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penalty for the breach of the divinity's rights (cf. Tylor, ut sup., ii. 209 sqq.). In like manner, the fact that contact with a chief, or with some article belonging to him, had preceded some calamity to the person who touched him led to the belief that the chief and his possessions were taboo (see Com PARATIVE RELIGION, VI., 1, c), from which belief has unquestionably resulted the death of many natives of Australia, New Zealand, and other regions (Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 83, 94-97, London, 1884; A. S. Thomson, The Story of New Zealand, i. 103, ib. 1859). Thus, in some respects, superstition takes the form of pseudo-science. The cases are illustrative, and also representative of an enormous body of facts in human history; they serve to open up the wide range of primitive and later superstitions, including the practises of totemism, taboo, magic, fetishism, sacrifice, and the like (see COMPARATIVE RELIGION; FETISHISM). (2) Involved in the foregoing is a credulity from which enlightened reason offers the only escape. That primitive and early man should accept either explanations which occurred to him in accordance with the methods of logic just exemplified, or those which tradition had supplied, was to be expected. Science, in the sense of careful induction, is a very modern product, and is the acquisition even yet of comparatively few. As a consequence, credulity is one of the most persistent traits of the mass of mankind, and those who exhibit it are perhaps proportionally almost as numerous in Christendom as elsewhere. As a striking example of this it is possible to cite the testimony of a clergyman at-the trial of Dr. C. A. Briggs (q.v.) for heresy in 1893 to the effect that his mother in Scotland used to lay the Bible on the doorstep to keep out the witches. This custom is not yet entirely obsolete. Still widely prevalent and productive of corresponding actions is the belief in the validity of signs and omens, such as indications of the weather drawn from the inclination of the horns of the new moon, or in prophylactics and cures of various sorts such as that which regards as a cure or preventive of rheumatism the carrying in the pocket of a stolen potato, or as a cure for warts the rubbing of the same with a piece of stolen bacon rind (which is then to be buried). No reason adequate to the alleged effects can be assigned for the assumed causes, and induction finds no invariability in such antecedents and consequences. So that credulity is to be charged with a part at least in the continuance of superstition. It is important to note in this connection that credulity is in a sense communicable. A superstitious person, who is almost invariably dogmatic in his attitude, easily communicates and diffuses his anticipations or his dread and wins new adherents for his theories.

(3) The native conservatism of the human mind lends itself to the acceptance and retention of explanations or statements when once

happen often overcomes " common sense," and a person who lives may even in the present under this influence do that which he will in other circumstances hesitate to acknowledge. The emotions are in modern life, and with the utmost certainty have always been, the strongest element in superstition. Faith is " felt " in certain " indications " in spite of the pronouncement of reason against them and of the mandate of the will not to receive them. Thus, as stated by Dresslar (ut sup., p. 150), " the ` will to believe' and the reason for believing are both impotent when opposed by a well-developed feeling to believe." In other words, the emotions may override both reason and will. It is susceptible of proof that fear, as an emotion, is in part the result of certain physical conditions. This is illustrated by the fact that at night, when what psychologists call the subnormal and more primitive psychical forces are to the front and man's rational and higher faculties are less advantageously situated, the stress of superstitious fear is accentuated. Similarly, physical or mental or moral illness produces conditions favorable to the operation of superstition. Shakespeare noted the effects along this line in his saying, " Conscience does make cowards of us all " (Ham let, III., i. 83). In this respect superstition, like Ecstasy (q.v.), belongs, so far as it is religious, to the pathology of religion, and altogether to the pathology of psychology.