The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1918/Merlinus Redivivus
Merlinus Redivivus
By H.P. Lovecraft
In humanity's age-long struggle for emancipation from the ignoble chains of superstition, no retarding influence has been more potent than that of national distress. The inevitable result of a great war or social crisis, is to cloud the atmosphere for rational perception, to inflame the imagination beyond the realm of calm analysis, and to give unbounded licence to untrustworthy impressions, superficial doctrines, antiquated fallacies, distorted coincidences, psychopathic delusions, and irresponsible thoughts to which wishes alone are the fathers.
Throughout the war-torn world there is now being born a more dangerous and degrading era of superstition than history records tor many centuries past. Excited by a wild desire to communicate with the vast numbers of the honoured dead; rebellious against the thought that these splendid souls are totally lost to the earth; the public have turned with the irrationality of deep grief to the hoary frauds and delusions of cruder ages, and have lent willing ears to the charlatans and ecdentrics whose claims of spiritualistic insight are normally dismissed with a smile.
Amongst the uneducated, an atavistical relapse of this sort was but natural. We do not marvel at the legends of the Marns where the shades of our old English bowmen are said to have come to the assistance of the army and saved the day: or of Mons, where angels are reputed to have battled on the side of right against the Hun. These, and the usual mediumistic nonsense and amulet-wearing of the ignorant, were to be expected. But we do marvel at the extent to which the scientific perspective of supposedly wiser classes has become distorted.
Spiritualism, whose adherents now number many former men of science who should know better, is a frank surrender of judgment to vague subjective impressions. None knows better than the sober psychologist how vivid some apparently occult manifestations may be to contain types of persons; yet the sober thinker can see further than the spiritualist, and can analyse the phenomena, tracing them to a material cause in the consciousness of the subject.
The prime obstacle to truth in this struggle, is the will. Overpowered by a desire to believe in the supernatural, men are everywhere ignoring patent scientific principles and encroaching upon borderlands where evidence is highly coloured with illusion. Against common sense is arrayed a flimsy mass of dream-stuff which under ordinary conditions would be laughed out of court.
Were mental communication really possible, or the dead able to make themselves known to the living, it is safe to state that the world would be a very different place. Secrecy would be non-existent, and death would be no mystery. In fact, the very rarity and frivolity of alleged spiritual messages are enough to condemn them as frauds or hallucinations.
However general may be the relapse of the world into mediæval credulity, it is to be hoped that Anglo-Saxon sense and conservatism may exempt our particular realm from so pitiable an intellectual debacle.