The psychical sciences, hypnotism, animal magnetism, telepathy, spiritualism, though still unable to cope successfully with many of the problems presented to them, yet, such as they are, offer a useful contribution to religious problems. The history of religion is full of strange phenomena, many of which seem to be just such phenomena as are taken account of by these new mental sciences. The stigmata of St. Francis, visions, religious ecstasies, divine inspiration, resemble hypnoidal phenomena. To magnetoidal phenomena correspond the imposition of hands, to which importance is attached by Christianity, and the miracle of the woman cured by touching Christ's garment. Telepathy would seem to be a key to the explanation of prophesies and the gift of language; while bilocation, apparitions and like phenomena belong to both the sciences of religion and the psychical sciences, and one may hope that the latter will aid the former in determining their true significance. But whatever progress these mental sciences may make, it seems impossible that they can ever solve the fundamental problems of religion; that they can ever account for the religious sentiment in man, or make known the nature of God.
D. T. Howard.
With due recognition of the metaphysical nature of all scientific presuppositions, we may treat ethics as a science, in the sense of "an ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them." The most explicit program for such a treatment has been proposed by L. Lévy-Bruhl. The problem is not so much to establish standards or norms as to discover how men come to have certain standards. The method of natural science is as applicable to the discovery of the growth of norms as it is to the discovery of laws, and is calculated to teach us, not how to conform to a certain set of ethical rules, but how to behave wisely in society. The author is preparing a Case Book in Ethics, which will use much of the material of sociology, law, etc., but which will have its own specific purpose, i.e., to contribute to the study of the relations of men and groups of men, considered as organisms. Such a study of cases of conduct logically precedes other studies, such as biology, religious psychology, etc., contributory to an investigation of the problems of moral responsibility. Together with the theoretical part of ethical science should go a practical part, an art of ethics, including, for instance, directions as to the control of the will such as may be found in Edwin B. Holt's The Freudian Wish.
Marion C. CarrollAuthor.
The article begins with a quotation from Eucken declaring that the truth of knowledge must have its deepest ground not in preoccupation with the
