Superstition
As to the amusing superstitions we so often witness in people of intelligence and impressible nature, the question, even for those who indulge in such fancies, is not whether they are reasonable. Lord Byron would not commence an undertaking of any kind on Friday. But even Byron, with his remarkable sensitiveness to impressions, and his habit of brooding over the mysteries of life, would not venture to assert that such conduct is reasonable. The “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” says, “Jeremy Bentham’s logic, by which he proved he couldn’t possibly see a ghost, is all very well—in the daytime. All the reason in the world will never get impressions of childhood out of a man’s head.” Elsewhere, Dr. Holmes says, “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as a famous French woman did about ghosts, ‘Je n’y crois pas; mais je les crains,’—‘I don’t believe in them; but I am afraid of them, nevertheless.’”