Natural causes and supernatural seemings

Chapter I

1. Natural Defects and Errors of Observation and Reasoning ... ... ... ... ... ... 7

§ Uniformities of Experience ... ... ... ... 12

§ Sanctification of Error as Superstition ... ... ... 19

§ Fallacies of Coincidence in Reasoning ... ... 23

§ Fallacies of Coincidence in Observation ... ... ... 28

§ Laws of Assimilation and Discrimination ... 36

§ The Favourable Conditions of Superstition ... ... 40

§ Fallacies of Collusion ... ... ... ... 46

CHAPTER 11.

Natural Defects and Errors of Observation and Reasoning— continued ... ... ... ... ... 52

§ Causes of Erroneous Observation ... ... ... 52

(a) The Natural Limitations or Shortcomings of the Senses 54

VI CONTENTS.

PAGE

(6) The Want of Opportunities of Observation ... ... 56

(c) The Want of the Habit of Observation ... ... 60

(c?) The Effects of Bias ... ... ... ... 74

(e) The Misuse and Abuse of Words ... ... 98

CHAPTER HI. 2. The Activity of Imagination ... ... ... 116

PAET II.

UNSOUND MENTAL ACTION.

CHAPTER I.

Natural and Supernatural Religion ... ... ... 240

CONTENTS. Yll

PAET III.

THE ATTAINMENT OF SUPEENATUEAL KNOWLEDGE BY DIVINE ILLUMINATION.

PAGE

Section I. Ecstatic Intuition ... ... ... 265

III. Intuition of the Heart ... ... ... 287

IV. The Physical Basis of Ecstatic Intuition 305 V. Theological Illumination ... ... ... 319

VI. Isolation of Spiritual Knowledge ... 340

VII. Theology and Metaphysics ... ... 344

NATURAL CAUSES

AND

SUPEENATUEAL SEEMINGS.

STATEMENT OF THE AEGUMENT.

How is it that mankind, in different ages and places from their beginning until now, have had so many different notions concerning the supernatural, if there be a supernatural with which they can come into relations of knowledge and feeling ? How is it that they have had any notions at all concerning it, if there be no such accessible supernatural ? Those who believe confidently that there is not, or that in any case we cannot know anything about it, ought to show how it has come to pass that people everywhere, savage, barbarous, and cultured, have been impelled to construct it in the forms in which they have constructed it ; a plain scientific obligation lies on them

B to explain the natural origin of human belief respecting that which is beyond the reach of human thought. Those who imagine that there is a supernatural, and that we know something about it, ought, on their part, to formularize plainly the different methods of its revelation, to examine critically their respective claims to authority, and finally to make plain which revelation has the best authority, if there be more than one true, or which is the true one, if one only be true.

While that is waiting to be done, it will not be amiss to inquire and examine how far the causes of beliefs in the supernatural, and of the sundry and diverse notions that have been entertained concern-: ing it in different times and places, can be identified with causes which are habitually working in human thought now, and which were more largely operative in its more primitive stages of development. These causes may be classed as follows : —

I. Causes which lie in the natural operations of the sound mind ; of which two principal divisions may properly be made, namely —

1. The natural defects and errors of human observation and reasoning.

2. The prolific activity of the imagination, always eager and pleased to exercise itself. For it ought to be well considered in this relation that, while the.

STATEMENT OF THE ARGUMENT. 3

exercise of observation and reasoning is slow, toilsome, and difficult, the exercise of imagination is quick, easy, and pleasant; and how largely, therefore, the scanty supplies of the former are immediately supplemented by the lavish profusions of the latter.

II. Causes which lie in the operations of the unsound mind, and which fall naturally under the two principal headings of —

2. Mania and Delusions.

III. Causes which lie in the adoption of ecstatic illumination or intuition as a special channel of supernatural knowledge.

If the domain of the supernatural has shrunk immensely in modern times, as it undeniably has, and if the age of miracles be now past, as on all hands is repeated continually, the question to be seriously considered is how much of this result is due to the progressive discovery of the natural origin and working of causes which formerly, being entirely hidden, lent all their support to theories of the supernatural. Is it because they have ceased to operate as once they operated in human thought that the supernatural has waned ? or is it that it has come by degrees, as human means improved, to take less and less part in human doings ? Is the change subjectiye only? or is it an actual objective change ? If the former, then the supernatural relics in modern belief will be owing to the fact that causes, once so widely operative, continue to work in the old way in some minds.

PAET I,

CAUSES OF FALLACIES INCIDENT TO THE NATURAL OPERATIONS OF THE SOUND MIND.

1. The Natueal Defects and Erroks of Human Observation

AND Reasoning,

Chapter I. 1, The Natural Defects And Errors Of Observation And Reasoning

In all historical ages — and, having regard to tneir traditions and superstitions, we may assume it to be true also of the pre-historical ages—men have continually made errors in their observations and reasonings ; they have seen and drawn conclusions from what they have seen more often wrongly than rightly. It is thought to be no matter of surprise that savages and barbarians did so habitually in the pre-scientific ages ; the tendency is rather to look down with compassion on their aberrations as the natural consequences of their low mental states, and to nurse the pleasing conviction that nothing of the kind happens now, in these days of superior insight and better reasoning. In spite of this easy self-gratulation, however, it is undeniable that the same kind of errors in seeing and thinking which were made then are made still, that the great majority of persons reason

8 NATUBAL CAUSES AND SUPERNATURAL SEEMINGS.

no better now than the great majority did then, and that beHefs are cherished now which have no better foundations than many extinct pre-scientific beHefs; and it is pretty certain that in years to come some cherished beHefs of to-day shall serve to those who are then alive as curious and instructive examples of states of imperfect mental evolution. As in the past and now, so then, wiser descendants shall wonder to think that rational beings could ever have been so very irrational as their forefathers.

Does it not seem strange, when we consider it, that the race of man on earth should have gone forward as well and far as it has gone, when all the while most of that which it was thinking and believing was not true ? Let any one read and quietly reflect on the appalling histories of the numerous absurd beliefs and practices that have prevailed among mankind in the past, and prevail still in the dark places of the earth especially, considering by the light of them what the human race has been from the beginning until now, and he can hardly fail to be seriously perplexed what to think of it. He may well think that to go wrong is as natural to the human mind as to go right. Certainly it would be a thing incredibly strange were we to suppose that the faiths which inspired actual conduct were as badly based as those which filled the abstract regions of specula-

EEBOBS OF OBSERVATION AND REASONING. 9

tion, the implicit in conduct as ungrounded as the explicit in thought. But men have never fed their bodies on fictions. The reasonings of the savage respecting the habits of the game which he pursued and the fish which he caught for his food ; the wily precautions taken by him to hide his trail from his enemies and to foil their stealthy pursuit; and his careful observations of the scarcely perceptible signs by which to guide himself through the trackless forest and across the pathless prairie — these were as sound as the reasoning and observation of the astronomer of the present day, who, noting the track of a comet, predicts the exact moment a thousand years to come when it will be at the same spot in the heavens, or, from an unexplained deviation of a planet's orbit, proclaims the presence of an undiscovered planet at a place where it is afterwards found to be. In the one case, as in the other, the rules of right seeing and thinking are the same, and in the one case, as in the other, the same fallacies are apt to infect seeing and thinking.

To the vulgar it seems a marvellous thing when the astronomer makes predictions that embrace such vast lengths of time and such immensity of space ; but the wonderful science which enables him to do such things is not at all different in kind from the common knowledge by which the dullest rustic foretells with certainty that one sort of seed, when put into the earth, will grow into a mustard plant, and another sort of seed into a turnip. The science of the astronomer is of the same kind as the knowledge of the vulgar ; it is the inevitably ensuing intelligence common to those who, being normally constituted mentally, have the opportunities, appliances, and training necessary to the study of a class of phenomena requiring special means of observation; it is the common sense appertaining to an uncommon class of phenomena. And the errors of such knowledge have no prerogative of birth or dignity over other errors; they are errors simply, of the same kind and illustrating the same mental tendencies as common error.

We are apt nowadays, perhaps, to think too much of theories of knowledge and too little of the knowledge which is implicit in wise action. No nation ever yet made itself by theories of social contract or by any other explicit theories ; the work was done first, and the theories came afterwards ; the reason was latent in the fact before it was patent in the explanation. It was not by fictions of thought, but by realities of feeling and doing, that savages grew into powerful tribes or nations ; and the inquirer must look beneath their superstitions and other notional absurdities of the intellect who would find out how

ERROES OF OBSERVATION AND REASONING. 11

that was done, and how far their wrong theories of the universe were of practical worth in the use made of them to guide and sanction the real forces at work in social development. Even discoverers of a law of gravitation, however high their just pretensions, cannot properly afford to despise the condensed and, so to speak, silent knowledge which is implicit in the social growth from scattered tribes of wandering savages to a strong and settled barbarous nation.

There is always a fund of wisdom in the common sense and practical instincts of the common people, the instruction of which philosophy misses when it neglects or disdains to take sufficient account of it. Having to deal with the stern realities of life, working men are compelled to have working beliefs in order to act ; feeling instinctively that the best test of the value of a belief is — Will it work? they turn their backs impatiently upon empty abstractions and demand beliefs with real contents. For example, persons of culture who make for themselves the dismaying discovery that they cannot go on believing in a personal God, are happy to take refuge in more general terms and abstractions, such as Deism and Pantheism, and make mighty use of them ; but the labouring classes, repudiating such barren metaphysical abstractions, either repudiate God altogether or demand that, if there be a God who ruleth the earth, He shall be a real living God, working in the events of the world as they do themselves; not an abstract absolute, emptied of contents and living only in the misty regions of speculative thought, but " a literal, personal, and eternal God." Thus they, by their practical instincts, escape those self- deceiving effects of abstractions by which philosophers sometimes seek and discover the explanation of a concrete fact in what is no more than the abstract statement of the very same fact : the sleep-producing effects of opium in the soporific virtues of that drug ; the evolution of the universe from the like to the unlike in a self- determining instability of the homogeneous, whereby it starts on heterogeneous tracks of stabler being ; the determination of self in an abstract will ; the moral sanction of individual conduct in the authority of an abstract morality, which thereupon becomes a metaphysical entity or a spiritual inspiration from without ; and the like verbal sophisms.

§ Uniformities of Uxpeiience,

If it be asked of the rustic how he is sure that from one sort of seed will spring one sort of plant after he has buried it in the earth, and from another sort of seed another sort of plant, he will be likely to answer that any fool knows as much, because even a fool can-

EERORS OF OBSERVATION AND REASONING. 13

not fail to notice so common and constant a succession of events ; and if the astronomer be asked how it is that he foretells with such precision so amazing a result at so vast a distance of time, he will say, if he be not prompted by scientific vanity to make a mystery of his calling, that every astronomer who knows his business can do it as well as he can. In both cases the reasoned inference rests upon the observation of uniformities of experience, and in neither case has it any authority other than experience : not individual experience alone, it may be, but the slowly gained and consolidated experience of the race embodied in the general statement or so-called law. So long as the uniformity of nature lasts as it is, so long must men, constituted as they are, continue to conclude with confidence, from certain coexistences and sequences of events within their experience, as to future coexistences and sequences ; and so long as they do that they will be liable, from imperfect observation, as they always have been, to make mistakes by supposing connections that are occasional and accidental to be invariable and essential— by believing casual to be causal events.

It is notoriously a hard matter to conceive that which contradicts uniform experience, and a harder matter still to believe it. If two things or events are always seen together, they are inevitably thought of together, and thereupon believed to be bound together by an inseverable tie, not in the mind alone, but in the nature of things. They would be so certainly if the mind were fully and exactly sensitive to every atom and force, separate and combined, in the universe, and to their several relations — if, in fact, being commensurate with it, it were omnisensible and omniscient; but as that is very far from being the case, the tie may or may not be, and most often will not be, absolute. Easy and abundant occasions of error present themselves at every turn. A wider experience and a larger reach of reason may prove the association supposed invariable to be no more than accidental, or at any rate not to be invariable. All swans were believed to be white until a black swan was seen for the first time, ''swan" and ''whiteness" being two notions that always went together ; for 'a long time it was inconceivable and incredible that there could be people at the other side of the earth, since, if there were, they must be walking with their heads downwards ; and it is still inconceivable to many persons that a body in motion would go on moving at the same velocity if it were not acted upon by some new force. In these cases the contradictory experiences suffice to correct the erroneous generalizations. But contradictory instances have not always an equal success to overthrow false conclu-

ERRORS OF OBSERVATION AND REASONING. 15

sions. The general, once accepted, is very apt to be invested with an authority greater than it has obtained from actual experience, or than any actual experience could give it, and so to survive in spite of experience. It has truly greater authority than individual experience, because it represents the common or general experience of the kind ; and therefore it is that it is by many thought to be above experience altogether, the real source of its higher authority being overlooked. Nay, it is itself only too ready, once it has got launched into vogue, to resent its real origin, and to kick down the humble ladder of experience by whose steps it has been raised to its abstract dignity.

That which we have uniformly felt and thought and made the adjustment of our natures to, becomes a part of our mental structure — a fundamental form of thought, if invariable in human experience ; wherefore to change or reverse the constant experience, and especially to introduce a new and quite strange experience, is to sever us from our hold on reality for the time being, and to occasion a helpless bewilderment or vertigo, a sort of mental dissolution, until we are able to organize a new mental adjustment.* Hence

* It is just as it is with tlie bodily equilibrium, to maintain which we require the silent help of all the impressions from without that we are wont to be in relation with, not conscious of them the while, perhaps. Hence sudden deafness in one ear occasions distressing vertigo for a time.

it is that an earthquake, going counter to all ordinary experience, causes a most extraordinary and indescribable feeling of alarm and mental impotence in countries where it is a very infrequent event ; and it was for the same reason, no doubt, that comets and eclipses at one time produced an overwhelming terror, as they do still among some barbarous peoples, being thought to be ill-boding portents big with calamities. It may well be for the same reason that a nation goes mad with panic of fear and rage of suspicion when its political and social framework falls to pieces, as happened in France during the storm of its great Eevolution ; and for a similar reason, again, that the individual (although the cause of the desolation in this case is internal) whose disordered brain is oppressed with a painful impotence of function, and whose thought and feeling are almost paralyzed, is overwhelmed with a strange reeling of sense and thought, showing itself in a terrifying loss of hold on realities, an alarming feeling of dissolution of personality, a panic-like dread of formless ills. Let him who would realize the necessity of the familiar definite relations between the internal fabric of mind and the external framework of things, listen to the melancholic sufferer struggling in vain with the inadequacy of language to express his appalling sense of the unreality of things and the disabling appre-

EEBOES OF OBSEEYATION AND REASONING. 17

hension which the strangeness of his own mental being occasions him.

It is with beliefs as it is with movements : the right belief, like the right movement, being that which has been acquired by the suitable adaptation to former like circumstances and now fits with most exactness present circumstances ; true, therefore, if they are essentially like, untrue if they are unlike. To ask a person to believe otherwise than according to his uniform experience is like asking a skilful purposive movement which has been acquired with great pains by special training to adapt itself suddenly to the accomplishment of something quite different ; and to ask him not to apply old beliefs to the apprehension of new facts is like asking a man not to use for the grasping of a quite new object the most fit movements which he is capable of, because they are not entirely fit. He must use the old motor apprehension or grasp until he has fitted himself with a new one, which he gains by gradual adaptation. So it is with beliefs : he cannot choose but make use of the old belief, though it does not fit exactly, but in doing so he ought to take great care to see exactly wherein it does not fit, and to proceed to modify it accordingly. Does it err by falling short of or by being in excess of the facts? and is it necessary to add to it or to take from it, or otherwise to modify it ?

The work of modification must be a work of patience and pains, for it is as hard to dissociate two ideas that have always gone together in experience as it is to dissociate two movements that have always been associated in practice. Were a curious person, by way of philosophical experiment, to go about diligently to dissociate his experiences, it might well happen to him to see many things in a new light, to see some things which he had previously been entirely blind to, and perhaps in the end to make discoveries of a surprising and instructive kind. A good effect of wide observation of men and things and of a large general culture is to leave the mind open and susceptible to new experiences which ought to modify or reverse old conceptions, instead of declining converse with them or relegating them to a category which fits them not. On the other hand, one of the most signal features of the savage mind and of the uncultivated mind everywhere is the incapacity to receive new ideas, and the tenacious holding to received customs and notions which, being part of the wisdom of their forefathers, whose manes they perhaps worship, they regard reverently as a part of the order of nature, and, like it, not even admitting of question.*

* A very early, if not original, worship of mankind, is still practised at the present day. In Java is a tribe called the Karangs, supposed

ERROR AS SUPERSTITION. 19

§ Sanctification of Error as Superstition.

A great cause, then, of ordinary errors of thought, and of ordinary errors that have attained an extraordinary eminence as superstitions, is an unfounded belief in instances of uniformity which are not really such, and the survival or standing over (superstes) of such errors in religious beliefs and customs after they are discredited by observation. It is an inference from the particular to the general when the general has not the authority of adequate experience to warrant it, and the subsequent perpetuation and sanction of the inference as sacred in spite

to be descendants of the aborigines of the island, whose old men and youths fonr times a year repair secretly in procession, by paths known only to themselves, to a sacred grove in the dense forest; the old men to worship and make offering, the youths to see and learn the mysterious litany of their fathers. In this grove are the ruins of terraces laid out in quadrilateral enclosures, the boundaries of which are marked by blocks of stone laid or fixed in the ground. Here and there on the terraces are more prominent monuments — erect pillars surmounting oval piles of stones ; flat slabs on the ground supporting egg-shaped blocks ; and specially noteworthy, a pillar, erect within a square marked out with stones on the ground, round wliich the worshippers plait at every visit a fringe of Areng palm leaves. Here these despised and secluded people, following the rites and customs that have descended to them through their forefathers from vastly remote antiquity, continue to celebrate what are evidently phallic rites of worship, repeating with superstitious awe a litany which they do not comprehend, and whose origin and purpose are lost to their traditions. (Forbes's Wanderings in the Eastern Arcldpelago, p. 101.)

of experience. Those things which, when they went together before, were followed by good luck, will, when they occur together again, bring good luck after them, and a day on which a misfortune has befallen becomes an unlucky day. Thus it is that there is still a strong feeling, and in former days there was even a religious obligation, against commencing important business on the unlucky day. In reality there may be no more connection between the two events than there is between an eclipse of the sun and the birth of a red-haired child which chances to take place during it, or between the flaming of a comet in the heavens and the career of a great conqueror or a great criminal who is born under that aspect of them. More than eighteen hundred years have passed since Ovid referred to the vulgar objection of the ancient Eomans to marriages in May, the probable reason of the aversion being that the funeral rites of the Lemiiralia were celebrated in that month; but still the superstition is not extinct, for marriages in May are thought by many to be unlucky now. How vivid and penetrating a ray of light does the fact throw on the persistence, for good or ill, of the past, be it never so remote, in the present of human thought and feeling !

The priests of ancient Eome, making good profit to themselves out of this omen-seeking habit of mind,

EBEOB AS SUPERSTITION. 21

as the medicine-men of savage tribes do still, discovered, in the entrails of the animals offered up as sacrifices to the gods, the signs propitious or unpropitious to the enterprise about to be undertaken. And the derivation of omens from the flights of birds was developed into an elaborate science, of which the superstitions still lingering in remote country villages with respect to the good or ill luck portended by flights of magpies are but feeble survivals. How little real observation was at the bottom of omens of the kind, widespread and hallowed as they were amongst all sorts of people in all quarters of the earth, is shown clearly by the fact that the same event which was an omen of ill luck in one nation might be an omen of good fortune in another nation, and that the sight of the same kind of bird was a good or a bad omen according as it happened to the right or to the left of the person who chanced to see it. In like manner, when prayers were made daily to saints in Christendom, with a more vital belief in their efficacy than exists generally now, or than it is perhaps possible for any one to feel in the modern atmosphere of thought, one saint was invoked as specially propitious to one person or one class of persons, and another saint to another person or another class of persons; whence it did not fail sometimes to happen that the saint who was the

22 NATUKAL CAUSES AND SUPEKNATUBAL SEEMINGS.

patron of one was hostile to another when the interests of the two conflicted.*

Of course, he who had prayed once to a particular saint, and had got what he prayed for, was persuaded that he had got it in consequence of his prayer, and ever afterwards invoked that saint with heart of good hope, notwithstanding that on a hundred other occasions he failed to obtain that which he prayed for. In some Koman Catholic churches at the present day the walls inside are nearly covered with the votive tablets of those who, having prayed to the Virgin or to a saint for the recovery of a mother, child, sister, brother, father, or lover, from sickness, have thus recorded their gratitude for the favourable answer which the event has been.f And so in England still, when the country is suffering damage from the long continuance of wet weather, and the harvest cannot be

* The Lacedaemonians, according to Xenophon, put up their prayers very early in the morning, in order to be beforehand with their enemies and to pre-engage the gods in their favour.

t And not in Christian churches only. Of a Buddhist temple in the province of Shansi, in China, to which the neighbouring Mongols make pilgrimages in numbers, Mr. Gilmour says, " It seemed to be quite a famous temple, and was hung almost full of its own praises, written on red cloth and silk, the grateful offerings of votaries, who in this way returned thanks for having their prayers answered." (Among the Mongols, p. 144, by the Eev. James Gilmour, M.A.) All which naturally seemed very absurd and barbarous to a missionary of the one true religion.

gathered in, and the farmer looks round him in despair at the rain which continues to fall, special prayer is made solemnly to Almighty God in English churches, that He may turn from the people those evils which they for their sins have most righteously deserved, by sending fine weather. If fine weather comes at length after the long continuance of wet weather, it is a manifest and merciful answer to prayer; if not, the credit of prayer nowise suffers by its seeming ill success on the occasion.

§ Fallacies of Coincidence in Reasoning.

It might naturally be thought that people of all countries in all ages would not have offered sacrifices and supplications to their gods had not the events often answered the expectations of those who were at the cost and pains of offering them. Propitiatory hecatombs of slain creatures, human and animal, offered up in countless numbers on countless altars in all parts of the w^orld, are surely proofs of the existence of gods who have inclined their ears to hear the urgent prayers of mankind. Not so ; since the many gods that were thus invoked and propitiated with costly rites and ceremonies and amid the reverential awe of their unnumbered worshippers are now universally acknowledged to have had no existence outside human imagination, and not ever, therefore, to have answered the prayers they were supposed to answer at the time. Their real interest now is as extinct beliefs, not as extinct beings.