lute.

It is not difficult to recognize the social conditions from which this
tendency springs. The fundamental one, after all, is the widely spread
lack of respect for the expert. Such a lack easily results from
democratic life, as democracy encourages the belief that every one can
judge about everything and can decide from his own resources what
ought to be thought and what ought to be done. Yet no one can claim
that it is truly a part of democracy itself and that the democratic
spirit would suffer if this view were suppressed. On the contrary,
democracy can never be fully successful and can never be carried
through in consistent purity until this greatest danger of the
democratic spirit of society is completely overcome and repressed by
an honest respect for the expert and a willing subordination of
judgment to his better knowledge. Another condition which makes our
country a favourite playground for fantastic vagaries is the strong
emphasis on the material sides of life, on business and business
success. The result is a kind of contrast effect. As the surface of
such a rushing business life lacks everything which would satisfy the
deeper longings of the soul, the effort to create an inner world is
readily pushed to mystical extremes in which all contact with the
practical world is lost, and finally all solid knowledge disregarded
and caricatured. The newspapers have their great share, too. Any
absurdity which a crank anywhere in the world brings forth is heralded
with a joy in the sensational impossibilities which must devastate the
mind of the naive reader.

But whatever the sources of this prevailing superstition may be, there
ought to be no disagreement about its intellectual sinfulness and its
danger to society. We see some alarming consequences in the growth of
the revolt against scientific medicine. Millions of good Americans do
not want to know anything about physicians who have devoted their
lives to the study of medicine, but prefer any quack or humbug, any
healer or mystic. Yet for a queer reason the case of the treatment of
diseases shows the ruinous results of this social procedure very
slowly. Every scientific physician knows that many diseases can be
cured by autosuggestion in emotional excitement, and if this belief in
the quack produces the excitement and the suggestion, the patient may
really be cured, not on account but in spite of the quack who treats
him. The whole misery of this antimedical mo