What is superstition? By what positive signs do we recognize it? An exact definition and a sure criterion are impossible. It is a flitting notion that depends on the times, places, and nature of minds. Has it not often been said that the religion of one is superstition to another, and _vice versâ_? This, too, is only a single instance from among many others; for the common opinion that restricts superstition within the bounds of religious faith is an incomplete view. There are peculiar beliefs, foreign to every dogma and every religious feeling, from which the most radical freethinker is not exempt; for example, the superstitions of gamblers. Indeed, at the bottom of all such beliefs, we always find the vague, semi-conscious notion of a mysterious power--destiny, fate, chance.
Without taking the trouble to set arbitrary limits, let us take the facts as they are, without possible question, i.e., imaginary creations, subjective fancies, having reality only for those admitting them. Even a summary collection of past and present superstitions would fill a library. Aside from those having a frankly religious mark, others almost as numerous surround civil life, birth, marriage, death, appearance and healing of diseases, _dies fasti atque nefasti_, propitious or fateful words, auguries drawn from the meeting or acts of certain animals. The list would be endless.[120]
All that can be attempted here is a determination of the principal condition of that state of mind, the psychology of which is in the last analysis very simple. We shall thus answer in an indirect and incomplete manner the question of criterion.
First, since we hold that the origin of all imaginative creation is a need, a desire, a tendency, where then is the origin of that inexhaustible fount of fancies? _In the instinct for individual preservation_, orientated in the direction of the future. Man seeks to divine future events, and by various means to act on the order of things to modify it for his own advantage or to appease his evil fate.
As for the mental mechanism that, set in motion by this desire, produces the vain images of the superstitious, it implies:
(1) A deep idea of causality, reduced to a _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_. Herodotus says of the Egyptian priests: "They have discovered more prodigies and presages than any other people, because, when some extraordinary thing appears, they note it as well as all the events following it, so that if a similar prodigy appears anew, they expect to see the same events reproduced." It is the hypothesis of an indissoluble association between two or more events, assumed without verification, without criticism. This manner of thinking depends on the weakness of the logical faculties or on the excessive influence of the feelings.