it is that, in order to gain security of testimony, he still makes appeal to the supernatural by oaths on various solemn occasions.*

§ The Favourable Conditions of Superstition.

It is obvious that the tendency of mind by which undue weight is given to the according event, and due weight not given to the occasions when the result does not answer desire or expectation, which has been so great and manifest a cause of errors of observation and reasoning, has been a great, if not the main cause of the authority and credit which so many superstitions have enjoyed. Has it not notably been just where observation and reasoning were difficult or impossible that superstitions have sprung up and flourished? Universally among savage and barbarous peoples, where observation and reflection were inchoate and rudimentary, intellect being in its infancy, and among cultured people in relation specially to matters that lay outside the range of definite apprehension. At the present day, the ocean and the desert, the vast solitudes of the barren waters and the vast solitudes of the barren sands, remain the

* It hardly admits of doubt that oaths are, as Mr. Tylor has shown, descended legitimately from ordeals, of which they are in fact the natural survivals.

favourite homes of spiritual hauntings and phantoms; for where the senses are overpowered by the dread vastness of nature, so that they cannot fix themselves in definite and steady apprehensions, they, reeling in a bewildered vertigo and producing a panic-like awe, become the easy victims of hallucinations and the prolific parents of superstitions.* In vastness which cannot be grasped in apprehension or compassed in thought there is overpowering grandeur, and such grandeur inspires overwhelming awe; which is reason enough why the desert and the ocean have been so full of terrors and are still called sublime, while an acre of sand and a pond of water, being nowise impressive, have no terrors and stir no suggestions of the infinite, either with or without an initial capital letter. Without doubt it was from a vague and mysterious awe of that immensity around them which they could not apprehend in definite thought and feeling that man in his early days created so many gods; just as in this age and country a person not disposed to superstition could hardly fail, however much he might despise his weakness, in a gloomy

*Vast forests have a similar awing effect upon the mind. The forest growths of Russia, at one time overrunning almost all the central and northern territories, contributed powerfully to the polytheistic faiths of the early Slavs-in fact, implanted them so deeply in the Slav nature that the Russians believe in their forest spirits to this day. (The Russian Revolt, by E. Noble, 1885.)

forest on a dark night, to be affected by feelings of fear and awe which would seem ridiculous and humiliating in broad daylight.

It is in proportion as observation and reasoning have become more proficient that superstitions have dwindled and been extinguished. There is not a person living now probably who believes that Baal ever answered a single prayer of the devout Canaanite, or that Jupiter ever inclined his ear to hear the supplication of a pious Roman, or that the Mexican was any the better for the human sacrifices which he solemnly offered to Uitzilopochtli, though it would have gone hard with any one who, living when these gods held sway in human faith, had made a denial of their power and good or ill will. They were faiths which, being without foundation in fact, were destined inevitably to droop and die before a larger and more. enlightened experience. When the inhabitant of a land puts a being of like mind and character to himself in nature, only eternal in duration and infinite in power, in order to satisfy the mental yearning for a source, in terms of his own thought, of the illimitable energies and operations which it is impossible in the end he, a finite creature, should ever apprehend otherwise than in finite conceptions or express otherwise than in finite terms of himself-impossible, therefore, he should apprehend or express at all—it is

natural that he should solicit his favour and deprecate his anger, just as he would solicit the favour and deprecate the anger of an earthly ruler who had power of life and death over him. But when he is thoroughly convinced by reasoned experience that he never receives an answer to supplications which are as vainly spent as if they were addressed to the shifting cloud or to the passing wind, he naturally ceases to offer them, and first doubting of, finally disbelieves in, the superintendence and even the existence of such a being. So through the ages it has come to pass that faiths have slowly waned and gods have died; for faiths do not, like bubbles, burst, but stealthily, like clouds dislimned, lose their lineaments and gradually disperse.

The history of medicine is not less fruitful than the history of religion in examples of fallacious observations and of superstitious theories; and for the same reason-namely, the extreme difficulties of observation and the strong propensity to supernatural beliefs where mystery and fear prevail. The human organism is the most intricate and complex structure in the world a fabric of such nice and implicated correlations of parts and functions that the more its mechanism is known the more the wonder grows that it ever keeps in working order so well and for so long a time as it does; and it is in infinitely subtile and

complex relations with a multitude of external influences, physical and social. That being so, the exact causes of its disorders and the exact means of putting them right are inevitably the most difficult and complex study in the world, and yield unlimited scope for fallacies of observation and inference: No wonder, then, that the history of medicine teems with instances of false theories of diseases, and of remedies for them which enjoyed for longer or shorter periods immense reputation, on the basis of what was deemed to be adequate experience of their virtues, but which were afterwards abandoned as useless or pernicious.*

It was not only in such cases that the nature of diseases and the art of curing them were insurmountably obscure, but fear lent its mighty aid to magnify the mystery; for disease and death naturally stirred apprehension and alarm, and fear and ignorance are the legitimate parents of superstition. So it came to pass that the causes of these natural calamities were

*Roasted toad was at one time used as a specific for gout, the toad having been baked alive. This was the receipt: "Put the toads alive into an earthen pot, and dry them in an oven moderately heated, till they become fit to be powdered." Boyle recommended the thigh-bone of an executed criminal as a valuable remedy for dysentery. Other such remedies were the bowels of a mole cut open alive, and mummy made of the lungs of a man who had died a violent death. (Pharmacologia, by J. A. Paris, M.D., 1833.) Revolting remedies, but vastly less pernicious than such remedies as mercury and blood-letting, each of which, when in the full swing of its fashionable abuse, may soberly be said to have, like Saul, slain its thousands.