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.[1]
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-
- ↑ Dr. Holmes’s Homeopathy and its kindred delusions, first published about sixty years ago, was substantially a study of credulity as applied to medical matters. Readers of this will recall that besides the minute exposure of the baselessness of the Hahnemannian cult, there are there considered (1) the royal cure of the King’s Evil; (2) the Weapon Ointment and the Sympathetic Powder, the first rather lukewarmly considered by Bacon, the latter brought into notoriety by Sir Kenelm Digby; (3) the Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley; (4) the history of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinsism. These are thus summarized: “The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances. The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom, immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good physician of a great bishop. The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion, which flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as being a rich and comparatively recent illustration of the pretensions, the arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy errors have long been, and will continue to be, swollen into transient consequence. All display in superfluous abundance the boundless credulity and excitability of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.” The account of Perkins and his Metallic Tractors falls in well with the instances here considered.
