live their miserable lives. The public
discussions nowadays are full of stirring outcries against the rapid
spreading of vice in our large cities; it is a war for clean living
and health. But after all we ought not to forget that similar dangers
surround our inner culture and our spiritual life, and that an
intellectual underworld threatens our time, which demands a no less
rigorous fight until its vice is wiped out. The vice of the social
underworld gives a sham satisfaction to the human desire for sensual
life; the vice of the intellectual underworld gives the same sham
fulfilment to the human longing for knowledge and for truth. The
infectious germs which it spreads in the realm of culture may
ultimately be more dangerous to the inner health of the nation than
any physical diseases. The battle against vice and crime in the world
of the body ought to be paralleled by a battle against superstition
and humbug in the world of the mind. The victory over the social
underworld would anyhow never be lasting unless the intellectual
underworld were subjugated first. In the atmosphere of sham-truth all
the antisocial instincts grow rankly.

I know of a large, beautiful high school in which the boys and girls
are to receive the decisive impulses for their inner life from
well-trained teachers who have had a solid college education. I have
found out that quite a number of these teachers are clients of a
medium who habitually informs them as to their future, and for a
dollar a sitting gives them advice at every turn of their lives. I do
not know whether she takes it from the tea leaves or from an Egyptian
dream book or from her own trance fancies, but I do know that the
prophecies of this fraud have deeply influenced some of their lives
and shaped the faculty of the high school. What does this mean?
Mature educators to whose training society has devoted its fullest
effort and who are chosen to bring to the youth the message of earnest
thought and solid knowledge, and whose intellectual life ought
therefore to be controlled by consistent thinking and real love for
knowledge, fall back into the lowest forms of mental barbarism and
really believe in the most illogical prostitution of truth. The double
life of Jekyll and Hyde is more natural than this. The impulse to
virtuous behaviour and the atrocities of the criminal may after all be
combined in one character, but the desire to master the world by a
disciplined knowledge and to th