SUPERSTITION 



5637 



SUPERSTITION 



with a feeling that it is on the whole safer to 

 conform. From 875 persons (eighty per cent 

 women, twenty per cent men), of ages sixteen 

 to twenty-eight (students in two normal schools 

 of California), there were obtained about 1,100 

 admissions of full belief in some superstition, 

 about twice as many admissions of half-belief, 

 and nearly four times as many disbeliefs. 

 There were nearly as many who believed as 

 who disbelieved in some form of luck or sign. 



Spilling salt is the sign of a quarrel ; bubbles 

 in the tea cup or an itching skin means vis- 

 itors; a blister on the tongue means that you 

 have told a lie; when four persons in shaking 

 hands cross hands, it means a wedding; when 

 your ears burn, someone is speaking of you; 

 when you have the cold shivers, some one is 

 walking on the spot that will be your grave; 

 stepping on the cracks of paving-stones means 

 that you will fail in your lessons ; giving a knife 

 cuts friendship; breaking a mirror, walking un- 

 der a ladder, postponing a wedding, opening an 

 umbrella indoors, turning back on a journey, 

 stubbing the toe, wearing clothes inside out, 

 wearing a peacock feather, meeting a funeral, 

 going out of a house through a window, sitting on 

 a table, are all signs of bad luck; finding four- 

 leaved clovers or horseshoes, picking up pins, re- 

 turning part of money in payment are signs of 

 good luck. Add to these the avoidance of Friday 

 for enterprises, the refusal to sit down thirteen 

 at table, the belief in dreams, and one has a 

 fair notion of the great body of traditional 

 folklore which has come down the ages and 

 obtains more or less of a hold upon the grow- 

 ing minds of even the educated classes; inci- 

 dentally the attempt to see some kind of 

 meaning or connection between sign and event 

 requires an initiation into the byways of out- 

 grown systems and the ways of primitive think- 

 ing. 



As now current, these are fairly innocent 

 superstitions, which but slightly interfere with 

 the regulation of conduct by scientific think- 

 ing. That even slight belief affects conduct is 

 shown by the fact that rooms in hotels, cabins 

 in steamships, houses on streets skip number 

 thirteen or substitute twelve and one-half ; that 

 until recently steamers did not set sail on Fri- 

 day ; that some business men avoid transac- 

 tions when the thirteenth of the month falls 

 on a Friday ; or even that a Thirteen Club ex- 

 ists in New York, formed of thirteen members, 

 meeting for dinner on the thirteenth of the 

 month at 7:13 o'clock, in order to defy this 

 superstition. 



Pseudo-Science Mixture of Fact and Super- 

 stition. The effect of the belief or entertain- 

 ment is quite different when transferred to the 

 systems of interpretation of the pseudo-scien- 

 tific type. These, too, show the mixed origin 

 and reflect the history of superstition. Most 

 flagrant is the practice of fortune telling. It 

 rests primarily upon the doctrine (or the pre- 

 tense) of special powers, obtained by peculiari- 

 ties of birth (the seventh son of a seventh son, 

 born with a caul), or of association with a fa- 

 vored tribe (the gypsies), or occult learning (In- 

 dia), or of actual success in prediction, or pos- 

 session of a system. Fortune telling by cards 

 (see DIVINATION) shows how readily chance 

 combinations maybe fitted to the ordinary run 

 of human fate. But palmistry is the most typ- 

 ical in that it reads personal fortune from per- 

 sonal features, not as physiognomy attempted 

 to do by observing what kinds of qualities are 

 associated with features, but superstitiously by 

 attaching far-fetched consequences to minute 

 variations in the creases of the palm. Physiog- 

 nomy, like phrenology, is a pseudo-science be- 

 cause its data are utterly inadequate, unreli- 

 able, and misinterpret the relations which .they 

 observe. 



These attempt to build up knowledge after 

 the manner of a science, but really depend upon 

 prepossession, loose reasoning, and a hopeless 

 kind of evidence. They are superstitious only 

 in that the underlying idea continues the search 

 for signs of qualities of personal value in outer 

 indications. Psychology as a science has shown 

 how differently one must proceed to obtain 

 such insight, and that any rough-and-ready 

 diagnosis or reading of character, much less of 

 fate or fortune, is essentially unscientific, as 

 is the search for the elixir of life, the philoso- 

 pher's stone, or the fountain of youth. The 

 case of palmistry is much worse; it is plainly 

 superstitious in spirit, in method and in the 

 kind of interpretation which it employs. The 

 creases of the hand are adapted to use and 

 presumably had their origin in the apelike an- 

 cestors of the human race who dwelt in trees. 

 To call one of the major creases "the line of 

 life" and predict longevity or an early .death 

 from its variable length is an utterly arbitrary 

 procedure. The actual belief in such signifi- 

 cance is quite on a par with the practice of sav- 

 age tribes that put to death babes which their 

 fortune tellers decided were born at an evil 

 hour. And yet so strong are these supersti- 

 tious tendencies that fortune tellers and palm- 

 ists practice a suspicious if not entirely fraudu- 



