The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions. Carveth Read

established upon Magic only; though to these later forms, also, and to Religion itself magical beliefs contribute their support. The inevitable development of illusory imaginations along with common sense, then, assisted early and also later culture, because they preserved order and cohesion by re-arousing the ancient submission and loyalty of the pack. For common sense is always limited to present conditions, it could never have foreseen the dependence of human life upon order and the necessity of maintaining cohesion even at great immediate sacrifices. These interests were, therefore, served indirectly through delusions; natural selection must, within certain limits, have favoured the superstitious. Excessively imaginative and superstitious tribes may sometimes have been eliminated; for common sense also has biological utility. But, perverse as it may seem, imaginations utterly false have had their share in promoting “progress”: co-operating with agriculture and trade, magic, religions and the fine arts have, by supporting government and civil order, helped in accommodating us, and even in some measure adapting us, to our present condition, such as it is.

CHAPTER III

       BELIEF AND SUPERSTITION

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§ 1. Superstition

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      Inasmuch as the influence of superstition upon the history of society can hardly be exaggerated, it must be worth while to inquire into its origin and nature. But this inquiry leads into a quagmire of ambiguous words: and to attempt to define them for all purposes would entangle the discussion in endless controversies. So it will be best to explain merely in what sense certain words will be used in this book. “Superstition,” for example, means in common use (I think) false beliefs concerning supernatural powers, especially such as are regarded as socially injurious, and particularly as leading to obscurantism or cruelty: but it is often extended to cover beliefs of a negligible or frivolous kind, such as stories about “fairy-rings,” or the unluckiness of seeing the new moon for the first time through glass. Plainly the injuriousness of a false belief is often in dispute, and at any rate is a question of time and place. “Superstition,” then, is here used merely as a collective term for the subjects of the ensuing chapters—Magic (or the belief in occult forces) and Animism (or the belief in the activity of spirits).

      The consequences of a belief, again, whether good or evil, cannot affect its psychological character: in trying to explain its nature and origin, one cannot take account of its social values. The explanation of superstitions must hold of all false beliefs, whatever their utility or disutility. Nay, further, whether a belief is false or true does not necessarily affect its psychological character: for a man may hold two doctrines, one true and the other false, both derived from the sincere testimony of the same person, and he may not be able to discern any difference in the degrees of confidence with which he holds them or in their influence upon his conduct. The understanding of false belief, then, requires an examination of belief in general.

      Still, whilst in the mind of any given man a true and a false belief may have the same character and origin, considered generally they must surely have different origins and grounds; and to make the sequel clearer, I will anticipate its conclusions so far as to say that true beliefs seem to rest on perception or inferences verified by perception, and false beliefs seem to depend upon imagination that cannot be verified. This general statement will need several qualifications. But I rely upon it at present so far as to say that superstitions are essentially imagination-beliefs.

      We shall find that these superstitions, though often held by whole tribes with the utmost assurance, differ in some subtle way from the perception-beliefs of their common sense, as that “fire burns” and that “water quenches fire.” They are unstable: (1) they become active on occasions, and otherwise are apt to be forgotten—as ghosts are only thought of at night. (2) They are modifiable merely for the sake of economy or other convenience. (3) They lose their hold on a tribe, fall off and die in course of time without any change in the evidence for them. (4) They depend a good deal upon the assent of a crowd. (5) They often vary in neighbouring countries or families, or amongst the members of a family. This is not like common sense. Superstitions or imagination-beliefs are unstable, in spite of being often held with great obstinacy (so that people die for them), and of their enduring, in the simpler forms and at a certain level of social life, for thousands of years. There is something wanting in the holdfast or anchorage of imagination-beliefs.

      It is necessary to explain what I mean by “imagination.”

§ 2. Imagination

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      Is it enough to define “imagination” as merely the having of mental “images,” pictures before the mind’s eye? This would confine imagination to visual representations, to the exclusion of auditory, olfactory, etc., which are all a man born blind can have, and which sometimes occur to those who can see, though the visual are commonest. The word “images,” therefore, is sometimes used to cover all these modes of representation; though “phantasmata” would be better.

      Again, a mental image or phantasm, visual or auditory, is improperly called an imagination, if there is nothing more than the reproduction of a single sense-quality. Imaginations represent not abstract sensations, but perceptions. To see an armed knight is not merely to have a visual impression of him, but to perceive a living, solid, heavy object definitely in space; and imagination reproduces the whole of this, and otherwise would be quite uninteresting. What would the tournament in Ivanhoe amount to if the knights were only phantoms?

      Further, imagination, merely as a reproduction of perception, is not distinguished from memory; but, in use, the two are always contrasted. Memories are recognised (in their complete form) as returning to us from earlier experience, both their component pictures and the order of them, and they are relatively stable; imaginations are felt to be more or less novel, and can easily be modified. Probably all the elements of an imagination might have occurred in a memory; but the arrangement of these elements is often so different from any actual experience as to baffle every attempt to redistribute them amongst their sources. Hence, in normal cases, our attitudes toward a memory and toward an imagination are entirely different. If a seeming memory prove false, we say it was only an imagination.

      But, once more, a good many men never have images or phantasmata (except words), or very few or faint ones, or only when falling asleep, and so on. Yet they are not wanting in imagination; words or other signs serve them instead of images to carry all meanings (the important matter); they enter into the spirit of poetry and literary fiction: so that imagination may be active without images. And the fact seems to be that the effectiveness of mental processes depends very little upon phantasmata, but upon something much deeper in the mind; and that there exist in men all degrees of concrete representative power, from those who picture everything they think of with vivid and definite detail, down, through many stages of decreasing realisation, to those who have only faint or fragmentary “images,” or even none at all: without its being possible to say (at present) that one type of mind is better or worse than another; though they may be adapted to different tasks.

      Expectation and reasoning, which are closely allied (for every definite expectation is a sort of inference), are often carried on in pictures—“picture thinking”—and this also is called imagination. Tyndall’s brilliant address on The Scientific Uses of the Imagination is well known. It greatly helps some men in thinking to form pictures of what they think about, such as a machine or an anatomical specimen, as if they had the thing before them; or even of an atom, which no man ever has before him, and which cannot be imagined by reproducing the precept, but only by constructing a picture from much grosser materials according to concepts. The picture thus formed necessarily falls short in some ways of the thing thought or meant, and can only be prevented from misleading us by guarding it with definitions or rules