Approche médicale et analyse philosophique de l’imagination dans la critique de la superstition: comparaison paradoxale de Burton et Malebranche

Abstract

The fight against superstition in the xviith century in Europe required precautions with censoring, because of the suspicion of heresy, or atheism, associated to the criticism of irrationalism. To prove that superstition is a deviation of religion, some use medicine or philosophy. Imagination pathologies became the excuse for deviant behaviours and irrational beliefs. An anatomy of the brain, in Robert Burton’s work Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 in England), shows us how imagination produces an imaginary world for instable people, which is confused with the reality, and generates superstitious beliefs. In Recherche de la vérité by Nicolas Malebranche (1675 in France), the author uses philosophical analysis to denounce the same problem. Paradoxically, the modern Malebranche does not really succeed in proving how imagination causes superstition in a religious perspective. While Burton, with a medical methodology and in a humanist context, succeeds first in showing how imagination is the pretext for superstition; and then, lays the foundation of modern psychology.