Further down are found the acknowledged "freaks" at the brink of insanity, who are but the extreme form of the unstable, and who, after having wasted haphazard much useless imagination, end in an insane asylum or worse still.
Let us consider these three groups together. Let us eliminate the intellectual and moral qualities characteristic of each group, which establish notable differences between them, and let us consider only their inventive capacity as applied to practical life. One character common to all is mobility—the tendency to change. It is a matter of current observation that men of lively imagination are changeable. Common opinion, which is also the opinion of moralists and of most psychologists, attributes this mobility, this instability, to the imagination. This, in my opinion, is just upside down. It is not because they have an active imagination that they are changeable, but it is because they are changeable that their imagination is active. We thus return to the motor basis of all creative work. Each new or merely modified disposition becomes a center of attraction and pull. Doubtless the inner push is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. If there were not within them a sufficient number of concrete, abstract, or semi-abstract representations, susceptible of various combinations, nothing would happen; but the origin of invention and of its frequent or constant changes of direction lies in the emotional and motor constitution, not in the quantity or quality of representations. I shall not dwell longer on a subject already treated,[119] but it was proper to show, in passing, that common opinion starts from an erroneous conception of the primary conditions of invention—whether great or small, speculative or practical.
In the immense empire of the practical imagination, superstitious beliefs form a goodly province.
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.
(2) The abuse of reasoning by analogy. This great artisan of the imagination is satisfied with likenesses so vague and agreements so strange, that it dares everything. Resemblance is no longer a quality of things imposed on the mind, but an hypothesis of the mind imposed on things. Astrology groups into "constellations" stars that are billions of miles apart, believes that it discovers there an animal shape, human or any other, and deduces therefrom alleged "influences." This star is reddish (Mars), sign of blood; this other is of a pure, brilliant silvery light (Venus) or livid (Saturn), and acts in a different way. We know what clever structures of conjectures and prognoses have been built on these foundations. Need we mention the Middle Age practice of charms, which even in our day still has adherents among cultured people? The physicians of the time of Charles II, says Lang, gave their patients "mummy powder" (pulverized mummies) because the mummies, having lasted a long time, must prolong life.[121] Gold in solution has been esteemed as a medicine—gold, being a perfect substance, should produce perfect health. In order to get rid of a disease nothing is more frequent among primitive men than to picture the sick person on wood or on the ground, and to strike the injured part with an arrow or knife, in order to annihilate the sickening principle.