The Relation of Magic to Religion 511 



mythological segregations of Intellect, Emotion, Will. But new facts ^ 

 are accumulating, facts about the formation and flux of personality, 

 and the relations between the conscious and the sub-conscious. Any 

 moment some gi-eat imagination may leap out into the dark, touch 

 the secret places of life, lay bare the cardinal mystery of the marriage 

 of the spatial with the non-spatial. It is, I venture to think, towards 

 the apprehension of such mysteries, not by reason only, but by man's 

 whole personality, that the religious spirit in the course of its evolu- 

 tion through ancient magic and modern mysticism is ever blindly yet 

 persistently moving. 



Be this as it may, it is by thinking of religion in the light of 

 evolution, not as a revelation given, not as a r^aliM faite but as a 

 process, and it is so only, I think, that we attain to a spirit of real 

 patience and tolerance. We have ourselves perhaps learnt laboriously 

 something of the working of natural law, something of the limitations 

 of our human will, and we have therefore renounced the practice of 

 magic. Yet we are bidden by those in high places to pray "Sanctify 

 this water to the mystical washing away of sin." Mystical in this 

 connection spells magical, and we have no place for a god-magician : 

 the prayer is to us unmeaning, irreverent. Or again, after much toil 

 we have ceased, or hope we have ceased, to think anthropomorphically. 

 Yet we are invited to offer formal thanks to God for a meal of flesh 

 whose sanctity is the last survival of that sacrifice of bulls and goats 

 he has renounced. Such a ritual confuses our intellect and fails to 

 stir our emotion. But to others this ritual, magical or anthropo- 

 morphic as it is, is charged with emotional impulse, and others, a 

 still larger number, think that they act by reason when really they 

 are hypnotised by suggestion and tradition ; their fathers did this 

 or that and at all costs they must do it. It was good that primitive 

 man in his youth should bear the yoke of conservative custom ; from 

 each man's neck that yoke will fall, when and because he has out- 

 groAvn it. Science teaches us to await that moment with her own 

 inward and abiding patience. Such a patience, such a gentleness we 

 may well seek to practise in the spirit and in the memory of Dar^vin. 



^ See the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, London, passim, and 

 especially Vols. vii. — xv. For a valuable collection of the phenomena of mysticism, see 

 William James, Varieties of Eelifjious Experience, Edinburgh, 1901 — 2. 



