46 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



nosis and treatment of disease are interminorled with magrical 

 spells. Among primitive peoples, magic has always played a 

 great part, and it is perhaps a little difficult for us to realize 

 how deeply the principles of magic are entrenched in the 

 thought and history of man. 



Sir J. G. Frazer * analyzes the principles on which magic 

 is based: first, that like produces like or that an effect re- 

 sembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once 

 been in contact with each other continue to act on each other 

 at a distance. From the first of these principles, which he 

 calls the lazv of similarity, it is inferred that a man can pro- 

 duce any effect he desires merely by imitating it. If a savage, 

 for instance, wants a good crop, he will take care to have it 

 sown by a woman who has many children; or, if a witch 

 doctor, as the practitioners of primitive magic are called, 

 wants to hurt a man, he will make an image of him and then 

 destroy it in the belief that just as the image suffers, so does 

 the man, and when it perishes, he must die. From the second 

 principle, it is inferred that whatever is done to a material 

 object will affect any person with whom the object was once 

 in contact. Most savages are very careful to burn any hair 

 they cut off or the parings of their nails, lest an enemy inight 

 use them to do them harm. And in some African tribes, 

 anything once touched by the king must be carefully de- 

 stroyed. The negative principle, corresponding to the 

 principle of similarity, is the great widespread la^v of taboo, 

 which governs the things that a man abstains from doing 

 lest, on the principle that like produces like, they should 

 spoil his luck. The Eskimo boys, for instance, are forbidden 

 to play cat's cradle because if they do so their fingers might 

 in later life become entangled in the harpoon line. The 

 principles of inagic are so 'widespread that almost all the 

 acts of primitive peoples are connected with the production 

 of good luck or with the avoidance of ill luck. These wide- 

 spread principles are by no means extinct among us today. 



* J. G. Frazer, TJie Golden Bough, p. 11, one-volume edition, New 

 York, The Macmillan Company, 1922. 



