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The work of modification must be a work of patience and pains, for it is as hard to dissociate two ideas that have always gone together in experience as it is to dissociate two movements that have always been associated in practice. Were a curious person, by way of philosophical experiment, to go about diligently to dissociate his experiences, it might well happen to him to see many things in a new light, to see some things which he had previously been entirely blind to, and perhaps in the end to make discoveries of a surprising and instructive kind. A good effect of wide observation of men and things and of a large general culture is to leave the mind open and susceptible to new experiences which ought to modify or reverse old conceptions, instead of declining converse with them or relegating them to a category which fits them not. On the other hand, one of the most signal features of the savage mind and of the uncultivated mind everywhere is the incapacity to receive new ideas, and the tenacious holding to received customs and notions which, being part of the wisdom of their forefathers, whose manes they perhaps worship, they regard reverently as a part of the order of nature, and, like it, not even admitting of question.*

* A very early, if not original, worship of mankind, is still practised at the present day. In Java is a tribe called the Karangs, supposed

§ Sanctification of Error as Superstition.

A great cause, then, of ordinary errors of thought, and of ordinary errors that have attained an extraordinary eminence as superstitions, is an unfounded belief in instances of uniformity which are not really such, and the survival or standing over (superstes) of such errors in religious beliefs and customs after they are discredited discredited by observation. It is an inference from the particular to the general when the general has not the authority of adequate experience to warrant it, and the subsequent perpetuation and sanction of the inference as sacred in spite

to be descendants of the aborigines of the island, whose old men and youths four times a year repair secretly in procession, by paths known only to themselves, to a sacred grove in the dense forest; the old men to worship and make offering, the youths to see and learn the mysterious litany of their fathers. In this grove are the ruins of terraces laid out in quadrilateral enclosures, the boundaries of which are marked by blocks of stone laid or fixed in the ground. Here and there on the terraces are more prominent monuments-erect pillars surmounting oval piles of stones; flat slabs on the ground supporting egg-shaped blocks; and specially noteworthy, a pillar, erect within a square marked out with stones on the ground, round which the worshippers plait at every visit a fringe of Areng palm leaves. Here these despised and secluded people, following the rites and customs that have descended to them through their forefathers from vastly remote antiquity, continue to celebrate what are evidently phallic rites of worship, repeating with superstitious awe a litany which they do not comprehend, and whose origin and purpose are lost to their traditions. (Forbes's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago, p. 101.)

of experience. Those things which, when they went together before, were followed by good luck, will, when they occur together again, bring good luck after them, and a day on which a misfortune has befallen becomes an unlucky day. Thus it is that there is still a strong feeling, and in former days there was even a religious obligation, against commencing important business on the unlucky day. In reality there may be no more connection between the two events than there is between an eclipse of the sun and the birth of a red-haired child which chances to take place during it, or between the flaming of a comet in the heavens and the career of a great conqueror or a great criminal who is born under that aspect of them. More than eighteen hundred years have passed since Ovid referred to the vulgar objection of the ancient Romans to marriages in May, the probable reason of the aversion being that the funeral rites of the Lemuralia were celebrated in that month; but still the superstition is not extinct, for marriages in May are thought by many to be unlucky now. How vivid and penetrating a ray of light does the fact throw on the persistence, for good or ill, of the past, be it never so remote, in the present of human thought and feeling!

The priests of ancient Rome, making good profit to themselves out of this omen-seeking habit of mind,

as the medicine-men of savage tribes do still, discovered, in the entrails of the animals offered up as sacrifices to the gods, the signs propitious or unpropitious to the enterprise about to be undertaken. And the derivation of omens from the flights of birds. was developed into an elaborate science, of which the superstitions still lingering in remote country villages with respect to the good or ill luck portended by flights of magpies are but feeble survivals. How little real observation was at the bottom of omens of the kind, widespread and hallowed as they were amongst all sorts of people in all quarters of the earth, is shown clearly by the fact that the same event which was an omen of ill luck in one nation might be an omen of good fortune in another nation, and that the sight of the same kind of bird was a good or a bad omen according as it happened to the right or to the left of the person who chanced to see it. In like manner, when prayers were made daily to saints in Christendom, with a more vital belief in their efficacy than exists generally now, or than it is perhaps possible for any one to feel in the modern atmosphere of thought, one saint was invoked as specially propitious to one person or one class of persons, and another saint to another person or another class of persons; whence it did not fail sometimes to happen that the saint who was the

patron of one was hostile to another when the interests of the two conflicted.*

Of course, he who had prayed once to a particular saint, and had got what he prayed for, was persuaded that he had got it in consequence of his prayer, and ever afterwards invoked that saint with heart of good hope, notwithstanding that on a hundred other occasions he failed to obtain that which he prayed for. In some Roman Catholic churches at the present day the walls inside are nearly covered with the votive tablets of those who, having prayed to the Virgin or to a saint for the recovery of a mother, child, sister, brother, father, or lover, from sickness, have thus recorded their gratitude for the favourable answer which the event has been.t And so in England still, when the country is suffering damage from the long continuance of wet weather, and the harvest cannot be

*The Lacedæmonians, according to Xenophon, put up their prayers very early in the morning, in order to be beforehand with their enemies and to pre-engage the gods in their favour.

† And not in Christian churches only. Of a Buddhist temple in the province of Shansi, in China, to which the neighbouring Mongols make pilgrimages in numbers, Mr. Gilmour says, "It seemed to be quite a famous temple, and was hung almost full of its own praises, written on red cloth and silk, the grateful offerings of votaries, who in this way returned thanks for having their prayers answered." (Among the Mongols, p. 144, by the Rev. James Gilmour, M.A.) All which naturally seemed very absurd and barbarous to a missionary of the one true religion.

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