vi THE EMPIRICAL ORDER 103 



another of the imperceptible. The magic rain-making was 

 a quite natural process if anything was natural. The 

 harvest might be improved as obviously by prescribed 

 representations of a fertilising process as by the equally 

 unintelligible virtues of manure. The distinction which 

 makes the one method practical and relegates the other to 

 the clouds of superstition exists for us, not for the honest 

 magic-worker. No doubt some things were plain, while 

 round them rose a thin cloud of mystery, which gradually 

 deepened into an impenetrable veil, and no doubt it was 

 within the cloud confines, and most of all in its darker 

 recesses, that magic and spirit worship flourished most. 

 But this is not to say that either magic or animism was an 

 explicit theory of a deeper reality underlying the order 

 which common sense had evolved. For magic and anim- 

 ism precede the formation of that order, while the contrast 

 between experience and reality only comes into view after 

 it is firmly established. The recognition of the super- 

 natural as such is not primitive, but comes at a relatively 

 high stage of development. 



(4) But now if magic and animism belong in essentials 

 to a lower stage of thought, what takes their place when 

 the empirical order is formed? We are not to suppose 

 that they are extirpated by common sense. On the con- 

 trary, they retain much of their power, but are overlaid by 

 more developed conceptions. The mind is never satisfied 

 with the empirical order which fails to solve many of its 

 deepest and most urgent problems, and at every stage it 

 meets the need with ideas of an order suited to and condi- 

 tioned by its development at that stage. At the point at 

 which the empirical order is well developed the animistic 

 spirits are in greater or less degree subordinated to a god 

 or gods who, like other objects of common sense, are clearly 

 and vividly conceived. As compared with a spirit the god 

 has a distinct personality. He has a home, on Mount 

 Olympus or on Mount Seir. He has a history and a 

 character, friends and enemies, very possibly wives and 

 children. From an abstraction he has become something 

 concrete. He has evolved into a man, and indeed into a 

 superman, i.e. a being with human feelings but more than 



