[Vision2020] [Spam 3.56] Oliver Wendel Holmes

[lfalen]

Thanks, There is a lot of pseudoscience out there.The Nutrition and Heath Supplement field is full of it. In addition tho the Nutrition and Health letters put out by some of the  the major Universities, Skeptical  Inquirer Magazine does a good job of of pointing out false claims.
Roger
-----Original message-----
From: Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:34:15 -0800
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Spam 3.56] [Vision2020] Oliver Wendel Holmes

> 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
> 
>