Belief and Credulity

Front matter

BELIEF AND CREDULITY

I

The vital history of human development is to be sought in the history of beliefs. The inscriptions of Egypt or of Babylon, tho rendered in modern tongues, speak an imperfect message until illuminated by some insight into the beliefs which these cultures cherished. The amazing ruins of Copan, the serpent mound of Ohio, remain mute and inglorious until we can solve the riddle of the beliefs of their builders. Dead Pompeii becomes a living city when we people its streets with the hopes and fears, the beliefs and opinions of its last inhabitants. The history of the arts and the sciences, of society and of religion, specifically involves an account of the succession of beliefs and of the growth of belief-habits. The story of men’s doings is likewise, in large measure, a reflection of their beliefs; conduct, whether of individuals or of masses of men, remains an undeciphered record until interpreted as the concrete expression of definite beliefs. The spring of action is motive, and the intellectual impetus to motive is again, belief.

II

From what has been presented it might be inferred that the contemplation of error is more instructive than the story of the evolution of truth; and for certain purposes this is really the case. Error and credulity have thus far been utilized as a background against which to set off right belief; it will be useful to examine the background itself. Credulity is most generally exercised in regard to the acceptance of statements by others. When shall we believe what we are told, and when shall we suspect, discredit, deny? Again no golden rule; no automatic switch that makes connection when truth presses the button, but refuses to work for the touch of error; but also again, the possibility of reaching principles that may train the judgment and guide practice. Clifford has formulated these in a simple and acceptable fashion. You may believe another when “there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows of the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.” A man may deliberately lie; he may belong to the class to which Huxley refers when he speaks of “the downright lying of people whose word it is impossible to doubt”; he may be more or less consciously or subconsciously misled by his imagination; he may be hopelessly deficient in his powers of observation, or in his knowledge of fact, or in his capacity to handle evidence and argument; and none of these ethical or logical shortcomings seems to interfere at all in certain persons with their powers of holding and publishing opinions on all manners of subjects—even on those on which no human soul has the possibility of possessing knowledge. To Clifford’s dual conditions of logical responsibility must be added another pair; namely the distinction as to how far the issue involved is a matter of fact or of the interpretation of fact. Both facts and their interpretation, or arguments, appear as prominently on the side of error as of truth; yet, tho not reducible to anthropometric measurements, the physiognomies of the two are recognizably different to the trained observer.

It seems ludicrously easy to collect facts of any desired quality and to point them in any desired direction. Dr. Holmes effectively describes these abuses: “Foremost of all, emblazoned at the head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from time immemorial,—Facts! Facts! Facts!” Yet in the crucible of logic it is possible to separate the dross from the gold. The arguments employed have a like suspicious appearance: they “have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of every doctrine and pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers of police.” The former type of credulity—the rash acceptance of facts—is the more simple and the more usually considered; the latter type—the rash acceptance of explanations of interpretations of facts—is frequently the more vital and instructive. Ingenious and successful lying is doubtless a fine art: yet the more difficult part of it is the gaining of credence for one’s inventions. That depends largely upon the belief-attitude of the public and upon the psychological climate in which they live. It is quite obvious that the conscienceless prevaricator or charlatan must play upon the prejudices and vanities and ignorance and cupidities of his clientèle. He presents what they wish to believe, appeals to their passions and emotional weaknesses, and when necessary berates his opponents with no gentle hand, and indulges in what Huxley speaks of as “varnishing the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic, rhetoric.” But the psychologist’s interest is predominantly on the other side, with the duped rather than with the knave; especially if it be a case in which contagion has a fair field and all judgment becomes lost in a psychic epidemic of credulity. Such we are apt to associate with dark ages and ignorant communities, with isolated cultures and inhospitable mental climates. A few instances from the days of the telegraph and the omnipresent daily paper may accordingly be the more instructive.

III

The name of Leo Taxil—a pseudonym for Gabriel Jorgand—may be unknown to many readers; it should not remain so, for the judgment which has been pronounced upon Mme. Bla —also a modern of the moderns—may with modifications be applied to Taxil; that he “has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.” Only Taxil’s accomplishments were of a rather gross order; his boldness surpassed his ingenuity; and the interest is centered in his deeds rather than in his personality. Like most disciples of Cagliostro, his career was a checkered one. In 1885, at the age of thirty-one, he was engaged upon his magnum opus, having already appeared as a violent radical in politics—he is a product of France—a rabid anti-clerical, and the author of a libelous pamphlet on the Secret amours of Pius IX. The suggestion for his chef d’oeuvre was the encyclical of Leo XIII. (1884) directed against the Freemasons, who with others were placed under the ban as subjects of the realms of Satan. After a full confession of the errors of his former ways, Taxil was received back with rejoicing into the bosom of the Church, and thereupon published four volumes of wholly imaginary revelations, revealing the sacrilegious orgies and devil-worship of the Masonic mysteries. For this he received in person the solemn benediction of the Vatican, as well as the material rewards of the sale of one hundred thousand copies of his work and the honor of its translation into English, German, Italian, and Spanish. If it be stated that the German version omitted the volume on the “Masonic sisters,” for the reason that it was not thought proper to outrage the moral sense of the community by recounting “the filthiness of the hellish crew,” the character of the work may be surmised. Taxil extended the sphere of influence of his imaginary demonolaters to all parts of the world—even from Singapore to Charleston, at which latter point the Masonic Grand Master figures as a Satanic Pope, who has at his disposal a telephone, invented and operated by devils, whereby he puts a girdle round about the earth in forty seconds, and a magic bracelet by which he summons Lucifer at his pleasure. Intoxicated by his success and the credulity of his adherents, Taxil’s invention runs riot; and he tells the story of a serpent inditing prophecies on the back of a demon who “in order to marry a Freemason, transformed himself into a young lady, and played the piano, evenings, in the form of a crocodile.” Taxil gained confederates in other countries, who contributed to the movement according to their several needs and talents. One of the most interesting figures in the story is the fictitious personage, Diana Vaughan—the of the drama and of its . She was given out to be the descendant of Thomas Vaughan, the seventeenth-century mystic, and the goddess Astarte; her Luciferian origin and principles were shown by her horror of all religious observances, by the devils who attended her, and thru whose aid she made excursions to Mars, where she “rode on Schiaparelli’s canals, sailed on the Sea of the Sirens, and strolled among the gigantic inhabitants of the planet.” Many remarkable incidents of her curious personality are retailed for the benefit of the believers; while poetic justice is appeased by her final conversion to the Church thru the instrumentality of the spirit of Jeanne d’Arc.

When it became necessary to materialize Diana Vaughan for the benefit of the privileged few and to satisfy the skepticism of others, she was cleverly impersonated by “a bright American girl, employed as a copyist in a Parisian typewriter establishment, who wrote all the letters at Taxil’s dictation and received a monthly salary of one hundred and fifty francs for her services.” This was hardly a fair appreciation of American talent, considering that the money remitted to Diana Vaughan in ten years amounted to more than half a million francs. In 1896 Taxil was a prominent figure in a great anti-masonic congress held at Trent, where indeed he was treated as a hero and a saint. On April 19, 1897, in Paris, there was held by invitation of Diana Vaughan a highly sensational function, at which it had been announced that the miraculous lady would appear. When the moment arrived, Taxil stepped forward and said: “Reverend Sirs, ladies and gentlemen! you wish to see Diana Vaughan. Look at me! I myself am that lady.” Then followed an explicit account of the twelve years of imposture and an impudent expression of thanks to the clergy for the unwitting aid in his deviltries; a forced retreat to a neighboring cafe to escape the vengeance of the crowd; a momentary furore, some discussion pro and con; and then, so far as can be learned, the world wagged on and the story ends. Surely this is a remarkable instance of fin-de-siècle credulity, and one that will hardly suffer by comparison with mediaeval superstition. Its importance in the present connection lies in the illustration which it furnishes of what may happen in extreme cases when verifiability and scientific-mindedness are wholly ignored, and the methods that appeal to authority and to prepossessions are allowed to run riot. Then standards of probability, as well as the critical attitude, are wholly absent or hopelessly distorted, and credulity has the open door.

Prepossessions are not always so prominent in the evolution of myths that gain acceptance by preying upon credulity. The presence of an indolent atmosphere and of a sympathetic milieu is all that is necessary. Of this the story of Kaspar Hauser, the “wild boy of Nuremberg,” furnishes a fairly modern instance; for the Nestors of our generation may easily remember the interest which his case aroused thruout Europe. The commonly accepted tale made him out as an abandoned child, cruelly confined in a dark cell, cut off from all association except with the monster who gave him his daily bread. He became the classic example of the condition of a human being in the absence of all education; he was heralded as a child of nature, as an example of the innocence of man before the fall, as a realization in the flesh of Rousseau’s Émile. It was proposed to adopt him as the child of Europe, and he was actually adopted as a son by the Earl of Stanhope. The interest in his case was maintained by the accounts of his marvelous psychic powers, as also by the speculations as to his origin, which brought slander upon many a noble house. He could see a gnat in a spider’s web a long distance off, and after twilight; he could distinguish between a pear and an apple and a plum tree by their odor at a distance at which others could barely see the trees; he was overcome by the exhalations of a graveyard several streets off; he could distinguish metals by their different attractions for his fingers, while the vicinity of a hardware shop brought on convulsions; when examined by a homeopathist, he proved in his own person the truth of homeopathy. As to the speculations as to who he might have been, it is enough to say that the gossips and the scholars were equally busy and, with characteristic Teuton , a bibliography of nearly three hundred numbers was accumulated, recounting the various versions of the story of Kaspar Hauser. The sifted facts out of which, or in spite of which, the various myths sprouted and flourished, are few and luminous. The boy appeared on the streets of Nuremberg with a letter in his hand, which he had doubtless written, and was put in prison as a helpless wayfarer. The original protocol shows that he walked a mile on that day, recited the Lord’s prayer, spoke with dialectical peculiarities, said that he had gone to school, showed his fondness for horses, and admitted that the object of the letter, addressed to a captain of cavalry, was to secure him a post in the service. He seemed to feign simple-mindedness and to avoid answering questions. In the one letter was another purporting to have been written sixteen years previously by the mother of the boy, but obviously a forgery. This started the story to which the Burgomaster gave wings by a proclamation elaborating the “wild boy of nature” theory, and embellishing it with fantastic “details calculated to give verisimilitude to an otherwise improbable tale.” Learned ignorance in the person of a Professor Daumer—to whom Kaspar was intrusted for his education—still further distorted the simple facts. Tho at first the boy could not speak (this is Daumer’s story) and could only understand those who treated him as an infant, this helpless and untutored babe, after three days, performed on the piano, soon after knitted a stocking, and in four weeks was able to entertain the Burgomaster with an account of his years of solitary confinement. Within a month this worthy, but mentally blind, professor had transformed the wild boy into a model of social elegance, who carried on witty conversations, made graceful allusions to the ancient Romans, and played checkers and chess. The story is too full of detail to be further considered; but enough has been given to show the glaring inconsistency of the theory of explanation either with the real facts, which almost no one knew, or even with the alleged facts, which were widely circulated. Kaspar’s lot simply chanced to fall in pleasant places, and, by accepting the part which the credulity of his surroundings thrust upon him, he was buoyed into fame and made the subject of a neugeschichtliche Legende. It is proper enough to add that the backward stage of a practical psychology seventy years ago alone made possible the acceptance of any such caricature of an untutored child of nature. Doubtless many gave no credence to the tale; but its ready acceptance in almost all circles gives it a permanent place in the history of credulity. In contrast with the affaire Taxil, the Kaspar incident appeals more to the intellectual than to the emotional weaknesses, and involves a larger share of misinterpretation of fact; while the lack of proper standards to estimate the improbability of what is given out for fact is glaringly obvious in both cases. This personal characteristic of the duped is often more forcibly described as gullibility.

To complete the collection of types of credulity, we should have an instance in which a system of interpretation of facts—not a mere narrative—in itself startling and contradictory to ordinary experience, gains widespread credence, and that in spite of pronounced inconsistency with verifiable observation and common sense. These conditions are remarkably well satisfied by the recent promulgation of the doctrines of Christian Science. Even in this field of intellectual effort the land of the free and the home of the brave has contributed an article worthy to compete with the foreign product. Eagle-like, this system spreads its wings and soars free from the bonds of sense or earth-bound realities, free from human logic and the errors of mortal mind, free from the material impediments which the Author of nature has inconsiderately set in our paths, free to make things so by thinking them so, free to set method and learning and experience at naught. And surely it calls for braveness of no common order to resist the seductive appeals of eye and ear, to sail steadily on heedless of the calls of the sirens of rationality, convinced at the outset that things cannot be as they are, and refusing the nod of recognition to the plebeian idols of the ills of flesh. It is not necessary in this connection to recount the beliefs of this system; it is sufficient to point out that when thousands of intelligent persons give practical adherence to, and enroll themselves under the banner of, one who teaches that a bunion would be an adequate cause of insanity, if only we held the same belief about the bunion as we do about congestion of the brain; that smallpox is contagious by reason of the same agencies as make weeping or yawning contagious; that fear may be reflected in the body as fractured bones, just as shame is seen rising to the cheek; that anatomy and physiology and hygiene are the husbandmen of sickness and disease, while the reading of a text-book of Christian Science is equally effective in producing health; or that when a healthy horse takes cold without his blanket, it is on account of the poor creature’s knowledge of physiology—then such persons can hardly complain if they are cited as instances of modern credulity.

IV

Such, then, is the background against which logical belief shines forth with contrasted splendor; such are, admittedly in their extreme form, the results of following after strange gods and deserting the narrow path of strenuous rationality, of critically trained judgment, of adherence to verifiable standards of belief. The tale needs no adornment, and the moral is sufficiently pointed to require no hard blows to drive it home. It will be profitable in continuation to survey, tho perforce briefly, the middle distance, the practical field of compromise and of the necessity for action, in which we must needs travel up hill and down dale and cannot take the level road which we wish were possible, in which we must risk error constantly if we would move at all.

In entering the practical arena the philosopher is indeed insensitive or unobservant who does not become conscious of a decided climatic change. He is probably already familiar with various uncomplimentary remarks concerning his unfitness to assume a due share of the responsibilities of life, from the tribute of Frederick the Great (“If,” he said, “I wanted to ruin one of my provinces, I would make over its government to the philosophers”) to the fashionable jibes against the scholar in politics. There is certainly much exaggeration in the current notions of the incompatibility of the reflective and the directive (perhaps it would be unwise to say the active) temperament; and there is much reason for the claim that the science-molded philosopher may say, “nous avons changé tout cela.” Indeed a recent writer has forcibly maintained that the nearest analogue of the man of science is the “so-called man of business, and the chief distinction between the two is that the one deals with the unfamiliar, the other with familiar things.” This significant difference was long ago presented by De Morgan as one of the advantages that a logical training secures. “I maintain that logic tends to make the power of reason over the unusual and the unfamiliar more nearly equal to the power over the usual and familiar than it would otherwise be. The second is increased; but the first is almost created.” This is but one of the differences in training, interest, thought-habit, and temperament that estrange the scholar from the man of affairs. Yet much of this unfamiliarity is a matter of technique, and as such belongs equally to the arts of life and to the sciences; the ignorance of one another’s techniques is no cause for lack of sympathy and comprehension of the aims and efforts of practical and scientific specialists. A further contrast is emphasized by philosophical historians. “In practical life, the wisest and soundest men avoid speculation, and insure success because, by limiting their range, they increase the tenacity by which they grasp events; while in speculative life the course is exactly the reverse, since in that department the greater the range, the greater the command, and the object of the philosopher is to have as large a generalization as possible”—this is Buckle’s formulation. “Nothing can be more fatal in politics than a preponderance of the philosophical, or in philosophy than a preponderance of the political spirit,” says Lecky. Mr. Fiske, in commenting upon the relations of Huxley and Gladstone (whom Huxley himself spoke of as a “copious shuffler”), says: “One could no more expect a prime minister, as such, to understand Huxley’s attitude in presence of a scientific problem, than a deaf-mute to comprehend a symphony of Beethoven.”

And yet these occupations are not mutually exclusive; philosophy and politics are not December and May, and the temperate zone, in which (in theory at least) we pass our existence, is a composite of the two. Indeed, a divorce of theory and practice is disastrous to both parties of the alliance; theory is the more real and vital for its consideration of and adaptation to tangible conditions; and practice is more rational and more liberal, embraces a larger expediency than if responsive only to the status quo. Learning dissociated from doing is threatened with the decadence of mere erudition, pedantry and disputation. Exercise is equally good for mind and body; but there is danger of falling in love with the mere mechanism of thought—the absorption in the feeling of one’s mental muscles contracting and of plodding in treadmill routine, ever moving, but never advancing. The danger of practice dissociated from principle is that of becoming time-serving, narrow, partisan, short-sighted; it tacks for every wind, loses its bearings, and sacrifices larger for smaller gains. Emerson said of the English some fifty year ago: “They are impious in their skepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust before a fact”; and Emerson’s own countrymen are curiously like and curiously unlike the people whose traits he characterizes. Mr. Morley deplores the same tendency from a more modern point of view. He notes the inclination to reply to an advocate of improvement by “some sagacious silliness about recognizing the limits of the practical in politics, and seeing the necessity of adapting theories to facts. As if the fact of taking a broader and wiser view than the common crowd disqualifies a man from knowing what the view of the common crowd happens to be, and from estimating it at the proper value for practical purposes.” These various opinions, when judiciously strained, leave a weighty deposit of truth; and they have a direct bearing upon the issues of right and wrong belief. They make it abundantly clear that the relations of right knowing to right doing as urgently demand illumination to-day as when Socrates mystified the Athenian youth by maintaining that no man would willingly do wrong or wittingly hold to error. On the one hand, we are told that for wild speculation and rash credulity the practical man takes the lead, whether it be by subscribing in coin to schemes for extracting gold from sea water, or “backing” the rain-makers or the “Keeley motor”; or in subscribing in faith to the reality of curative mental vibrations, the accounts of signaling with the inhabitants of Mars, the depositing of gray matter in Helen Keller’s finger-tips, or to any other of the items of the progress of science with which newspaper paragraphers regale their readers when copy is scarce. On the other hand, the men of books and apparatus are charged with the pursuit of fads, of a contempt for journals and ledgers, of an ignorance of business ways, and an incapacity to deal executively with men and things. The truth is that there are all shades and grades of men in both careers; and the important things to be observed are tendencies and their causes, not individuals and their peculiarities. It is these tendencies that are reflected in opinion and conduct indirectly, and directly in the relations that are entertained and acted upon, of theory to practice.

This relation—between the theoretical and the practical factors in the progress of knowledge—may be pictured as similar to that pertaining between master and dog. The dog runs ahead of the master, takes short excursions on his own account, comes to a turn of the road and wanders hesitatingly about until he detects the direction in which his master turns; then dashes confidently onward with an air of having intended to go that way all along, and probably imagines—and the appearances are in his favor—that he is leading the man. Yet the wise dog does not wander far out of scenting distance, is on the alert for the call of the master, and quickly retraces his steps when he finds that his master has turned the other way. It is doubtless true that the dog may light upon valuable discoveries; and the master will do well to heed any unusual signs of alarm or excitement on the part of his keen-scented companion; and if it happens that the shades of night close in upon him or that his own sight grows dim, he that walks in darkness is fortunate in having so trustworthy a guide. From which we may learn that the formation of belief in practical affairs, while seemingly independent of theory and indeed running ahead of theory for short stretches in a restless striving to enrich experience, is none the less directed by theory, and prospers best when following, tho with judgment and self-reliance, the indications of principles and formulae.

The mutual recognition of the functions of theorist and practitioner is one of the desired and not improbable consummations of modern civilization, and upon it depends in considerable measure the practical fate of right and wrong beliefs. It is still pertinent to repeat Buckle’s complaint that “a theorist is actually a term of reproach instead of being, as it ought to be, a term of honor; for to theorize is the highest function of genius, and the greatest philosophers must always be the greatest theorists”; yet, in so doing, we may add the condition that the philosophers shall theorize wisely and with appreciation of the actualities of existence, not dogmatically or capriciously. In brief, there is scientific theorizing, as there is scientific practice; belief and credulity, truth and error, economy and waste, profit and loss, are possible in each. Yet in the end, rational progress in belief and practice, tho truly a question of proportion, must take its illumination not diffusely from countless scattered sources, but directly from a central luminous principle. “The devotion to the practical aspect of truth”—to cite again from Mr. Morley—“is in such excess as to make people habitually deny that it can be worth while to formulate an opinion, when it happens at the moment to be incapable of realization for the reason that there is no direct prospect of inducing a sufficient number of persons to share it.” “As if the mere possibility of the view being a right one did not obviously entitle it to a discussion.” “The evil . . . comes of not see the great truth that it is worth while to take pains to find out the best way of doing a given task, even if you have strong grounds for suspecting that it will ultimately be done in a worse way.” “It makes all the difference in the world,” says Whately, “whether we put Truth in the first place or in the second place.” Mr. Morley thus protests against what he calls the House of Commons view of life, which subordinates principle to expediency—which may be unfortunate, but necessary—but in so doing sacrifices the paramount significance of principle—which is both unnecessary and pernicious.

The practical arena wherein truth and error, right and wrong, the better and the worse cause, principle and expediency, are engaged in combat is obviously too complex to admit of ready description or analysis; the few groups of combating influences that have been brought within the field of view occupy but a modest corner of the arena. Other equally important contests are going on at the same time; the ethical aspects of belief are nearly as complex as the intellectual, and as worthy of consideration; and people still find an interest in discussing how far truth should be disseminated when it undermines traditional convictions seemingly essential to happiness or even to virtue; how far, in Clifford’s words, “Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be whispered over rose-water after dinner, when the ladies are gone away,” and how far the dissemination of right belief is itself controlled by considerations of practical as well as of theoretical morality. Philosophers of so opposite a calling as a Harvard psychologist and a Parliamentary leader unite in telling us that, in the last analysis, with regard to disputed questions of a not too practical sort, men do and have a right to believe, at their own risk, that which seems to them most elevating, fitting, satisfying, and rational; that in this process we all follow custom and temperamental impulse, tho we cover our retreat with arguments. Into these enticing ramifications of the central problem of right and wrong belief, however germane to the comprehension of the forces that make for truth and error, it is not feasible at present to enter. The issues in which these various factors—and especially the aspects just presented of the relations of theory to practice—culminate is that of the formation of belief-standards. It is in the common possession of these that the logical man of theory and the logical man of practice should find their sympathetic companionship; and to the appreciation of this underlying requisite for harmonious and profitable intercourse, nothing will contribute more directly and effectively than a comprehension of the relations that do and should exist between the guiding principles of belief and their wise embodiment in conduct. If the leaders of men, leaders of small companies and of large ones, those who are listened to and likewise listen to others, can be induced to absorb somewhat of the spirit and the sensitiveness to real distinctions that result from the successful devotion to the aims of science, the danger of the ready acceptance of false beliefs, the fostering of credulity, would be materially lessened.