PROFESSOR WILLIAM MCDOUGALL 74 Are we trying to say something? DR. SIGMUND FREUD 104 He tells us his dreams ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM 202 The Devil take the hindmost! DR. GEORGE A. DORSEY 238 “We do not use the brains we have” LEWIS BROWNE 250 Stranger than fiction WILL DURANT 280 Almost an institution THE MISBEHAVIORISTS CHAPTER I THE MODERN TEMPER The past appears to be dead. “If the world of poetry, mythology and religion represents the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it, we need only compare the two to realize how irreconcilable they appear,” says Joseph Wood Krutch, associate editor of _The Nation_ and the author of a biography of Poe, writing in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1927. “The romantic ideal of a world well lost for love, and the classic ideal of austere dignity seem equally ridiculous, equally meaningless when referred, not to the temper of the past, but the temper of the present.” Hilaire Belloc is equally insistent as to the existence of this modern temper, for he remarks in the course of some “Cheerful Thoughts on Christmas.”[1] “I think it foolish to disguise from ourselves the plain fact that, in the societies which abandoned the Faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the last supports of Christian doctrine are breaking down very rapidly indeed. Of the doctrines themselves there is little left ... while the minority, which still feel some attachment to some few of these doctrines, feel that attachment in a decreasing degree and more and more as a vague, dissolving sentiment; less and less as a principle. “The old feeling that the doctrines were sacred and intangible, and that attack upon them was intolerable, has so utterly passed that the modern generation does not even understand it.... There has been hardly any defense, hardly any resistance; the last remainder of the creed ... has been allowed to slip away unnoticed like the last few coins of a fortune dissipated by a man so debauched as to have lost his memory.”