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 <a href="http://www.michaelariens.com/ConLaw/justices/holmes.htm">http://www.michaelariens.com/ConLaw/justices/holmes.htm</a> for a short biography.<br>
<br><p>"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.</p><p>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."</p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>