THE METHOD OF SCIENCE 47 



On careful analysis many of our beliefs will be found to be 

 essentially magical in origin though we are generally no 

 longer conscious of the sources from \vhich those beliefs have 

 sprung. Malinowski * considers that Frazer overstresses the 

 ritual aspect of magic and that it is the practical aspect of 

 magic as an answer to necessity that explains its persistence. 

 A sick man or a bereaved woman feels that something must 

 be done to assuage the hurt; and, if no effective remedy is 

 available from knowledge, magic takes its place. 



An even greater factor than magic in the history of man 

 has been the development of religion. Very early man ob- 

 served that his food and well-being were closely connected 

 ^vith natural phenomena, such as the cycle of the seasons, 

 which we know to be due to the movement of the earth 

 around the sun. He, ho^vever, catalogued the facts that he 

 knew under the hypothesis that natural phenomena ^vere due 

 to the actions of intelligent beings made in his image; and 

 he gave these invented beings jurisdiction over gioups of 

 natural phenomena, so that there were gods of the earth, the 

 sky, the sea, and minor gods of trees, rivers, and mountains. 

 Sometimes psychological phenomena ^vere classified in the 

 same way. There were gods of love and ^var, of terror and 

 sorrow, and thus ^vas built up the structure of religion. AV^hen 

 the gieat prophets came— Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed— 

 their philosophy drew on this structure and their followers 

 incorporated much of the earlier religious belief iYi the sys- 

 tems of philosophy that were founded on their teaching. To- 

 day, among what ^ve term religious belie js, we continually 

 encounter groups of associations that started as hypotheses to 

 be used in the classification of natural phenomena. Christian 

 hymns still repeat the belief that the crash of sound that 

 follows the discharge of electricity from a cloud to earth is 

 the voice of a god. But basically religion fulfills a need that 

 men have always felt, the need for knowledge of the funda- 

 mental issues of existence. How did the world come into 



* B. Mahnowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, p. 199, Chapel Hill, 

 University of North Carolina Press, 1944. 



