UPRUSH OF SUPERSTITION

Shannon News, 14 August 1925, Page 1

UPRUSH OF SUPERSTITION

“The w r orld is experiencing to-day. an extraordiary uprush of superstition. Like our primitive ancestors, we have our medicine men and our magicians; and we are eager to believe in effects without examining causes, and in achievements without inspecting the mechanisms to attain them. Tim subway news stanris are littered with a bastard crew of magazines ballyliooing short cuts to brain power,, will power, thought power, or personality plus. “A provincial French apothecary sweeps to fame by telling the lame and the halt to mumble a specific incantation and be cured. Masses of credulous people look to glandular treatments and to psycho-analysis as our forbears did to the rituals and spells of their witch doctors.

“Like tribes of savages, tormented by drought or deluge, famine or pestilence, we turn anywhere and everywhere to be rescued. Pseudo-scientific jargon is the descendant of priestly patter, and we prefer its glitter to the toilsome unadorned methods of genuine science and pure reason.”—{lrwin Ednam, assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University.