rience, is to sever us from our hold on reality for the time being, and to occasion a helpless bewilderment or vertigo, a sort of mental dissolution, until we are able to organize a new mental adjustment.* Hence it is that an earthquake, going counter to all ordinary experience, causes a most extraordinary and indescribable feeling of alarm and mental impotence in countries where it is a very infrequent event; and thence it was, no doubt, that comets and eclipses at one time produced an overwhelming terror, as they do still among some barbarous peoples, being thought to be ill-boding portents big with calamities. It may well be for the same reason that a nation goes mad with panic of fear and rage of suspicion when its political and social framework falls to pieces, as happened in France during the storm of its great Revolution; and for a similar reason, again, that the individual (although the cause of the desolation in this case is internal) whose disordered brain is oppressed with a painful impotence of function, and whose thought and feeling are almost paralyzed, is overwhelmed with a strange reeling of sense and

* It is just as it is with the bodily equilibrium, to maintain which we require the silent help of all the impressions from without that we are wont to be in relation with; not conscious of them the while, perhaps, only realizing how much we owe them when we lose them. Hence sudden deafness in one ear occasions distressing vertigo, and numbness of a small part of the body a disquieting sense of breach of personality, for a time.

thought, showing itself in a terrifying loss of hold on realities, an alarming feeling of dissolution of personality, a panic-like dread of formless ills. Let him who would realize how necessary to his hold on being are the familiar definite relations between the internal fabric of mind and the external framework of things, listen to the melancholic sufferer struggling in vain with the inadequacy of language to express his appalling sense of the unreality of things and the disabling apprehension which the strangeness of his own mental being and the sense of an impending dissolution of his conscious ego occasion him.

It is with beliefs as it is with movements: the right belief, like the right movement, being that which has been acquired by the suitable adaptation to former like circumstances and now fits with most exactness present [circumstances; true, therefore, if they are essentially like, untrue if they are unlike. To ask a person to believe otherwise than according to his uniform experience is like asking a skilful purposive movement which has been acquired with great pains by special training to adapt itself suddenly to the accomplishment of something quite different; and to ask him not to apply old beliefs to the apprehension of new facts is like asking a man not to use for the grasping of a quite new object the most fit movements which he is capable of, because they are not entirely

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fit. He must use the old motor apprehension or grasp until he has fitted himself with a new one, which he gains by gradual adaptation. So it is with beliefs: he cannot choose but make use of the old belief, though it does not fit exactly; but in doing so he ought to take great care to see exactly wherein it does not fit, and to proceed to modify it accordingly. Does it err by falling short of or by being in excess of the facts? and is it necessary to add to it or to take from it, or otherwise to modify it?

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 to which he had previously been entirely blind, 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.

*

§ Sanctification of Error as Superstition.

A great cause, then, of ordinary errors of thought, and of ordinary errors that have attained extraordinary eminence as superstitions, is an unfounded

* 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 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.)

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 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 of sense and reason. 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