5. The position of the seventeenth century believers in witchcraft was logically and theologically stronger than that of the few persons who rejected the current belief.
6. The impulse to put a witch to death comes from the instinct of self-preservation. It is no more cruel or otherwise blameworthy, in itself, than the impulse to put a murderer to death.
7. The belief in witchcraft manifests itself, not in steady and continuous prosecution, but in sudden outbreaks occurring at irregular intervals.
8. Such outbreaks are not symptoms of extraordinary superstition or of a peculiarly acute state of unreason. They are due, like other panics, to a perturbed condition of the public mind. Hence they are likely to accompany, or to follow, crises in politics or religion.
9. The responsibility for any witch prosecution rests primarily on the community or neighborhood as a whole, not on the judge or the jury.
10. No jury, whether in a witch trial or in any other case, can be more enlightened than the general run of the vicinage.
11. Many persons who have been executed for witchcraft have supposed themselves to be guilty and have actually been guilty in intent.
12. Practically every person executed for witchcraft believed in the reality of such a crime, whether he supposed himself to be guilty of it or not.
13. The witch beliefs of New England were brought over from the Mother Country by the first settlers.
14. Spectral evidence had been admitted in the examinations and trials of witches in England for a hundred years before the Salem prosecutions took place.