not be such a decay if facts were forthcoming of a nature and in sufficient number to sustain the interest. Telepathy is one of those things that appeal most strongly to popular credulity. The subject, or rather the alleged facts, might be studied without injury by a man of scientific training; but, handed over to the multitude, it is well adapted to become the fruitful source of every kind of intellectual mischief. There are hundreds of minds to-day that are perilously near the border land of insanity, and still more that are in a most unwholesome fever of unrest, simply on account of the obliteration, so far as they are concerned, of the boundaries of the possible and impossible. They do not know what to believe in or what to expect in the way of incursions from an invisible and intangible world, or what law of Nature they can safely regard as irreversible. Can any good come of this? We should certainly say