177, edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom.]
Thus Increase Mather, and thus in the year 1919 a distinguished
Professor of Celestial Mechanics discussing the Einstein theory:
"It may well be that.... Bolshevist uprisings are in reality the
visible objects of some underlying, deep, mental disturbance,
world-wide in character.... This same spirit of unrest has invaded
science." [Footnote: Cited in _The New Republic_, Dec. 24, 1919,
p. 120.]
In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause
or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently. They may
have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and
Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion. In a
superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of Celestial Mechanics,
emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever
it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all
sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be
related to anything else, provided it feels like it. Nor has a mind in
such a state any way of knowing how preposterous it is. Ancient fears,
reinforced by more recent fears, coagulate into a snarl of fears where
anything that is dreaded is the cause of anything else that is
dreaded.
10
Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all
evil, and of another which is the system of all good.
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