Fact and Fable in Psychology

by Joseph Jastrow

Folk-medicine forms a particularly apt field for the application of the two general forms of analogy indicated as prevalent among savages: analogies by contrast and the assignment of unusual effects to uncommon causes. If something is done with the right hand, doing it with the left reverses the action; one set of directions applies to men and contrary ones to women; saying a thing backwards is particularly efficacious. The prescription against hiccough, that you should "cross the front of the left shoe with the forefinger of the right hand while you repeat the Lord's prayer backwards" (Black) may serve to illustrate the one crooked type of argument, while for the other we have only to recall the Shakespearean witches, with their—

"Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.
Toad, that under coldest stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf;
Witches' mummy; maw and gulf,
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew,
Silvered in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch deliver'd by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab;
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
Cool it with the baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good."

VII

From folk-medicine to false and absurd forms of remedial systems, the transition is slight. For present purposes the most instructive of such systematized beliefs is the doctrine of sympathy, of which the most familiar survival is the phrase, "to take a hair of the dog that bit you." The system appeared in various phases and at various times. We find Paracelsus a believer in it in the form of a "weapon salve," which is to be applied to the weapon that caused the wound and thereby to heal the wound; weapon and wound having once been related as cause and effect, this relation is supposed to insure further connection. The system found wide circulation through the efforts of Sir Kenelm Digby. While Sir Kenelm's practices involved bad observation and ignorance of medicine, what gave the method its plausibility and induced the faulty observation was an underlying belief in the argument by analogy. His treatment may be gathered from a story he tells of a Mr. Howell, whose hand was cut in an attempt to stop a duel between friends. Sir Kenelm arrives on the scene and asks for anything that had the blood upon it; he is given the garter wherewith the hand was first bound; this he places in a basin of water, when suddenly Mr. Howell, who is unaware of what is going on, experiences a cooling effect and a relief from pain. When the garter is placed before a great fire, Mr. Howell experiences an intense burning in the wound. Still another form of this idea appears in the "sympathetic alphabet," in which each of two friends cuts out a piece of his skin and has it transferred to the other; on this grafted skin an alphabet is tattooed, and when a letter is pricked on the skin of the one friend, the other feels the pain at the corresponding point; and thus intercourse is established. A still more curious form of the doctrine appears in an out-of-the-way pamphlet; its title (a German translation from the French) is "The Thought Telegraph: or the instantaneous communication of thought at any distance, even from one end of the world to the other, by means of a portable machine. The most wonderful invention of our age." The true basis of the method, we are told, depends upon a "sympathetic-galvano, magnetic, mineral, animal, adamitic fluid;" the practice depends upon the alleged discovery of a species of snails, placed in a sympathetic relation, so that ever after their movements are in harmony. Accordingly each operator takes one of the snails and places it upon the alphabet chart; the snail crawls over the chart resting upon certain letters, and the other snail, however far removed, will do just the same, and thus the thought-telegraph will be established. Like Charles the Second's famous fish, that would not add to the weight of a dish of water in which it was placed, it lacks nothing but truth to be a great invention. Practices of the same general nature are still current; in the Netherlands, the knife that cut one is rubbed with fat in the belief that as the fat dries the wound will heal. The relation may become more remotely analogical and more arbitrary, as when, to cure ague, as many notches are cut in a stick as there have been fits; as the stick dries the ague is to disappear; ruptured children are passed through a split tree, and thus a sympathy is produced between child and tree, so that as the tree heals the child will be cured. A like sympathy is supposed to exist between celestial objects and human events; this is particularly applied to the moon, the moon's growth and wane indicating the fortunate times for growth and decay of earthly things. One must sow grain, cut the hair, and perform sundry other operations with the increase of the moon, to insure increase of growth. The tides are similarly significant, as the ever-pathetic Barkis "going out with the tide" sufficiently illustrates.

While in the doctrine of sympathy, the resemblance basal to the analogy is one of relation,—such as the relation of cause and effect, of owner and the object owned, of implement and the action performed by its use,—in the doctrine of seals or signatures, the resemblance is an outward, usually a visible one, of form, color, or the possession of marked peculiarities. Underlying this doctrine seems to be the belief that no object or event is without profound significance for man's welfare. The key to this significance is to be found in a resemblance obvious or remote, actual or ideal. Hence the uses of things are suggested by their appearance. The euphrasia or eyebright is useful in case of sore eyes on account of the bright eye-like spot in its corolla; special virtues are ascribed to the ginseng on account of the resemblance of its roots to a human shape. The granulated roots of the white meadow saxifrage were regarded as efficacious against calculous complaints. The Solomon's-seal is so called on account of the marks in the cross-section of its roots, and is used to seal wounds. Water-soldier, on account of its sword-shaped leaves, was regarded as useful for gunshot wounds. The red rose suggests its use in blood diseases; and yellow flowers were used in jaundice and liver complaints. The walnut was clearly defined for use in mental diseases: for its shape was that of the head, the outer green covering being the pericranium, the hard shell the skull, and the kernel the brain. Old ladies' thistle was for stitches in the side, nettle tea for nettle-rash, hearts'-ease for heart troubles. Plants whose parts resembled teeth were prescribed for toothache, quaking grass against shakes, and so on with consistent illogicality (Dyer). The resemblances here involved are obvious enough; they are just such as underlie popular names of plants and the metaphorical use of terms. They form another illustration of how metaphor and analogy overlap; what we accept as a sufficient suggestion for an appropriate name was by pseudo-science, by folk-lore, or by superstition regarded as sufficiently significant to support a cause-and-effect-like or a teleological relation. This, furthermore, is a line of practice in which modern superstition and savage belief stand on an equal footing; the prescriptions just cited are matched by the operations of the Cherokee, who make "a decoction of the cone-flower for weak eyes because of the fancied resemblance of that plant to the strong-sighted eye of the deer" (Clodd); who carry out the notion more elaborately when they "drink an infusion of the tenacious burrs of the common beggars'-lice, an American species of the genus Desmodium, to strengthen the memory," or to "insure a fine voice, boil crickets and drink the liquor" (Clodd). The "Zulu medicine-man, who takes the bones of the oldest bull or dog of the tribe, giving scrapings of these to the sick, so that their lives may be prolonged to old age," in turn finds a parallel in the seventeenth-century doctors, "who, with less logic, but perchance unconscious humor, gave their patients pulverized mummy to prolong their years" (cited by Clodd). Analogy in savagery, in pseudo-science, and in undeveloped science, in superstition and in survival, are of a nature all compact.

The transition from magic to science was made possible by, and itself illustrates the supplanting of, loose and false reasoning by close and logical thought; the pseudo-sciences represent weak and erroneous inference even more than they embody defective observation or mere ignorance. An over-dependence upon analogy characterizes some portions of them all, and finds its fullest development in astrology, as also in the various forms of alchemy and magic with which it is historically connected. Although this body of thought engaged the energies of many able and famous scholars, we can look upon it only as a system of resemblances and coincidences, elaborate and complex indeed, but requiring little more than a vivid imagination and a somewhat keen sense for far-fetched analogies. "This investigation," says the astrologer in Rydberg's "Magic of the Middle Ages," "relies on the resemblances of things, for this similarity is derived from a correspondence, and causality is interwoven with correspondence. Thus, for instance, we judge from the resemblance between the splendor of gold and that of the sun, that gold has its celestial correspondence in that luminary and sustains to it a causal relation." Again, "the two-horned beetle bears a causal relation to the moon, which at its increase and wane is also two-horned; and if there were any doubt of this intimate relation between them, it must vanish when we learn that the beetle hides its eggs in the earth for the space of twenty-eight days, or just so long a time as is required for the moon to pass through the zodiac, but digs them up again on the twenty-ninth, when the moon is in conjunction with the sun." (Agrippa, "De Occulta Philosophiæ," i. 24.)

It will readily be seen how limitless are the results obtainable with such a system. Each planet becomes associated with a definite part of the body, and an argument such as the following becomes possible: "Since Capricornus, which presided over the knees in the house of Saturn, and all crawling animals are connected with the planet, the fat of snakes is an effective remedy against gout in the knees, especially on Saturday, the day of Saturn" (Rydberg). Tables of correspondences were freely devised showing the representatives of the sun, moon, and five planets among the elements, the microcosm, animals, plants, metals, and stones. Thus Mars was represented in these spheres respectively, by fire, acid juices, beasts of prey, burning, poisonous and stinging plants, iron or sulphuric metals, diamond, jasper, amethyst, and magnet; the vein of analogy lying in the fierce character of the god, whose name the planet bears. This idea of correspondence dominates the queer collection of odds and ends by which the old-time magician worked his charms. "Here," for instance, he would say, "is a plate of lead on which is engraved the symbol of a planet; and beside it a leaden flask containing gall. If I now take a piece of fine onyx marked with the same planet symbol and this dried cypress branch, and add to them the skin of a snake and the feather of an owl, you will need but to look into one of the tables given you to find that I have only collected various things in the elementary world which bear a relation of mutual activity to Saturn, and if rightly combined can attract both the powers of that planet and of the angels with which it is connected" (Rydberg). Mr. Tylor thus ably characterizes the analogies on which such systems are built and the uses to which they are put. "But most of his pseudo-science seems to rest on even weaker and more arbitrary analogies, not of things but of names. Names of stars and constellations, of signs denoting regions of the sky and periods of days and years, no matter how arbitrarily given, are materials which the astrologer can work upon and bring into ideal connection with mundane events. That astronomers should have divided the sun's course into imaginary signs of the zodiac, was enough to originate astrological rules, that these celestial signs have an actual effect on real earthly rams, bulls, crabs, lions, virgins. A child born under the sign of the lion will be courageous, but one under the crab will not go forward in life; one born under the waterman will be drowned, and so forth.... Again, simply because astronomers chose to distribute among the planets the names of certain deities, the planets thereby acquired the characters of their divine namesakes. Thus it was that the planet Venus became connected with love, Mars with war, Jupiter (whose ♃ in altered shape still heads our physicians' prescriptions) with power and joviality." The various positions of the heavenly bodies at one's birth, interpreted by such wild analogies, readily yield material for the prediction of future careers, vague enough to defy close denial, and bold enough to claim readily foreseeable consequences as striking verifications. Astrology represents the climax of the argument by analogy, fully systematized and calling into play many of the resources of modern learning. What is so clearly represented in astrology appears to a less extent in other pseudo-scientific systems; notably in palmistry and phrenology. It captivates the well-informed as well as the ignorant, it appeals to minds that are strong as well as those that are weak, and emphasizes the pricelessness of our scientific inheritance and the necessity of guarding it by the cultivation of sound logical habits of thought.

It would be pleasant, but unwarranted, to think of these forms of thought as obsolete; human nature is more deep-seated than learning. "In every department of human thought," says Mr. Clodd, "evidence of the non-persistence of primitive ideas is the exception rather than the rule. Scratch the epiderm of the civilized man, and the barbarian is found in the derm. In proof of which, there are more people who believe in Zadkiel's 'Vox Stellarum' than in the Nautical Almanac; and rare are the households where the 'Book of Dreams' and 'Fortune-Teller' are not to be found in the kitchen. The Singhalese caster of nativities has many representatives in the West, and there may lie profit in the reminder of the shallow depth to which knowledge of the orderly sequence of things has yet penetrated in the many. Societies and serials for the promulgation of astrology exist and flourish among us; Zadkiel boasts his circulation of a hundred thousand, and vaunts the fulfillment of his Delphic prophecies; while the late Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, was pestered, as his successor probably is, with requests to work the planets, accompanied by silver wherewith to cross his expert palm." The old astrology finds its descendants in modern fatuous volumes on Heliocentric Astrology, or Kabalistic Astrology, abounding in absurd pseudo-philosophic jargon and science-aping demonstrations, but in reality only the "vulgarest travesty of the old."

VIII

By way of conclusion it may be helpful to consider certain general truths in the field of anthropology and mental evolution, upon which the illustrations we have been considering have a bearing. We have seen what a widely extended genus the analogical argument compasses; and yet, if we were to include under this head certain closely allied and yet distinguishable forms of thought, it would be much wider still. I refer particularly to the use of metaphor and symbolism, which, like the children's make-believe with their dolls or fairies, is none the less on the boundary line between the real and the fictitious. Myth equally readily passes from the unconscious to the conscious stage, and much of what is plausibly interpreted as an argument by analogy, seems equally well an intentional use of symbolism and myth. That savages, at least in all but the lower stages, appreciate the use of myth is beyond all doubt. Primitive ceremonials, as also primitive explanations of the changes of nature, are full of symbolisms, which involve the same mental habit, whose products in the domain of analogy have been portrayed. This mythological instinct, Mr. Tylor well says, "belongs to that great doctrine of analogy from which we have gained so much of our apprehension of the world around us. Distrusted as it now is by severer science for its misleading results, analogy is to us still a chief means of discovery and illustration, while in earlier grades of education its influence was all but paramount. Analogies which are but fancies to us were to men of past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the sword from hilt to point; they could see a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the heaven god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his injunctions to use metaphor cautiously and to take care to make all similes consistent."