sought in the anger of the gods, in the malice of demons, in the malignant aspects of the stars, in the evil eyes of witches, in the divine judgment of sin, and in like superstitious imaginings; and the alleviation or cure of them in the special favour of particular gods or spirits, or in the prayers of saints, or in the eager and confident use of substances which, because their origin was involved in mystery, or because of their rarity or extreme nastiness, or because of some equally groundless fancy, were thought to have singular and sovereign virtues. If the patient recovered after prayer or remedy, as many times he would do by the salutary efforts of nature, it was proof of its curative virtue, no thought being given to the numerous instances in which no good effect followed, nor to the many other agencies besides it which were at work in the cases in which recovery did take place. The follies of physic have not been less numerous, if less pernicious and pestilential, than the fables of religion; the follies of the one and the fables of the other illustrating the same defects and tendencies of human observation and thought in a parallel series of fictitious causes and fictitious remedies.

§ Fallacies of Collusion.

It is evident that the fallacy of observation and reasoning by which a nation was deluded into the flattering belief of an intervening aid by its special god in answer to prayer, must have been a most powerful agency in sustaining and strengthening the belief which, without it, could hardly have taken root and flourished everywhere so vigorously as history proves it to have done. But, though a main, this fallacy of coincidence was not the entire, cause of the credit of superstitions of the kind. In cases of signal accord between the omen or prayer and its fulfilment, where the improbability of an accidental coincidence was so great as practically to exclude the notion of it, and where, therefore, the claim of a causal relation might well seem indisputable, no proper account was taken of the possibility of collusion. Now, this collusion might not only take place between persons concerned, whose interest it was to make the experiment a success, and who, consciously or unconsciously, conspired together for that purpose, as priests, rulers, omen-mongers, workers of magic, and others have often done, but might be a self-connivance. There have always been individuals more wise than the multitude, who, making the natural use of their superior sagacity to gain advantages for themselves,

*

have fooled and duped it for their own profit, and often at the same time for its good-Minos pretending to be advised by Jupiter, Numa retiring to take counsel of Ægeria, and many more like instances amongst all nations; and it is very certain that in this way projects and laws and institutions obtained an acceptance and an authority and a stability which they would never have obtained as the mere counsels of a wiser individual, and that useful customs and practices were consecrated as religious ceremonials.† That which was promulgated as coming by the direct inspiration of the god, and being accomplished by supernatural ways, carried a sanction with it which it could not have had as coming by the inspiration of a good understanding, and being accomplished by natural ways; the omen and prayer were the mysterious means of bringing supernaturally to pass that which the sagacious mind, seeing farther ahead

* A learned Buddhist or a philosophical disciple of Confucius would doubtless include Moses at Mount Horeb.

The greatest obstacle which vaccination encountered in India was the belief that the natural small-pox was the work of a mischievous deity, MAH-RY UMMA, or rather that the disease was an incarnation of her in the infected person. The fear of offending her and provoking her resentment made the natives averse to vaccination, until they were reassured by a new superstitious impression; no other than the belief that the goddess had spontaneously chosen this new and milder method of manifesting herself, and that she might be worshipped with equal acceptance under this new shape. (Pharmacologia, p. 19, by Dr. Paris.)

than the multitude, had foreseen, or had designed, by operating impressively on less enlightened minds, to bring about.*

It was not always in such cases that the deception was entirely wilful-pure and unmixed fraud; deliberately devised and systematically executed fraud of that kind is rare in the world. There was most often, no doubt, a subtle collusion with self, a large measure of secret self-connivance, which made the author of the deception to some extent its victim also; for when any one has interest or pleasure in duping others, and, letting his will loose from moral restraint, makes a practice of acting such a part, his nature grows inevitably and easily to the habit of its exercise and so brings him finally to dupe himself: deliberate impostor by art, he becomes an ingrained impostor by second nature; a surely avenging destiny of natural law thus charging itself with the stern retributive fulfilment of the consequences of action. Note a familiar example of this process of demoralization in the ease with which one who begins by telling, in dramatic fashion, stories that excite wonder goes on sometimes to exaggerate and embellish and invent

* It was no demerit, but a merit rather, of the pagan oracle that it did not answer plainly and directly, but gave its responses in enigmatical and darkly mysterious words; the very mystery of the oracular language was calculated to impress the imagination, increase the awe, and conquer the belief of the anxious inquirer.

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until they become complete romances, and in the end he is not himself sure what is true and what is false in them.

There is not a province of human observation and thought which, when its history is examined, is not found to teem with superstitious fallacies and fancies; but whosoever would have instructive proof, in a comparatively modern instance, of the vitality of bad observation grown into superstition, could hardly do better than study the records of witchcraft in civilized countries. If he be cynically minded, he will not fail to find ample gratification of his mood in the horrible and heartrending stories of the terrible tortures and deaths that were inflicted on multitudes of innocent people who were believed to be witches, and in the reflection that the condemnation of these poor harmless wretches received the sanction of the good and wise men of the time-of a most learned and distinguished judge in this country, Sir Matthew Hale, and of a not less learned and distinguished physician, Sir Thomas Browne, so late as the year 1662. The particular reasons which Sir Matthew Hale gave for his judgment, on the occasion of condemning to death the last two women who were executed for bewitching children in England, have a general and lasting interest. "That there were such creatures as witches