[Vision2020] Oliver Wendel Holmes

[Art Deco]

I ran across these paragraphs in a short story by Oliver Wendel Holmes.  It
easily could be taken as a description of religious belief.  Holmes was
nominally speaking of phrenology, but critics have maintained he was really
alluding to revealed religion.  See
http://www.michaelariens.com/ConLaw/justices/holmes.htm for a short
biography.

"I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a pseudoscience. A
pseudoscience consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against
it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative practical
application. Its professors and practitioners are usually shrewd people;
they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a good deal among
themselves. The believing multitude consists of women of both sexes,
feeble-minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who always get cheated
in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium,
and others of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently
a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or a
member of the detective police. I did not say that Phrenology was one of
the pseudosciences.

A pseudoscience does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may contain
many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts with a
little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the strength of a
single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one. The
practitioners of the pseudosciences know that common minds after they have
been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest rag of a lie,
or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us, we are very apt
to supply the next out of our own imagination. (How many persons can read
Judges XV. 16 correctly the first time?) The pseudosciences take advantage
of this. I did not say that it was so with Phrenology."


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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