Chapter 59

RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION

We need not impose upon ourselves the endless and repulsive task of describing all the superstitions that have existed in the world. In his impotence and laziness the natural man unites any notion with any other in a loose causal relation. A single instance of juxtaposition, nay, the mere notion and dream of such a combination, will suffice to arouse fear or to prompt experimental action.

[Sidenote: Felt causes not necessary causes.]

When philosophers have objected to Hume’s account of causation that he gave no sufficient basis for the _necessary_ influence of cause on effect, they have indulged in a highly artificial supposition. They have assumed that people actually regard causes as necessary. They suppose that before we can feel the interdependence of two things in experience we must have an unshakable conviction that their connection is necessary and universal. But causation in such an absolute sense is no category of practical thinking. It appears, if at all, only in dialectic, in ideal applications of given laws to cases artificially simplified, where the terms are so defined that their operation upon one another is involved in the notion of them. So if we say that an unsupported weight _must_ fall to the ground, we have included in the word “weight” the notion of a downward strain. The proposition is really trifling and identical. It merely announces that things which tend to fall to the ground tend to fall to the ground, and that heavy things are heavy. So, when we have called a thing a cause, we have defined it as that which involves an effect, and if the effect did not follow, the title of cause would no longer belong to the antecedent. But the necessity of this sequence is merely verbal. We have never, in the presence of the antecedent, the assurance that the title of cause will accrue to it. Our expectation is empirical, and we feel and assert nothing in respect to the necessity of the expected sequence.

[Sidenote: Mechanism and dialectic ulterior principles.]

A cause, in real life, means a justifying circumstance. We are absolutely without insight into the machinery of causation, notably in the commonest cases, like that of generation, nutrition, or the operation of mind on matter. But we are familiar with the more notable superficial conditions in each case, and the appearance in part of any usual phenomenon makes us look for the rest of it. We do not ordinarily expect virgins to bear children nor prophets to be fed by ravens nor prayers to remove mountains; but we may believe any of these things at the merest suggestion of fancy or report, without any warrant from experience, so loose is the bond and so external the relation between the terms most constantly associated. A quite unprecedented occurrence will seem natural and intelligible enough if it falls in happily with the current of our thoughts. Interesting and significant events, however, are so rare and so dependent on mechanical conditions irrelevant to their value, that we come at last to wonder at their self-justified appearance apart from that cumbrous natural machinery, and to call them marvels, miracles, and things to gape at. We come to adopt scientific hypotheses, at least in certain provinces of our thought, and we lose our primitive openness and simplicity of mind. Then, with an unjustified haste, we assert that miracles are impossible, i.e., that nothing interesting and fundamentally natural can happen unless all the usual, though adventitious, _mise-en-scène_ has been prepared behind the curtain.

The philosopher may eventually discover that such machinery is really needed and that even the actors themselves have a mechanism within them, so that not only their smiles and magnificent gestures, but their heated fancy itself and their conception of their rôles are but outer effects and dramatic illusions produced by the natural stage-carpentry in their brains. Yet such eventual scientific conclusions have nothing to do with the tentative first notions of men when they begin to experiment in the art of living. As the seeds of lower animals have to be innumerable, so that in a chance environment a few may grow to maturity, so the seeds of rational thinking, the first categories of reflection, have to be multitudinous, in order that some lucky principle of synthesis may somewhere come to light and find successful application. Science, which thinks to make belief in miracles impossible, is itself belief in miracles—in the miracles best authenticated by history and by daily life.

[Sidenote: Early selection of categories.]

When men begin to understand things, when they begin to reflect and to plan, they divide the world into the hateful and the delightful, the avoidable and the attainable. And in feeling their way toward what attracts them, or in escaping what they fear, they at first follow passively the lead of instinct: they watch themselves live, or rather sink without reserve into their living; their reactions are as little foreseen and as naturally accepted as their surroundings. Their ideas are incidents in their perpetual oscillation between apathy and passion. The stream of animal life leaves behind a little sediment of knowledge, the sand of that auriferous river; a few grains of experience remain to mark the path traversed by the flood. These residual ideas and premonitions, these first categories of thought, are of any and every sort. All the contents of the mind and all the threads of relation that weave its elements together are alike fitted, for all we can then see, to give the clue to the labyrinth in which we find ourselves wandering.

There is _prima facie_ no ground for not trying to apply to experience such categories, for instance, as that of personal omnipotence, as if everything were necessarily arranged as we may command or require. On this principle children often seem to conceive a world in which they are astonished not to find themselves living. Or we may try aesthetic categories and allow our reproductive imagination—by which memory is fed—to bring under the unity of apperception only what can fall within it harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding, impervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing in itself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to which it was attached. It would yield an experience—doubtless a highly interesting and elaborate experience—but one which could never serve as an index to successful action. It would totally fail to represent its conditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continued existence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part, therefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of lovely vapid music or parasitic dream.

Now such dreams are in fact among the first and most absorbing formations in the human mind. If we could penetrate into animal consciousness we should not improbably find that what there accompanies instinctive motions is a wholly irrelevant fancy, whose flaring up and subsidence no doubt coincide with the presence of objects interesting to the organism and causing marked reactions within it; yet this fancy may in no way represent the nature of surrounding objects nor the eventual results, for the animal’s consciousness, of its own present experience.

[Sidenote: Tentative rational worlds.]

The unlimited number of possible categories, their arbitrariness and spontaneity, may, however, have this inconvenience, that the categories may be irrelevant to one another no less than to the natural life they ought to express. The experience they respectively synthesise may therefore be no single experience. One pictured world may succeed another in the sphere of sensibility, while the body whose sensibility they compose moves in a single and constant physical cosmos. Each little mental universe may be intermittent, or, if any part of it endures while a new group of ideas comes upon the stage, there may arise contradictions, discords, and a sense of lurking absurdity which will tend to disrupt thought logically at the same time that the processes of nutrition and the oncoming of new dreams tend to supplant it mechanically. Such drifting categories have no mutual authority. They replace but do not dominate one another, and the general conditions of life—by conceiving which life itself might be surveyed—remain entirely unrepresented.

What we mean, indeed, by the natural world in which the conditions of consciousness are found and in reference to which mind and its purposes can attain practical efficacy, is simply the world constructed by categories found to yield a constant, sufficient, and consistent object. Having attained this conception, we justly call it the truth and measure the intellectual value of all other constructions by their affinity to that rational vision.

Such a rational vision has not yet been attained by mankind, but it would be absurd to say that because we have not fully nor even proximately attained it, we have not gained any conception whatever of a reliable and intelligible world. The modicum of rationality achieved in the sciences gives us a hint of a perfect rationality which, if unattainable in practice, is not inconceivable in idea. So, in still more inchoate moments of reflection, our ancestors nursed even more isolated, less compatible, less adequate conceptions than those which leave our philosophers still unsatisfied. The categories they employed dominated smaller regions of experience than do the categories of history and natural science; they had far less applicability to the conduct of affairs and to the happy direction of life as a whole. Yet they did yield vision and flashes of insight. They lighted men a step ahead in the dark places of their careers, and gave them at certain junctures a sense of creative power and moral freedom. So that the necessity of abandoning one category in order to use a better need not induce us to deny that the worse category could draw the outlines of a sort of world and furnish men with an approach to wisdom. If our ancestors, by such means, could not dominate life as a whole, neither can we, in spite of all progress. If literal truth or final applicability cannot be claimed for their thought, who knows how many and how profound the revolutions might be which our own thought would have to suffer if new fields of perception or new powers of synthesis were added to our endowment?

[Sidenote: Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.]

[Sidenote: A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.]

We sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous was disbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganise experience and defeat intelligence. No supposition could be more erroneous. Every superstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand, to foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis is chimerical, arbitrary, and founded on a confusion of efficient causes with ideal results. But the same is true of many a renowned philosophy. To appeal to what we call the supernatural is really to rest in the imaginatively obvious, in what we ought to call the natural, if natural meant easy to conceive and originally plausible. Moral and individual forces are more easily intelligible than mechanical universal laws. The former domesticate events in the mind more readily and more completely than the latter. A miracle is so far from being a contradiction to the causal principle which the mind actually applies in its spontaneous observations that it is primarily a better illustration of that principle than an event happening in the ordinary course of nature. For the ground of the miracle is immediately intelligible; we see the mercy or the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some other sort that inspired it. A mechanical law, on the contrary, is only a record of the customary but reasonless order of things. A merely inexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be no miracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that, contrary to what is usually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if the water of Lourdes, bottled and sold by chemists, cured all diseases, there would be no miracle, but only a new scientific discovery. In such a case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why we were created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effect morally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it be favourable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomes miraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedience of nature to the exigencies of spirit. Were there no known ground for such a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events, we should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have no relation to religion.

[Sidenote: Superstitions come of haste to understand.]

What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence in the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as we have laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous and cannot fulfil its function until it applies mechanical categories to existence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moral intelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmony in the world. For moral significance is relative to particular interests and to natures having a constitutional and definite bias, and having consequently special preferences which it is chimerical to expect the rest of the world to be determined by. The attempt to subsume the natural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a government of the parent by the child—something children are not averse to. But such follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature, restless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They are the errors of reason, wanderings in the by-paths of philosophy, not due to lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather to a premature vivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate information. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. The mind’s reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficient nourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, so that both materials and guidance are lacking for its precocious organising force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep and ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower—an inversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic disorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged and the higher contaminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought to follow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it ought to feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hence the deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorant of and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned to exercise.

[Sidenote: Inattention suffers them to spread.]

It is now generally acknowledged that workers of miracles, prophets, soothsayers, and inspired or divinely appointed men may, like metaphysicians, be quite sincere and fully believe they possess the powers which they pretend to display. In the case of the more intelligent, however, this sincerity was seldom complete, but mixed with a certain pitying or scornful accommodation to the vulgar mind. Something unusual might actually have happened, in which case the reference of it to the will that welcomed it (without, of course, being able to command it unconditionally) might well seem reasonable. Or something normal might have been interpreted fancifully, but to the greater glory of God and edification of the faithful; in which case the incidental error might be allowed to pass unchallenged out of respect for the essential truths thus fortified in pious minds. The power of habit and convention, by which the most crying inconsistencies and hypocrisies are soon put to sleep, would facilitate these accommodations and render them soon instinctive; while the world at large, entirely hypnotised by the ceremonious event and its imaginative echoes, could never come to close quarters with the facts at all, but could view them only through accepted preconceptions. Thus elaborate machinery can arise and long endure for the magical service of man’s interests. How deeply rooted such conventions are, how natural it is that they should have dominated even civilised society, may best be understood if we consider the remnants of such habits in our midst—not among gypsies or professional wonder-workers but among reflecting men.

[Sidenote: Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom.]

Some men of action, like Cæsar and Napoleon, are said to have been superstitious about their own destiny. The phenomenon, if true, would be intelligible. They were masterful men, men who in a remarkable degree possessed in their consciousness the sign and sanction of what was happening in the world. This endowment, which made them dominate their contemporaries, could also reveal the sources and conditions of their own will. They might easily come to feel that it was destiny—the total movement of things—that inspired, crowned, and ruined them. But as they could feel this only instinctively, not by a systematic view of all the forces in play, they would attach their voluminous sense of fatality to some chance external indication or to some ephemeral impulse within themselves; so that what was essentially a profound but inarticulate science might express itself in the guise of a superstition.

In like manner Socrates’ Demon (if not actually a playful fable by which the sage expressed the negative stress of conscience, the “thou shalt not” of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom. Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message from heaven. He taught a feeble voice—senseless like all ghostly voices—to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within himself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some external sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is obviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonably subordinate reason at certain junctures. Its abdication, however, was half playful, for he could always find excellent grounds for what the demon commanded.

In much the same manner the priests at Delphi, when they were prudent, made of the Pythia’s ravings oracles not without elevation of tone and with an obvious political tendency. Occasions for superstition which baser minds would have turned to sheer lunacy or silly fears or necromantic clap-trap were seized by these nobler natures for a good purpose. A benevolent man, not inclined to scepticism, can always argue that the gods must have commanded what he himself knows to be right; and he thinks it religion on his part to interpret the oracle accordingly, or even to prompt it. In such ways the most arbitrary superstitions take a moral colour in a moral mind; something which can come about all the more easily since the roots of reason and superstition are intertwined in the mind, and society has always expressed and cultivated them together.