xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 299 



as to the practical necessity of determining the length 

 of the year and so the recurrence of the seasons and the 

 right time for the exercise of agricultural foresight. Most 

 of the ancient modes of divination, such as chiromancy, 

 geomancy, catoptromancy, rhabdomancy, sortilege and 

 incubation, have become merely learned names to most of 

 us. But their equivalents still survive, sustained by their 

 occasional success in satisfying human desires. The law, 

 even now, does not think it derogatory to its majesty to 

 persecute the poor palmists and fortune-tellers who try to 

 make a precarious living out of the curiosity of those who 

 despair of calculating their personal future by more 

 scientific means. And whenever a gathering of under 

 graduates has inspirited a table to turn, it is always asked 

 to indicate what horse is going to win whatever is the 

 next important race. 



But it must not be thought that the history of human 

 credulity is merely a sickening and abject record of 

 human folly, which has no value for Science. For out of 

 all this mass of wild experimenting experience has 

 selected what was workable. By outcasting superstitions 

 Science segregates itself. Magic is the mother of Science, 

 much as Error is of Truth ; it is inferior to its offspring, 

 not in its conception or its pedigree, but in its efficiency. 

 Science is a system of magic formulas, which after many 

 trials and with many tribulations man has made. But 

 the formulas (or laws ) of Science really and habitually 

 work, and so verify themselves and are accepted as true : 

 those of its unsuccessful and discarded rivals are only 

 occasionally supported by a coincidence or by the 

 psychic tendency of many beliefs to verify themselves. 



A scientific formula which does not work is impossible 

 by definition. For if a formula fails to work when 

 applied to the phenomena it was devised to control, it is 

 condemned as false, and we seek to supersede it with a 

 better. Nevertheless the fundamental ideas of Science 

 are the same as those of pseudo-science or of magic. 

 They are all ineradicably and intensely human, as 

 befits the descendants of the human passion to control 



