tion thus put upon them, is the more intelligible because sometimes it is practically the only thing which saves them from extinction at the hands of their more advanced neighbours or conquerors; and at all times it is gratifying to the despised "nigger" or "barbarian" to excite the terror of his owner or his superior in civilisation. The privilege thus conferred upon the lower race or section would be jealously preserved and handed down; and hence probably nowadays all those who are credited by their neighbours with this power firmly believe themselves that they possess it.

We may now proceed to consider the conditions under which was waged that struggle for existence between magic and religion, on the issues of which the future progress, scientific as well as religious, of mankind depended. And first let it be observed that, though evolution is universal, progress, whether in religion, morality, science, or art, is exceptional. The law of the survival of the fittest works inexorably; the fittest form of belief-be it the belief in magic or the belief in religion-inevitably survives, only the "fittest" is not necessarily or usually the highest; it is that which the particular race under its special conditions is fittest for.

The hostility from the beginning between religion and magic is, as has already been said, universally admitted; its origin is disputed. The suggestion made by those who regard sorcery as the primeval fact of which religion was an offshoot, that it is due to the priest's jealousy of the sorcerer, once his confrère and then his professional rival, does not carry us very far. To say nothing of the fact that he who says priest says religion, i.e. of the fact that to assume without explanation the existence of the priest is to leave the origin of religion unexplained, the jealousy of the priest is not the fact of real importance in the discussion. What we want to know is why the jealousy of the priest woke an answering chord in the heart of the average man, for without that response the priest's jealousy would be powerless for good or for evil. The probable answer is that the sentiment of the supernatural, the conviction of the existence of an overruling supernatural power, whatever the occasion under which man first became aware of its existence as one of the

facts of his internal experience, was offended by the pretension of any merely human being to wield supernatural power; such a pretension was irreconcilable with the existence of the sentiment, and the shock which ensued from the collision of the two resulted in the feeling, or rather was the feeling, that the pretension was impious. But it is obvious that the violence of the shock and the vigour of the consequent reaction would depend considerably on the strength of the sentiment and conviction of the supernatural. This brings us to note that in the historical instances given by Dr. Tylor of the existence in civilised races of the belief in magic, those races have not yet reached the stage of development in which sorcery is seen to be an absolute impossibility, both from the religious and the scientific point of view. Probably even their present stage of development is higher, however, than that in which they were when the belief first appeared amongst them. In fine, the triumph of magic, where it was complete, is itself a considerable presumption that the conflict began at a time when the religious sentiment was quite immature and incapable of successfully asserting itself. Where the sentiment of the supernatural succumbed, it did not cease to exist, but was modified or misinterpreted in accordance with the magical, view of the universe. Progress in science and religion ceased, but the evolution and organisation of magic into a system went on apace, until, where a people is entirely given up to magic, the world is filled with supernatural terrors, and life with the rites prescribed to exorcise them. On the other hand, where we find religion in the ascendant but sorcery coexisting with it, we may infer that religion had become firmly established in the more progressive section of the community before the contrast between the beliefs of the more and the less enlightened members had produced that confusion of ideas which is the essential condition of the belief in magic. And here we may remark that, as sorcery, when it is victorious, does not kill the sentiment of the supernatural, but, on the contrary, lives on it and perverts it to its own uses, so there are few religions which succeed in entirely uprooting the belief in magic from the minds of the most backward members of their congregations; and that, owing to the vitality and tenacity of primitive

modes of thought, no religion is free from the danger of relapse on the part of some of its believers and the recrudescence of a belief in magic. Hence it is that we find religion and magic sometimes acting and reacting on one another. Even a religion so comparatively developed as that of ancient Rome, sanctioned the resort in times of stress, such as an exceptional drought, to magic, and fell back on the lapis manalis as a rain-making charm. Sometimes religion will have a fixed modus vivendi with sorcery, and take magic into its own organisation, as in Chaldæa. On the other hand, magic, even where its relation to religion is one of avowed hostility, will implicitly recognise the superiority of its rival by borrowing from or travestying its ritual; the superstitious mind, incapable of understanding prayer, will recite the Lord's Prayer backwards as a spell more powerful than any of its own; and the Irish peasant uses holy water where simple water would have been considered by his pre-Christian ancestor as sufficiently efficacious.

Consequently, everywhere now we find either (1) magic surviving in countries where religion is dominant, or (2) magic practically in sole possession of the human mind. By the former fact some inquirers have been led to regard the two as originally identical; by the latter, to regard magic as that out of which religion has been evolved. But both inferences may be as erroneous as it would be to infer that, because in Southern Europe pagan practices are still sometimes tolerated under the sheltering shadow of the Church, therefore Christianity was evolved out of Aryan polytheism. At any rate, whether the attempt made in this chapter and the last to offer a third explanation be accepted or rejected, it is well to recognise that the facts are not necessarily exclusive of the view that religion and magic had different origins, nor absolutely conclusive in favour of viewing religion as a mere variety or "sport" of

sorcery.

CHAPTER V

LIFE AND DEATH

ACCORDING to the view advanced in the previous chapters, the belief that all natural phenomena have life, and that all the many changes in nature are due to a will or wills similar to man's, does not necessarily imply any belief in the supernatural. The sequences of events which this piece of primitive philosophy seeks to explain are themselves, ex hypothesi, uniform, familiar, in a word natural, not supernatural; and the explanation itself consists in assimilating the things explained not to anything supernatural or superhuman, but to something essentially characteristic of human nature. The sentiment of the supernatural is not aroused by events which happen as they were expected to happen, but by some mysterious and unaccountable deviation from the ordinary course of nature. It is specifically distinct also from the terror which dangers inspire, or the respect and admiration which the strength of the greater carnivora may have exacted from primitive man; and it seems psychologically inadmissible, on the one hand, to derive it from any of these feelings, and, on the other, to confound it either with fear or with gratitude; for though each of these latter two emotions may go with it, neither is indispensable to it.

But though no belief in the supernatural is necessarily implied in the view that all things which affect man possess life, still the two beliefs seem to have been universally combined in varying degrees. This combination is, I suggest, the first great step in or towards the evolution of religion. The second great step was that which settled the terms on which man was to live with the supernatural beings by whom he was surrounded. Those terms could only be

terms either of hostility or of friendship; indifference towards the powers with whom it lay to thwart man's most cherished hopes, and even his efforts to effect his own selfpreservation, was an impossible attitude. But permanent resistance to such powers was an attitude equally impossible. Primitive man in his struggle for existence must have suffered so many defeats, his generalisations must have been so often upset, his forecasts of the immediate future so often disappointed, as perpetually to strengthen the belief that amongst the forces against which he was contending there were many that were irresistible, supernatural. That, relying upon magic, he thought to combat and actually to coerce the supernatural beings that he had to deal with, is difficult to believe. Much that civilised man regards as magic is regarded by those who practise it not as sorcery but as science, and its practice implies no intention to put constraint upon supernatural beings. Of the practices which are in intention magical, some are in their origin "sympathetic" (i.e. pieces of savage science), and the rest are perversions or parodies of acts of true worship; but both classes presuppose the conception of the supernatural: the latter by the terms of its definition, the former because it could not be used to constrain supernatural beings until the beings to whom it was applied came to be thought supernatural. In fine, both classes are subsequent in development to the establishment of those permanent friendly relations between worshipper and God in which worship takes its rise. Again, in conjectures about primitive man, we argue back from existing savages; now, many of the cases in which savages have been reported to apply constraint to their gods and inflict punishment upon them, prove to be due to misunderstanding-as we shall see in a subsequent chapter on Fetishism-for the savage's terror of the supernatural is too great to allow him wantonly to provoke its anger. We may therefore reasonably doubt whether all the supposed cases of coercion are not due to error in observation; at anyrate we may confidently assert that there is no tribe existing whose attitude towards the supernatural is one of hostility pure and simple, and whose faith is placed in magic alone, as there must once have been, if they are right who hold that magic