410 THE NATURE OF TRADITION 



teristic of the most primitive peoples. The categories parti- 

 cularly the category of substance are not clearly denned. Thus 

 vital functions may be confused with material substance, meri 

 and animals may be identified with their shadow, and a pain 

 may be confused with a stone that can be extracted. So, too, it 

 is thought that a man's qualities can be obtained by eating him. 

 Relations and qualities tend to become substances, substances 

 deliquesce into a series of changes, and the general is confused 

 with the particular. These tendencies of early thought underlie 

 animism and magic, which are characteristic of all primitive 

 races. Mr. Frazer, for instance, has distinguished two forms of 

 sympathetic magic which he calls homoeopathic and contagious 

 magic. Dancing and leaping to make the crops grow high is an 

 example of the former ; ' the sympathy that is supposed to 

 exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as 

 his hair or nails, so that whoever gets possession of human hair 

 or nails may work his will at any distance upon the person from 

 whom they were cut ', l is an example of the latter. ' Homoeo- 

 pathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity : 

 contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by con- 

 tiguity. Homoeopathic magic commits the mistake of assuming 

 that things which resemble each other are the same ; contagious 

 magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have 

 once been in contact with each other are always in contact.' 2 



There follows a second stage which Professor Hobhouse calls 

 the stage of ' common sense '.. It is characterized by the organiza- 

 tion of ideas in accordance with the categories and by the differen- 

 tiation of feeling from belief. At this stage the categories are no 

 longer ordinarily confused and the difficulty of affirming what 

 a man does not like to believe is no longer so strongly felt as in 

 the previous stage. Experience is tested and good evidence is 

 recognized as such. It is no longer believed that an enemy can 

 be harmed by maltreating a likeness of him or that qualities like 

 courage are substances that may be transferred. This is the 

 stage of conceptual thought reached by the ordinary man in 

 everyday life in a modern community when he is not specifically 

 engaged in work of a scientific nature or in problems of religion 

 or philosophy. Just as the simpler mental processes are present 



1 Frazer, Golden Bough, London, 1911, part i, vol. i, p. 175. * Frazer, 



loc. cit., part i, vol. i, p. 53. Taboo, it may be observed, is merely a kind of 

 negative magic. 



