THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MAECH, 1875. 



THE GENESIS OF SUPERSTITIONS. 1 



By HERBERT SPENCEE. 



COMPREHENSION of the thoughts generated in the primitive 

 man by his converse with the surrounding world can be had 

 only by looking at the surrounding world from his stand-point. The 

 accumulated knowledge and the mental habits slowly acquired during 

 education must be suppressed, and we must divest ourselves of con- 

 ceptions which, partly by inheritance and partly by individual cult- 

 ure, have been rendered necessary. None can do this completely, 

 and few can do it even partially. 



It needs but to observe what unfit methods are adopted by educa- 

 tors, to be convinced that even among the disciplined the power to 

 frame thoughts which are widely unlike their own is extremely small. 

 When we see the juvenile mind plied with generalities while it has 

 yet none of the concrete facts to which they refer when we see 

 mathematics introduced under the purely rational form, instead of 

 under that empirical form with which it should be commenced by the 

 child, as it was commenced by the race when we see a subject so ab- 

 stract as grammar put among the first instead of among the last, and 

 see it taught analytically instead of synthetically ; we have ample 

 evidence of the prevailing inability to conceive the ideas of unde- 

 veloped minds. And, if, though they have been children themselves, 

 men iind it hard to rethink the thoughts of the child, still harder 

 must they find it to rethink the thoughts of the savage. To keep out 

 automorphic interpretations is beyond our power. To look at things 

 with the eyes of absolute ignorance, and observe how their attributes 

 and actions originally grouped themselves in the mind, imply a self- 

 suppression that is impracticable. 



Nevertheless, we must here do our best to conceive the surround- 

 ing world as it appeared to the primitive man, that we may be able 



1 From author's advance sheets of the " Principles of Sociology," Part II., chapter 

 viii. " Primitive Ideas." 



tol. vi. 33 



