It is hardly surprising that geniuses, and criminals too (as Vidocq remarks in The Mysteries of Paris), in short all those who, in one way or another, are placed outside the normal, should be superstitious. They have no impressa vestigia for their feet, they go forward along unknown or forbidden paths, and so they are observant in quite a different degree from others, and moreover of very different things. The mass of people do not really live, they are mere repetitions, live in the security of the probable, and so they are not superstitious, that is to say they do not notice that this belief of theirs in the probable is, in another sense, a tremendous superstition.