The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-04-19
THE AGE OF REASON.


 that great libertarian Tom Paine wrote his Age of Reason intimat- ing by the use of that title that it had at length arrived on Mother Earth. and his work would be justi- fed by the fact, but had he lived to see this age, it is hardly likely that he would lay any claim to such a condition Of things.
 Today. and especially since the Great War broke out, it is evidenced on every hand that men are govern ed not by their reason but by their emotions. and those feelings which are spontaneously evoked and are not by reason of the exercise of mans intelligence. now hold sway.
 We are back to the days of nation al Gods and Lares and Penates, and men are moved by emotional superstition of a sentimental type rather than by their calculated judgment.
 In magazines and papers we see very much concerning the religious revivals which have arisen in con- sequence of the war, and we dis cover that with the uncertainties ot existence that this war condition has given origin, men seek to pre- pare themselves by placing them selves under the protection of na- tional deity who will watch and ward them from evils they know not what.
 Men arrange meetings. congregat- ings and gatherings with a view or subjecting the emotions of the mass to a stimulus which will overcome the hampering tendencies of intell- igent consideration, and also that the instinctive superstition of the in dividual may be reused to do what his reason rejects as abhorrent.
 Here is a Sunday magazine sec ton Of a great newspaper where a Professor of Astrology tells what is to happen in the war after consult ing the stars Here is anoth3f ar ticle in a semi-scientiic review which says that boons on dreams. oh divination and astrology never had such sales as within the past few years. The deaJh Of a seeress in Pa ris who foretold the future battles of the war in annual instalments Is the occasion of international concern and regret Men turn under the in auences Of their own emotional acts for an emotional solution of the consequences which plz1le them. The war accentuates the insecurity of living; it turns into strange chan nels our thoughts, our acts, our feel ings. And We turn just as naturally 10 this mystic uncertainty, and ve- nerate and worship 1t. So the an clients placed God in the whisper ing wind, in the tempest, in the mountains. in the rivers, in the sea: the air, sun, fire-all these things which they did not understand they endowed with divinity that passeth understanding.
 When we throw away the con quest of years of struggle against superstition and revert to the con dition of an elemental instinct which observes but does not reason; when we form our lives and perform our actions as the unconscious re- snonding reaction to the stimulus of our feelings. simply and directly, we have to resort in the final reckon ing to superstition to uphold us when the ballast of reason has been rejected.
 So it is that having dcthroned req son and elevated sentiment, emo tion and feeling to take the place of our intelligence, we have to re- vert to mysticism and superstition to guide us in the path. Be 1t kind lv or no, we crave for that guidance which men have created through their fears and nurtured through the uncertainties of the consequences of emotional acts.
 Naturally we have no difficulty in convincing ourselves of the nobility of this. The gods which nation worships are always worthy of re- verence in the minds of those who must needs reverence them. It is now that reason assumes an ignoble