Transcriber’s note: Table of Contents added by Transcriber.
EDITED BY
J. McKEEN CATTELL
VOL. LVII
MAY TO OCTOBER, 1900
NEW YORK AND LONDON
McCLURE, PHILLIPS AND COMPANY
1900
Copyright, 1900,
By McCLURE, PHILLIPS AND COMPANY.
SEPTEMBER, 1900.
If that imaginary individual so convenient for literary illustration,a visitor from Mars, were to alight upon our planet at the presenttime, and if his intellectual interests induced him to take a survey ofmundane views of what is “in heaven above, or on the earth beneath orin the waters under the earth,” of terrestrial opinions in regard to thegreat problems of mind and matter, of government and society, of lifeand death—our Martian observer might conceivably report that a limitedportion of mankind were guided by views that were the outcomeof accumulated toil, and generations of studious devotion, representinga slow and tortuous, but progressive growth through error and superstition,and at the cost of persecution and bloodshed; that they maintainedinstitutions of learning where the fruits of such thought could beimparted and the seeds cultivated to bear still more richly, but thatoutside of this respectable yet influential minority there were endlessupholders of utterly unlike notions and of widely diverging beliefs,clamoring like the builders of the tower of Babel in diverse tongues.
It is well at least occasionally to remember that our conceptions ofscience and of truth, of the nature of logic and of evidence, are not souniversally held as we unreflec