us are lifted up to the level of the most sagacious, so that really
a simple cornet in the Blues is no more likely to entertain a
foolish belief about ghosts or witchcraft, or any other
supernatural topic, than the Lord High Chancellor or the Leader of
the House of Commons. How different is the intellectual regime of
Eastern countries! In Syria and Palestine and Egypt you might as
well dispute the efficacy of grass or grain as of magic. There is
no controversy about the matter. The effect of this, the unanimous
belief of an ignorant people upon the mind of a stranger, is
extremely curious, and well worth noticing. A man coming freshly
from Europe is at first proof against the nonsense with which he is
assailed, but often it happens that after a little while the social
atmosphere in which he lives will begin to infect him, and if he
has been unaccustomed to the cunning of fence by which Reason
prepares the means of guarding herself against fallacy, he will
yield himself at last to the faith of those around him, and this he
will do by sympathy, it would seem, rather than from conviction. I
have been much interested in observing that the mere "practical
man," however skilful and shrewd in his own way, has not the kind
of power that will enable him to resist the gradual impression made
upon his mind by the common opinion of those whom he sees and hears
from day to day. Even amongst the English (whose good sense and
sound religious knowledge would be likely to guard them from error)
I have known the calculating merchant, the inquisitive traveller,
and the post-captain, with his bright, wakeful eye of command--I
have known all these surrender themselves to the REALLY magic-like
influence of other people's minds. Their language at first is that
they are "staggered," leading you by that expression to suppose
that they had been witnesses to some phenomenon, which it was very
difficult to account for otherwise than by supernatural causes; but