Among all nations, in all places, and all times ill-meaning words have been dreaded as likely to bring misfortune. The ill omen boded by the names was an all-sufficient reason to the ancient Romans for changing the name of Maleventum into Beneventum, of Epidamnum into Dyrrachium; a contagion of evil was feared in them. It is a general, if not natural, impulse to shrink from speaking of a person's death in his presence, or in the presence of his friends, or even in any one else's presence; rather than use the actual word, people go about to use some kind of circumlocution to indicate what they will not say directly; and in different nations there have been all sorts of euphemisms used for this purpose, just as if the word "death," the moment it left the speaker's lips, were an operative power to fulfil itself.* Not many persons can divest themselves completely of the superstitious feeling that there is something more than a mere explosion of vain words, some power more than natural, some mysterious executive agency, in a parent's curse of a disobedient child, though the child hear it not, or in the victim's dying appeal to God's vengeance on his murderer.

* Although a general, it is not a universal, impulse; for the Chinese meet death with the greatest coolness; and nothing is more gratifying to the dying man than to see that a handsome coffin has been prepared for him. (See Abbé Huc's Chinese Empire.)

I

So much, then, in exemplification of the sort of errors of belief that have flowed from the natural defects of human observation and reasoning. It is abundantly evident that many of the superstitious beliefs and practices which have come and gone through the measureless past of human doings have had their source and sustenance in these defects. Though inevitable once as imperfect developments of thought, such superstitions and errors have outlived their raison d'être, and now stand over in civilized countries as survivals of a lower level of intelligence. Being degradations of thought, in the sense of belonging to lower grades of thought, they are naturally displayed most largely by those who are so engrossed with the supply of their daily wants that they have not the leisure or inclination to train and cultivate their minds in correct habits of thought, and in relation to those subject-matters of thought that lie furthest from the reach of human apprehension.

* 66 Superstition "means literally "something which stands over.” A custom, or practice, or belief, which survives when the life and meaning have gone out of it, and when it is, perhaps, mischievous, as from the inherent conservatism of human nature often happens, is literally a superstition. It has outlived the reason of its being, and is what Mr. Tylor aptly calls "a survival." No doubt insufficient beliefs were sufficient enough for their purposes at the time; therefore, although errors now, they were practically truths then. The superstition is to treat them as truths now when, conflicting with experience or contradicted by it, they subsist only by virtue of the conservative force of tradition, custom, and the like, and require, therefore, super

If there be a class of men who deliberately cut themselves off and keep themselves aloof from the methods and aims of a positive study of nature, by which these past errors have been uprooted and the intellectual progress of modern times has been gradually accomplished, pursuing an artificial training according to pre-scientific methods in subjects that lie outside the aims and means of true knowledge, and thus moulding for themselves a special mental mechanism, they will naturally fall into the same kinds of errors and embody the same kinds of superstitions as those of whom they are the representative survivals.

Any one who wishes may follow the entire process of defective seeing and thinking by watching the growth and development of a child's mind, which repeats, in abstract and brief chronicle, the main errors of the development of human thought through the ages; even as its embryonic development repeats in a series of rapid sketches the successive stages of the slow process of organic development on earth from the simple and general to the most complex and special form of animal life.

natural authority in order to maintain any credit. Hence another and ill meaning of the word has come to be something which stands over as beyond explanation by natural causes, and must be referred to supernatural causes, and which is cherished as sacred when it is useless, or burdensome, or even pernicious and pestilent.

CHAPTER III.

2. THE ACTIVITY OF IMAGINATION.

THE second great source of error attaching to the operations of the sound mind is the exceeding activity of imagination, which is a prolific faculty or function always eager and pleased to exercise itself. The quick way in which it hastens to fill the voids of knowledge with fictions and theories affords remarkable contrast to the slow, toilsome, and comparatively unwelcome work of observation and reasoning. Why it is that there is so much more pleasure and spontaneity in the exercise of imagination making fictions than in the exercise of reason welding truth, we know not, unless it be that it is a particular instance of the pleasure and spontaneity which belong to the function of generation universally throughout nature. For the essential character of the function of imagination is generation or creation, whether as poetry, painting, invention, or any other form of art (Toinois, that is, of any sort),

and pleasure its natural accompaniment, therefore; while the operations of reason may be compared to the slow, tedious, and gradual processes of education and training.

However rigidly the rules of right seeing and thinking are laid down, and their strict observance enjoined, it seems certain from past experience that they will continue to be violated habitually; the mind, however well disciplined in self-restraint, will not be, as it has not been, content to stay in the simple confession and quiet repose of ignorance concerning all that lies beyond its reach of knowledge. An insatiable curiosity to know will urge it, as heretofore, to chafe impatiently at the check and to endeavour to surmount it; and with good reason, since without speculative curiosity there would be no inquiry, and without inquiry no increase of knowledge. In time to come, then, so long at any rate as the nisus of evolution lasts in nature and works through man, we may continue to expect, as in times past it has been, fictions instead of facts, theories anticipating observation, conjectures taking the credit of certitude.

The forms of imagination's creation naturally correspond with the levels of thought at the time and place, and follow the fashions of its conceptions. As once it peopled the universe with deities and demons