force automatic writing on her it will be harmless and no cause for
hysteric developments. But surely her art is entirely useless for any
practical purpose. She cannot know anything which others do not know
beforehand. Clairvoyant powers or prophetic gifts are not hers, and
above all her mind-reading is a natural process. The edifice of
science will not be shaken by the powers of my little Rhode Island
friend.
Yet the most important part is not the fate of the individual child,
but the behaviour of this nation-wide public which chases her into the
swamps of fraud. No one can decide and settle whether the party of
superstition forms the majority or the minority. If all the silent
voters were sincere, they probably would carry the vote for telepathy.
But in any case, such a party exists, and it does not care in the
least that scientific investigations clear up a case which threatens
to bring our world of thought into chaotic disorder. A world of mental
trickery and mystery, a world which by its very principle could never
be understood, is to them instinctively more welcome than a world of
scientific order. There cannot be a more fundamental contrast between
men who are to form a social unit than this radical difference of
attitude toward the world of experience. Compared with this deepest
split in the community, all its other social questions seem temporary
and superficial.
V
THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
Every lawyer knows some good stories about some wild juries he has
known, which made him shiver and doubt whether a dozen laymen ever can
see a legal point. But every newspaper reader, too, remembers an
abundance of cases in which the decision of the jury startled him by
its absurdity. Who does not recall sensational acquittals in which
sympathy for the defendant or prejudice against the plaintiff carried
away the feelings of the twelve good men and true? For them are the
unwritten laws, for them the mingling of justice with race hatreds or
with gallantry. And even in the heart of New York a judge recently
said to a chauffeur who had killed a child and had been acquitted:
“Now go and get drunk again; then this jury will allow you to run over
as many children as you like.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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