CONTENTS.

Superstition is a tendency to believe in something outside the ordinary course of nature.
Since nature, however, is the unceasing work of Eternal Reason, superstition is a tendency to believe in what is unreasonable.
This tendency is the degenerate state of an originally well-disposed mind.
Infidelity consists in a tendency to reject all direct certainty that does not proceed from the impressions of the senses.

2. The origin of superstition and infidelity, and their mode of development . . . . . . . . . . p. 61.

The beauty of the earliest comprehension of the world by man must itself be destroyed by the forces of the world in order that the human race may be led to a higher point.
The enlightenment of the understanding regarding natural events rouses in some people doubts concerning old opinions, and in others, a stronger attachment to them and a hatred of new ideas.

3. The Middle Ages an example of a period of superstition . . p. 65

Christianity could not abolish that kind of superstition which sought for aid from the devil.
Man’s false comprehension has mingled the grossest superstition with religion.
We must set up the truth of history as a testimony against the one-sided eulogist of the Middle Ages.

4. The injurious effects which superstition exercises on all the concerns of life . . . . . . . . . . p. 67

5. On the supposed poetry of superstition . . . . . . p. 69

It is not necessary for the creatures invented by superstition to partake in external reality in order to receive poetical value; it is a prosaic error to demand this for the sake of poetry.
A true insight into things cannot approve of the arrogance with which some poetical works endeavor to give an external reality to those powers of darkness created by superstition. The true kingdom of the beautiful is a kingdom of reason.
The desire entertained by some people to restore superstition is wrong because no one is serious in desiring it, and it only misleads some people into a belief in fictitious beings.
A gross abuse of the words poetic and prosaic.
Natural science certainly limits the poet with respect to the use of some representations which are contrary to reason; but—besides granting him rich compensation as a man, by higher insight into...