Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/135

 Rh It may be of interest to ask how it came about that a belief of this kind should strike such deep roots in the mind of the nations? Why should people give credence to assertions not easily proved? A legitimate question to put, when once we have reached the starting-point of the belief. The credulity of the masses is no answer. Even credulity presupposes a mental disposition to accept a teaching in which there is no control possible, except it be the chance accomplishment of one or another prediction. When once the belief is established, the mass concludes, by a chain of loose reasoning, that what has proved true in one case may be true in other cases also.

I am not bold enough to deny the possibility of the stars and planets exercising a certain influence upon man and earthly beings. Sun and moon produce the great and stirring movements of the seas known as the tides, and why should they not exercise some similar influence upon the blood, causing it also to ebb and flow? The quick or slow movement of the blood stimulates or neutralises our activity, it makes us sluggish or enthusiastic, and thus determines our action. The whole electric power stored in the earth, of which we now begin to get a faint glimpse, is derived directly from the sun; the X rays, invisible to us, mould our life profoundly; and wireless telegraphy may be carried on in space with greater effect than we are as yet aware. There may be an elementary basis of rudimentary experience at the root of the vastly-developed science or pseudo-science of astrology. But between the premiss of a possible influence of the heavenly bodies,and the theory and practice of astrology with its systematised interpretation of that influence, yawns the gulf which modern science attempts to bridge. But the people had no clear conception of these truths, or apparent truths. To them sufficed the example of the great, of the kings and the aristocracy; and the authority of the masters stood in place of individual reasoning. Thus, therefore, the Letter spread consternation far and wide, and one of the