Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.
A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.
We sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous was disbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganise experience and defeat intelligence. No supposition could be more erroneous. Every superstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand, to foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis is chimerical, arbitrary, and founded on a confusion of efficient causes with ideal results. But the same is true of many a renowned philosophy. To appeal to what we call the supernatural is really to rest in the imaginatively obvious, in what we ought to call the natural, if natural meant easy to conceive and originally plausible. Moral and individual forces are more easily intelligible than mechanical universal laws. The former domesticate events in the mind more readily and more completely than the latter. A miracle is so far from being a contradiction to the causal principle which the mind actually applies in its spontaneous observations that it is primarily a better illustration of that principle than an event happening in the ordinary course of nature. For the ground of the miracle is immediately intelligible; we see the mercy or the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some other sort that inspired it. A mechanical law, on the contrary, is only a record of the customary but reasonless order of things. A merely inexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be no miracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that, contrary to what is usually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if the water of Lourdes, bottled and sold by chemists, cured all diseases, there would be no miracle, but only a new scientific discovery. In such a case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why we were created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effect morally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it be favourable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomes miraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedience of nature to the exigencies of spirit. Were there no known ground for such a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events, we should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have no relation to religion.
Superstitions come of haste to understand.
What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence in the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as we have laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous and cannot fulfil its function until it applies mechanical categories to existence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moral intelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmony in the world. For moral significance is relative to particular interests and to natures having a constitutional and definite bias, and having consequently special preferences which it is chimerical to expect the rest of the world to be determined by. The attempt to subsume the natural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a government of the parent by the child—something children are not averse to. But such follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature, restless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They are the errors of reason, wanderings in the by-paths of philosophy, not due to lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather to a premature vivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate information. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. The mind’s reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficient nourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, so that both materials and guidance are lacking for its precocious organising force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep and ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower—an inversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic disorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged and the higher contaminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought to follow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it ought to feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hence the deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorant of and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned to exercise.
Inattention suffers them to spread.
It is now generally acknowledged that workers of miracles, prophets, soothsayers, and inspired or divinely appointed men may, like metaphysicians, be quite sincere and fully believe they possess the powers which they pretend to display. In the case of the more intelligent, however, this sincerity was seldom complete, but mixed with a certain pitying or scornful accommodation to the vulgar mind. Something unusual might actually have happened, in which case the reference of it to the will that welcomed it (without, of course, being able to command it unconditionally) might well seem reasonable. Or something normal might have been interpreted fancifully, but to the greater glory of God and edification of the faithful; in which case the incidental error might be allowed to pass unchallenged out of respect for the essential truths thus fortified in pious minds. The power of habit and convention, by which the most crying inconsistencies and hypocrisies are soon put to sleep, would facilitate these accommodations and render them soon instinctive; while the world at large, entirely hypnotised by the ceremonious event and its imaginative echoes, could never come to close quarters with the facts at all, but could view them only through accepted preconceptions. Thus elaborate machinery can arise and long endure for the magical service of man’s interests. How deeply rooted such conventions are, how natural it is that they should have dominated even civilised society, may best be understood if we consider the remnants of such habits in our midst—not among gypsies or professional wonder-workers but among reflecting men.
Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom.
Some men of action, like Cæsar and Napoleon, are said to have been superstitious about their own destiny. The phenomenon, if true, would be intelligible. They were masterful men, men who in a remarkable degree possessed in their consciousness the sign and sanction of what was happening in the world. This endowment, which made them dominate their contemporaries, could also reveal the sources and conditions of their own will. They might easily come to feel that it was destiny—the total movement of things—that inspired, crowned, and ruined them. But as they could feel this only instinctively, not by a systematic view of all the forces in play, they would attach their voluminous sense of fatality to some chance external indication or to some ephemeral impulse within themselves; so that what was essentially a profound but inarticulate science might express itself in the guise of a superstition.
In like manner Socrates’ Demon (if not actually a playful fable by which the sage expressed the negative stress of conscience, the “thou shalt not” of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom. Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message from heaven. He taught a feeble voice—senseless like all ghostly voices—to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within himself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some external sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is obviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonably subordinate reason at certain junctures. Its abdication, however, was half playful, for he could always find excellent grounds for what the demon commanded.