450 Professor James George Frazer [Feb. 5, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, Febniarv 5, 1909. 



Sir James Crichtox-Beowne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S., 

 Treasurer and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Professor James George Frazer, D.C.L. LL.D. Litt.D. 



The Influence of Superstition on the Growth of 

 Institutions. 



We are apt to think of Superstition as an unraitii]:ated evil, false in 

 itself, and pernicious in its consequences. That it has done much 

 harm in the world cannot be denied. It has sacrificed countless 

 lives, wasted untold treasures, embroiled nations, severed friends, 

 parted husbands and wives, parents and children, putting* swords and 

 worse than swords between them ; it has filled gaols and madhouses 

 with its innocent or deluded victims ; it has broken manv hearts ; 

 embittered the whole of manv a life : and, not content with perse- 

 cuting the hving, it has pursued the dead into the grave and beyond 

 it, gloating over the horrors which its foul imagination has conjured 

 up to appal and torture the survivors. It has done all that and 

 more. Yet the case of superstition, like that of ]\Ir. Pickwick 

 after the revelations of poor Mr. Winkle in the witness-box, can 

 perhaps afford to be placed in a rather better light ; and without 

 posing as the Devil's Advocate, or appearing before you in a blue 

 flame and sulphureous fumes, I do profess to make out what the 

 charitable might call a plausible plea for a very dubious client. For 

 I propose to prove, or at least to make probable by examples, that 

 among certain races and at certain times some social institutions 

 which we all, or most of us, believe to be beneficial, have partially 

 rested on a basis of superstition. The institutions to which I refer 

 are purely secular or civil : of religious or ecclesiastical institutions I 

 shall say nothing. It might perhaps be possible to show that even 

 religion has not wholly escaped the taint or dispensed with the aid 

 of superstition ; but I prefer for to-night to confine myself to those 

 civil institutions which people commonly imagine to be bottomed on 

 nothing but hard common sense and the nature of things. While 

 the institutions with which I shall deal have all survived into civihsed 

 society, and can no doubt be defended by solid and weighty argu- 

 ments, it is practically certain that among savages, and even among 

 peoples who have risen above the level of savagery, these very same 

 institutions have derived much of their strength from beliefs which 



