Walter Bagehot

We gave the best evidence of our belief in its power to 'bring luck;' we fought for it (if our elders were out of the way); we offered to buy it with many other fish from the envied holder, and I am sure I have often cried bitterly if the…

Persons who stand up for the dignity of philosophy, if any such there still are, will say that I ought not to mention this, because it seems trivial; but the more modest spirit of modern thought plainly teaches, if it teaches anything, the…

The worst of these superstitions is that they are easy to make and hard to destroy.

A single run of luck has made the fortune of many a charm and many idols.

I am sure that if an elder boy said that 'the pretty fish was lucky--of course it was,' all the lesser boys would believe it, and in a week it would be an accepted idol.

But if once created they are most difficult to eradicate.

A nation which was moved by these superstitions as to luck would be at the mercy of a nation, in other respects equal, which, was not subject to them.

In historical times, as we know, the panic terror at eclipses has been the ruin of the armies which have felt it; or has made them delay to do something necessary, or rush to do something destructive.

The necessity of consulting the auspices, while it was sincerely practised and before it became a trick for disguising foresight, was in classical history very dangerous.

A religion full of omens is a military misfortune, and will bring a nation to destruction if set to fight with a nation at all equal otherwise, who had a religion without omens.

Unquestionably therefore the pre-historic religion was like that of savages--viz., in this that it largely consisted in the watching of omens and in the worship of lucky beasts and things, which are a sort of embodied and permanent omens.

It may indeed be objected--an analogous objection was taken as to the ascertained moral deficiencies of pre-historic mankind--that if this religion of omens was so pernicious and so likely to ruin a race, no race would ever have acquired…

The fancied discovery of these omens--not an extravagant thing in an early age, as I have tried to show, not a whit then to be distinguished as improbable from the discovery of healing herbs or springs which pre-historic men also did…

And if in reason the omen-finding race were superior to the races in conflict with them, the omen-finding race would win, and we may conjecture that omen-finding races were thus superior since they won and prevailed in every latitude and…

Such differences as exist between the Aryan, the Turanian, the negro, the red man, and the Australian, are differences greater--altogether than any causes now active are capable of creating in present men, at least in any way explicable by…

And there is, therefore, a strong presumption that (as great authorities now hold) these differences were created before the nature of men, especially before the mind and the adaptive nature of men had taken their existing constitution.

It is almost beyond imagination how man, as we know man, could by any sort of process have gained this step in civilisation.

And it is a great advantage, to say the least of it, in the evolution theory that it enables us to remit this difficulty to a pre-existing period in nature, where other instincts and powers than our present ones may perhaps have come into…

The conscious end of early societies was not at all, or scarcely at all, the protection of life and property, as it was assumed to be by the eighteenth-century theory of government.

Such is our earliest property-law, and our earliest life--law is that the lives of all members of the family group were at the mercy of the head of the group.

As far as the individual goes, neither his goods nor his existence were protected at all.

There are people to this day who would not permit in their house people to sit down thirteen to dinner.

They do not expect any evil to themselves particularly for permitting it or sharing in it, but they cannot get out of their heads the idea that some one or more of the number will come to harm if the thing is done.

The faint belief in the corporate liability of these thirteen is the feeble relic and last dying representative of that great principle of corporate liability to good and ill fortune which has filled such an immense place in the world.

Doing anything unlucky is in their idea what putting on something that attracts the electric fluid is in fact, you cannot be sure that harm will not be done, not only to the person in fault, but to those about him too.