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.