for example, the
superstitions of gamblers. Indeed, at the bottom of all such beliefs, we
always find the vague, semi-conscious notion of a mysterious
power--destiny, fate, chance.

Without taking the trouble to set arbitrary limits, let us take the
facts as they are, without possible question, i.e., imaginary
creations, subjective fancies, having reality only for those admitting
them. Even a summary collection of past and present superstitions would
fill a library. Aside from those having a frankly religious mark, others
almost as numerous surround civil life, birth, marriage, death,
appearance and healing of diseases, _dies fasti atque nefasti_,
propitious or fateful words, auguries drawn from the meeting or acts of
certain animals. The list would be endless.[120]

All that can be attempted here is a determination of the principal
condition of that state of mind, the psychology of which is in the last
analysis very simple. We shall thus answer in an indirect and incomplete
manner the question of criterion.

First, since we hold that the origin of all imaginative creation is a
need, a desire, a tendency, where then is the origin of that
inexhaustible fount of fancies? _In the instinct for individual
preservation_, orientated in the direction of the future. Man seeks to
divine future events, and by various means to act on the order of things
to modify it for his own advantage or to appease his evil fate.

As for the mental mechanism that, set in motion by this desire, produces
the vain images of the superstitious, it implies:

(1) A deep idea of causality, reduced to a _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
Herodotus says of the Egyptian priests: "They have discovered more
prodigies and presages than any other people, because, when some
extraordinary thing appears, they note it as well as all the events
following it, so that if a similar prodigy appears anew, they expect to
see the same events reproduced." It is the hypothesis of an indissoluble
association between two or more events, assumed without verification,
without criticism. This manner of thinking depends on the weakness of
the logical faculties or on the excessive influence of the feelings.

(2) The abuse of reasoning by analogy. This great artisan of the
imagination is satisfied with likenesses so vague and agreements so
strange, that it dares everything. Resemblance is no longer a quality of
things imposed on the mind, but an hypothesis of the mind imposed on