The public conscience of the social world has been stirred in recent days by the dangers which threaten from an antisocial world that lurks in darkness. The sociologists recognize that it is not a question of vicious and criminal individuals, but one of an antisocial atmosphere, of immoral traditions and surroundings, through which crime flourishes and vice is fostered. They speak of a social underworld, and mean by it that whole pitiable setting in which the gangs of thieves and the hordes of prostitutes live their miserable lives. The public discussions nowadays are full of stirring outcries against the rapid spreading of vice in our large cities; it is a war for clean living and health. But after all we ought not to forget that similar dangers surround our inner culture and our spiritual life, and that an intellectual underworld threatens our time, which demands a no less rigorous fight until its vice is wiped out. The vice of the social underworld gives a sham satisfaction to the human desire for sensual life; the vice of the intellectual underworld gives the same sham fulfilment to the human longing for knowledge and for truth. The infectious germs which it spreads in the realm of culture may ultimately be more dangerous to the inner health of the nation than any physical diseases. The battle against vice and crime in the world of the body ought to be paralleled by a battle against superstition and humbug in the world of the mind. The victory over the social underworld would anyhow never be lasting unless the intellectual underworld were subjugated first. In the atmosphere of sham-truth all the antisocial instincts grow rankly.

I know of a large, beautiful high school in which the boys and girls are to receive the decisive impulses for their inner life from well-trained teachers who have had a solid college education. I have found out that quite a number of these teachers are clients of a medium who habitually informs them as to their future, and for a dollar a sitting gives them advice at every turn of their lives. I do not know whether she takes it from the tea leaves or from an Egyptian dream book or from her own trance fancies, but I do know that the prophecies of this fraud have deeply influenced some of their lives and shaped the faculty of the high school. What does this mean? Mature educators to whose training society has devoted its fullest effort and who are chosen to bring to the youth the message of earnest thought and solid knowledge, and whose intellectual life ought therefore to be controlled by consistent thinking and real love for knowledge, fall back into the lowest forms of mental barbarism and really believe in the most illogical prostitution of truth. The double life of Jekyll and Hyde is more natural than this. The impulse to virtuous behaviour and the atrocities of the criminal may after all be combined in one character, but the desire to master the world by a disciplined knowledge and to think the universe in ideas of order and law cannot go together with a real satisfaction and belief in the chaotic superstitions of mediumistic humbugs. Here we have truly a twofold personality, one living in a world of culture and the other in an underworld of intellectual dissipation and vice. It would not be desirable for the high school teachers who are to be models of virtue to live a second life as gamblers and pick-pockets, but it is more dangerous if they are the agents of intellectual culture and indulge at the same time in intellectual prostitution.

No spirit of false tolerance ought any longer to be permitted, when the treacherous danger has become so nation wide. It is sufficient to take up any newspaper between New York and San Francisco and run through the advertisements of the spiritualists and psychical mediums, the palmists and the astrologers, the spiritual advisers and the psychotherapists: it is evident that it is a regular organized industry which brings its steady income to thousands, and which in the bigger towns has its red-light districts with its resorts for the intellectual vice. The servant girl gets her information as to the fidelity of her lover for fifty cents, the clerk who wants to bet on the races pays five dollars, the great banker who wants to bet on stocks pays fifty dollars for his prophetic tips, and the widow who wants messages from her husband pays five hundred dollars, but they all come and pay gladly. If this mood permeates the public of all classes, it is not surprising that the cheapest spiritualistic fraud creeps into religious circles, that the wildest medical humbug is successfully rivalling the work of the scientific physician, and that the intellectual graft of psychical research is beginning to corrupt the camps of the educated. Surely it is a profitable business, and I know it from inside information, as not long ago a very successful clairvoyant came to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and offered me a partnership with half his income, not because he himself believed much in my psychology, but because, as he assured me, there are some clients who think more highly of my style of psychology than of his, and if we got together the business would flourish. He told me just how it was to be done and how easy it is and what persons frequent his parlours. But I have inside information of a very different kind before me, if I think of the victims who come to me for help when superstition has broken their mental springs. There was a young girl to whom life was one great joy, until for ten dollars she got the information that she would die in a very big building, and now she goes into hysterics when her family tries to take her into a theatre or a hotel or a railway station or a school.

Indeed the psychologist has an unusually good chance to get glimpses of this filthy underworld, even if he does not frequent the squalid quarters of the astrologers. Bushels of mail bring this superstition and mental crookedness to his study, and his material allows him to observe every variety of illogical thought. If a letter comes to his collection which presents itself as a new specimen that ought to be analyzed a little further, nothing is needed but a short word of reply. It will at once bring a full supply of twisted thought, sufficient for a careful dissection. It has been said repeatedly in the various vice investigations that no one can understand the ill fate of the vicious girls, unless he studies carefully the men whom they are to please. An investigation into mental vice demands still more an understanding of those minds which play the part of customers. There are too many who cannot think in straight lines and to whom the most absurd linking of facts is the most satisfactory answer in any question. The crudeness of their intellect, which may go together with ample knowledge in other fields, predestines them to be deceived and puts a premium on the imposture. I may try to characterize some varieties of crooked thinking from chance tests of the correspondence with which the underworld has besieged me. I have only the letters of most recent date in hand.

I abstract, of course, from those written by insane individuals. They come plentifully and show all sorts of distortions and impossible ideas. But they do not belong here. The confused mind of the patient is not to be held responsible. His absurdities are symptoms of disease, and they are sharply to be separated from the lack of logic in the sound mind, just as the impulse to kill in paranoia is to be distinguished from the murderous schemes of the criminal. It is generally not difficult to recognize at once which is which. I find the most frequent type of letters from evidently diseased persons to be writings like this: “Dear Sir: I wish to let you know that some young men have a sort of a comb machine composed of wireless telephone and reinforced electricity. They can play this machine and make a person talk or wake or go to sleep. They can tell where you are, even miles away. They play in the eyes and brain, I think. They have two machines; so they know when the police or anybody is coming toward their house. They keep talking most of the time so as to take up a person's mind. It is about time it was stopped, but people don't understand such things around here. Could a wireless telephone get their voices? Hoping you will do something to stop them, I am yours, One Who Has Been Annoyed Very Much.”

There is no help for such a poor sufferer except in the asylum. Here we want to deal not with the patients, but only with the sinners who sin against logic, while their minds are undiseased.

There is another large class of correspondents, which is not to be blamed, and which is one of the most interesting contributers to the psychologist's files. People write long discussions of theories which they build up on peculiar happenings in their minds. The theories themselves may be entirely illogical, or at least in contradiction to all acknowledged science, but such letters are interesting, because they disclose abnormal mental states. Here it is not real insanity; but all kinds of abnormal impulses or ideas, of psychasthenic emotions, of neurasthenic disturbances, of hysteric inhibition, are the starting points, and it is only natural that such pathological intrusions should bewilder the patient and induce him to form the wildest theories. Again, he may believe in the most improbable and most fantastic connection of things, but this is due to the overwhelming power of disturbances which he is indeed unable to explain to himself. I have a whole set of letters from women who explain in fantastic theories their magical power to foresee coming events; and yet it is not difficult to recognize as the foundation of all such ideas some well-known forms of memory disturbance. Commonly it is the widespread tendency of women to accompany a scene with the feeling that they have experienced it once before. They are few who never have had it, especially in states of fatigue; many have it very often; and some are led to trust it and to become convinced that they really experienced the scene, at least in their minds, beforehand. This uncanny impression then easily develops into untenable speculations on the borderland of normal intellect. The letters which approach those of the insane most nearly come from persons who try to work out a theory to account for hysterical experiences which break into their normal life. Sometimes the most absurd explanations must be acknowledged as justified from the standpoint of the patient. A woman wrote to me that she had the abnormal power to produce railroad wrecks by her mere will, while she was lying at home in bed. She wanted me to hypnotize her in order to relieve her from this uncanny power. She had elaborated this thought in full detail. She did not know, what I found out only slowly, that in hysterical attacks at night, for which every memory was lost the next morning, she used a stolen switch key to open a switch, because she was angry with a railway official. I will ignore all such cases with an abnormal background here and confine myself to the healthy crowd.

If I were to characterize their writings from an outside point of view, I might first say that their expressions are expansive. There is no limit to their manuscripts, though I have to confess that an exposition of eighty-five hundred pages which has just been announced to me by its author has not yet reached me. Nor can it be denied that their relation to old-fashioned or to new-fashioned spelling is not always a harmonious one. Nor should I call them always polite: the criticism of my own opinions, which they generally know only from some garbled newspaper reports, often takes forms which are not the usual ones for scholarly correspondence. “Whether it is your darkness or if it is the badness of the police that go around calling themselves the government, that probably ordered you to put such ignorance in the Sunday article, I do not know.” Or more straightforward are letters of this type: “Greeting—You take the prize as an educated fool. According to reports to me by less stupid and more honest men than you, the matter is....” It is surprising how often the handwriting is pretty, coquettish, or affected, but almost half of my crank correspondence is typewritten.

When the newspapers tell of a mysterious case, minds of this type immediately feel attracted to mix in. When a few years ago I published an article disclosing the tricks of Madame Palladino, I was simply flooded with letters of advice and of explanation. The same thing occurred recently when the papers reported that I was experimenting with Beulah Miller. Now it is easy to understand that those who fancied that the Miller child had supernatural gifts of telepathy and clairvoyance would wish to bring their questions to me so that I might make Beulah Miller trace their lost bracelets or predict their fortune in the Stock Exchange. But I was at a loss to understand why so many persons from Maine to California felt tempted to write long letters to me in which they told me what kind of questions I ought to ask the child, as if I could not formulate a question for myself. Every one expected a special report for himself with exact statements of her answers. The whole performance showed a lack of judgment which is typical of that lower intellectual layer; and yet the letters were often written on beautifully monogrammed letter paper. More often, however, my own writings or doings have nothing to do with the case. I am the perfectly innocent receiver of written messages about anything between heaven and earth, while the messages which my correspondents receive from me are not always authentic. One of my psychically talented writers reports: “On May 31st at eight forty-nine A.M. in the midst of a thunderstorm I came into communication with Doctor MÜnsterberg and asked him to send me a message. He said, 'The name of my son is Wilhelm MÜnsterberg.'” It is improbable that I lied so boldly about my family, even in a telepathic message.

I may select a few typical theories, which all come from evidently otherwise normal and harmless people. I have before me a whole series of manuscripts from a druggist who is sure that his ego theory is “very near the truth.” It is in itself very simple and convincing. “The right and the left cerebral egos united with one sublime ego are in the body in a loose union in possession of an amoeboid cell. During sleep they may separate. The sublime ego wanders through nerve paths to the bowels, and the bowel experiences are the dreams.” An experiment brought a definite proof of this. The druggist dyed some crackers deep blue with methylene blue, and later dreamed that a large train of blue food was passing by. As each carriage of the train corresponded to a granule of starch in the crackers, he was able to figure that the ego which saw those parts of the crackers was about one thousandth of an inch large. “The fact of seeing in dreams is due to vital force, the peculiar low speed to the high vibration force of living albuminoids emitted from every tendril of bioplasm and perceived by the eye of the ego-bion during its visit.” “Within the ego-bion is the ego itself, which is much simpler looking, about one hundredth of a micromillimeter.” I do not want to go into details of how these egos can be transmitted “by kiss or otherwise” from one generation to another, but I can say that as soon as the reader has grasped the fundamental thesis of the author, everything follows with perfect logic. The good man, who is doubtless a faithful druggist and whose mind is perfectly clear, has simply twisted some of the ideas which he has gathered from his ample reading and developed his pet theory.

His case is very similar to that of a dignified, elderly trained nurse who is faithfully devoted to her noble daily work and who follows her vocation without indicating to any one that she is the author of a great unpublished philosophical work. She has spent twenty-five years of her life on the elaboration of this magnum opus, which is richly illustrated. Everything in the book is consistent and in harmony with its presuppositions. The theory again is very simple; every detail is perfectly convincing, if you acknowledge the starting point. As to this, there may be difference of opinion. The fundamental thought is that all human souls are born in the forests of Central Africa. “Souls are sexless forces. Never is one soul born into life. There are always two. Often we find three pairs of almost the same type with but a shadow of density to distinguish each pair. Man evolutes upward on the scale of life by two tribes of apes. Ere man becomes human, he represents one cell force. When man takes the human form as Maquake, he becomes a double life cell.” I do not claim to be an expert in this system, but if I understand the whole work rightly, the idea is that any human soul born there by the monkeys in Africa has to pass in circles of one thousand years from individual to individual, becoming at first negro, then Indian, then Malayan, then Hindu, then Greek, Celt, and Roman, then Jew, and finally American. After a thousand years the soul begins to degenerate and enters sinners and criminals. Which stage the soul has reached can easily be seen from the finger nails. The chief illustrations of the great work were therefore drawings of finger nails of all races. It is a side issue of the theory that “souls once matured generally pass on to another star. The nearer the sun is to the star holding life, the denser is all growth in nature.” I acknowledge that this view of evolution does not harmonize exactly with my own, but I cannot deny that the whole system is worked out with perfect consistency, and wherever I asked the writer difficult questions as to some special problems, she was at once ready to give the answers with completely logical deduction from her premises. She is by no means mentally diseased, and she does not mix her theories with her practical activity. If she sits as nurse at the bedside of a patient, she recognizes of course from the finger nails that this particular soul may be three or five thousand years old, and accordingly in a decaying state, but that does not interfere with her conscientious work as a nurse and helper.

To be sure, not every one spends twenty-five years on the elaboration of some twisted fancies. Most of my correspondents write the monumental thoughts of their systems with decisive brevity. A physician informs me that every thought and act of our lives is transfixed on the etheric vapours that surround our earth, and that it is therefore only natural that a clairvoyant is able to see those fixed events and write them down afterward from the ethereal inscriptions. Another tells about his discovery that the human body is a great electrical magnet. I am the more glad to make this fact widely known, as the author writes that he has not given it to the public yet, as he is not financially able to advertise it. Yet he himself adds that after all it is not necessary to advertise truth. On eight quarto pages he draws the most evident consequences of his discovery and shows how he is able to explain by it the chemical change of each cell in the brain and to prove that “foolish so-called spirits are simply electrical demonstrations.” “I can demonstrate every current, nerve cell, and atom of the human body. It may seem strange to you that I claim so much, but with the induction every investigation has been so easy for me. I have never been puzzled for any demonstration yet, but I am still searching for more knowledge. Yours for investigation....” I may say that this is a feature common to most of my correspondents of this metaphysical type. They are never “puzzled.”

Nearly related to this type of theories are the systems of astrology; and in our upper world very few are really aware what a rÔle astrology is still playing in the intellectual underworld. Some of the astrological communications I receive periodically go so far beyond my understanding that I do not even dare to quote them. But some of the astrological authors present very neat and clean theories which are so simple and so practical that it is almost a pity that they are absurd. For instance, I am greatly interested in the question of determining how far the mind of individuals is predisposed for particular vocations, and in the psychological laboratory we are busy with methods to approach the problem. The astrologers have a much more convincing scheme. My friend writes that he has observed “over two thousand cases wherein the dates of birth have been the means to give the position of the planets at the hour of birth, the purpose being to ascertain the influence they had on man. Now the furniture business calls for an artistic temperament, and after careful observation through birth dates it is found that the successful furniture men have the planet Venus in their nativities. But the Venus influence is prominent also in other lines of business such as art, jewellery, and in all lines where women's necessities are manufactured. Other planetary influences on success in business are: Saturn for miners, tanners, gardeners, clowns, and beggars; Mercury for teachers, secretaries, stationers, printers, and tailors; Jupiter for clergymen, judges, lawyers, and senators; Mars for dentists, barbers, cutlers, carpenters, and apothecaries; Uranus for inventors, chemists, occultists, and others.”

One system which is still more frequent than the astrological is the strictly spiritualistic one, which expresses itself in spirit returns and messages from the other world. Geographically the most favoured stations for wireless heavenly connections seem to be Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. The adherents of this underworld philosophy have a slang of their own, and the result is that their letters, while they spring from the deepest emotions, sound as if they were copied from the same sample book. The better style begins about like this: “Knowing that you are intensely interested in things psychological, I beg to enclose you copies of some of the automatic letters which I have received. I have a young lawyer friend in the city, and he and I can throw down fifteen or twenty sheets of paper on a table, take hold of hands and get them written full, and in this way I have received letters from Pericles, Aristides, Immanuel Kant, and many others. I got letters from Julia Ward Howe a week after her transition, and I got letters from Emerson and Abraham Lincoln by asking for them. I enclose copy of the last letter which I received from Charlotte Cushman, and I think you will agree there is nothing foolish about it or indeed about any of the letters. I have recently married again, and my present wife is a wonderful trance medium, probably the best means of communication between the two worlds living to-day.” This is not exceptional, as practically every one of my spiritualistic correspondents has some “best means of communication between the two worlds.” The messages themselves usually begin: “My loved one, out of the realms of light and truth, I come to you ...” and so on. If the letters do not come from the spiritualists themselves, some of their friends feel the need of turning my attention to the “wonderful psychic powers” of their acquaintances. Not seldom the spirits take a more refined form. “The forms of the newly dead come to me in bulk. I see and feel them. They are purplish inky in colour. When a real spirit comes to me in white, I close my eyes. I seem to have to. The spirit or presence most commonly seen, I believe, is a thought form. It frequently comes off the cover of a magazine, and were I not getting wise, I would think the universe turned suddenly to beauty. But I am learning that a person can receive wonderfully exaggerated reports from the very soul of the artist.”

From here we see before us the wide vista of the individual gifts and talents: the underworld people are sometimes bragging of them, sometimes grafting with them, if not blackmailing, and often simply enjoying them with the sweet feeling of superiority. The powers turn in all valuable directions. Here is one who wishes to know whether I have ever heard of any other “person who senses the magnetism of the earth and is able to tell many kinds of earthquakes? Also volcanic heats? A quick reply will favour me.” Many have the regular prophetic gift; practically every one of them foresaw the assassination of McKinley. Most of them, however, are gifted in curing diseases. The typical letter reads as follows: “There is a young man living here who seems to be endowed with a wonderful occult power by the use of which he is able to diagnose almost any human ailment. He goes into a trance, and while in this condition the name of the subject is given him, and then without any further questions he proceeds to diagnose his case fully and correctly and prescribes a treatment for the relief of the trouble. In every case yet diagnosed a cure has almost immediately resulted.” This kind of gift is so frequent that it is really surprising that so many physicians still rely on their clumsier method. Marvellous also are the effects which hypnotism can secure in this paradise of the ignorant. After having hypnotized patients many hundred times, I fancied that I had a general impression as to the powers and limits of hypnotism. But there is no end to the new information which I get from my hypnotizing correspondents. “Has it ever occurred to you that by hypnotism death will be prevented, and all ills, mental or otherwise, be cured before long? Why do I think so?” Of course I do not know why she thinks so. I usually do not know why the writers of the underworld letters think so. Or rather I usually do know that they do not think at all.

There may be many who will read all this not only with surprise, but with skepticism. They live their intellectually clean lives, dwell in safe, comfortable houses of the intellect and move on well-paved educational streets, and never see or hear anything of those inhabitants of the intellectual slums. If ever a letter like those which pour in hundreds to the desk of the psychologist were to stray into their mail, they would feel sure that they had to do with a lunatic who belongs in an asylum under a physician's care. They have no idea that not only their furnaceman and washwoman, but also their tailor and their watchmaker, or perhaps the teacher of their children, and, if they examine more carefully, three of their last dinner guests, are strolling for hours or for a night, or living for seasons, if not for a lifetime, in that world of superstition and anti-intellectual mentality. Such people are not ill; they are personally not even cranks; they are simply confused and unable to live an ordered intellectual life. Their character and temperament and their personality in every other respect may be faultless, but their ideas are chaotic. They bring together the contradictory and make contrasts out of the identical, and, far from any sound religious belief or any true metaphysical philosophy, they simply mix any mystical whims into the groups of thought which civilization has brought into systematic order. Instead of trying to learn, they are always longing for some illegitimate intellectual profit; they are always trying to pick the pocket of the absolute.

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 naÏve 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 movement is therefore somewhat veiled and alleviated. But this is not so in the fields of real culture and knowledge. The belief in the absurdities there has not even an autosuggestive value. It is simply destructive to the life of civilized society. It is absurd for us to put our best energies to work to build up a splendid system of education for the youth of the whole nation, and at the same time to allow its structure to be undermined by the millionfold intellectual depravity.

Of course it may be difficult to say what ought to be done. I feel sure that society ought to suppress with relentless energy all those parlours of the astrologists and palmists, of the scientific mediums and spiritualists, of the quacks and prophets. Their announcements by signs or in the public press ought to be stopped, and ought to be treated by the postal department of the government as the advertisements of other fraudulent enterprises are treated. A large rÔle in the campaign would have to be played by the newspapers, but their best help would be rendered by negative action, by not publishing anything of a superstitious and mystical type. The most important part of the fight, however, is to recognize the danger clearly, to acknowledge it frankly, and to see with open eyes how alarmingly the evil has grown around us. No one will fancy that any social schemes can be sufficient to bring superstition to an end, any more than any one can expect that the present fight against city vice will forever put a stop to sexual immorality. But that surely cannot be an argument for giving up the battle against the moral perversities of metropolitan life. The fact that we cannot be entirely successful ought still less to be an argument for any leniency with the intellectual perversities and the infectious diseases the germs of which are disseminated in our world of honest culture by the inhabitants of the cultural underworld.