sorcery was invented, and the rest of the evolution of religion follows without difficulty; or, if any further explanation is required, it is to be found in the fact that the imagination of the savage is unbridled. Now, though the savage, if the idea that he too should have supernatural powers had been suggested to him, would doubtless have thought the suggestion excellent if it could be carried out, he would also have inquired how the thing was to be done. It is one thing to wish you had a certain power; it is quite another thing to imagine you have it something, be it what it may, is required to set the imagination to work, to start the idea that it is possible to work impossibilities. The suggestion that the savage fancy is so unbridled that it is capable of believing anything, does not help us much here, for several One is that, as Mr. Andrew Lang has conclusively shown, the incredulity of the savage is quite as strong and as marked as his credulity: he is proof against the invasion. of unfamiliar ideas. Another is that, according to the best observers, the imagination of the savage is not unbridled but is singularly sterile, and moves within remarkably narrow limits. A third is that the savage's thought is subject to mental laws as much as is civilised man's; and that the conception of art magic could not possibly have sprung up uncaused and without a reason. If the conception were confined to some one region, it might possibly be due to a fortuitous combination of ideas or a fancied resemblance in particular things which no general laws could assist us to divine. But the belief in magic is world-wide, and should be due to some widely working cause.

reasons.

Dr. E. B. Tylor 2 has pointed out that "nations whose education has not advanced far enough to destroy their belief in magic itself" yet "cannot shut their eyes to the fact that it more essentially belongs to, and is more thoroughly at home among, races less civilised than themselves." In any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering survivor of an older nationality, is liable to the reputation of sorcery." It is from this fact that the explanation of magic here advanced takes its start. In historic times the belief in magic is fostered by the juxtaposition of two races, the 1 Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 91. 2 Primitive Culture, ch. iv.

one more and the other less civilised. The one race, being the more civilised, has learnt (whether in the way suggested in the last chapter or otherwise) that certain natural phenomena are due to divine agency and are beyond the power of man to influence or control. The other race, being less civilised, has not yet learnt this lesson, has not yet learnt to distinguish between what it is and what it is not possible for man to effect, but still employs for the production of both classes of effects indiscriminately those principles of induction which are common both to savage and scientific logic. Hence the more civilised race find themselves face to face with this extraordinary fact, namely, that things which they know to be supernatural are commonly and deliberately brought about by members of the other race. But this is

what is meant by magic.

Now, if this be the correct account of the origin of the idea of magic, it follows, first, that the idea was not due to any freak of savage fancy, that it was not anybody's invention nor the outcome of research, but was, like most other ideas, simply and directly suggested by actual facts; and, in the next place, that the cause which suggested it is not local or transient, but is the necessary and inevitable outcome of the fact that some men progress more rapidly than others, and consequently is, what we are in search of, namely, a worldwide cause.

It is, however, not essential to the production of the idea of magic that there should be a difference of race between those who are credited with magical power and those who credit them with it. They may be members of the same community. All that is requisite is the juxtaposition, the coexistence of the more and the less enlightened views of what man can effect in different sections of the community, and the survival amongst the more backward members of the belief in the power of certain processes to produce effects which are deemed by the more advanced section to be supernatural. Wherever these conditions were to be found, that is everywhere, causes were at work which must inevitably produce in the more (but by no means fully) advanced members a belief that the lower possessed magical powers. That the lower section or race readily accepted the reputa

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 anyrate, 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.