With every ordinary person now being told that his ideas and tastes, on...

With every ordinary person now being told that his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art and government, were as good as if not better than those of "connoisseurs" and "speculative men" who were "college learnt," it is not surprising that truth and knowledge, which had seemed so palpable and attainable to the enlightened late eighteenth century, now became elusive and difficult to pin down.65 As popular knowledge came to seem as accurate as the knowledge of experts, the borders the enlightened eighteenth century had painstakingly worked out between religion and magic, science and superstition, naturalism and supernatural-ism, became blurred. Animal magnetism now seemed as legitimate as gravity. Popular speculations about the lost tribes of Israel seemed as plausible as scholarly studies of the origins of the Indian mounds of the Northwest. Dowsing for hidden metals appeared as rational as the workings of electricity. And crude folk remedies were even thought to be as scientific as the bleeding cures of enlightened medicine. The result was an odd mixture of credulity and skepticism among many middling Americans. Where everything was believable, everything could be doubted. Since all claims to expert knowledge were suspect, people tended to mistrust anything outside of the immediate impact of their senses. They picked up the Lockean sensationalist epistemology and ran with it. They were a democratic people who judged by their senses only and who doubted everything that they had not seen, felt, heard, tasted, or smelled. Yet because people prided themselves on their shrewdness and believed that they were now capable of understanding so much from their senses, they could be easily impressed by what they sensed but could not comprehend. A few strange words spoken by a preacher, or hieroglyphics displayed on a document, or anything written in highfalutin language could carry great credibility. In such an atmosphere hoaxes of various kinds and charlatanism and quackery in all fields flourished.66

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