Magic Science and Religion 65 



principles, atid we also realise clearly why this is much more 

 prominent in primitive religions than in civilised ones. Public 

 participation and social interest in matters religious are thus 

 explicable by clear, concrete, empirical reasons, and there is no room 

 for an Entity, revealing itself in artful disguise to its worshippers, 

 mystified and misled in the very act of revelation. The fact is 

 that the social share in religious enactment is a condition necessary 

 but not sufficient, and that without the analysis of the individual 

 mind, we cannot take one step in the understanding of religion. 



At the beginning of our survey of religious phenomena, in 

 Section III, we have made a distinction between magic and 

 religion ; later on in the account, however, we left the magical 

 rites completely on one side, and to this important domain of 

 primitive life we have now to return. 



V 



The Art of Magic and the Power of Faith 



Magic — the very word seems to reveal a world of mysterious and 

 unexpected possibilities ! Even for those who do not share in that 

 hankering after the occult, after the short-cuts into " esoteric 

 truth," this morbid interest, nowadays so freely ministered to by 

 stale revivals of half-understood ancient creeds and cults, dished 

 up under the names of " theosophy," " spiritism " or " spiritualism," 

 and various pseudo-" sciences," -ologies and -isms — even for the 

 clear scientific mind the subject of magic has a special attraction. 

 Partly perhaps because we hope to find in it the quintessence of 

 primitive man's longings and of his wisdom — and that, whatever 

 it might be, is worth knowing. Partly because " magic " seems 

 to stir up in everyone some hidden mental forces, some lingering 

 hopes in the miraculous, some dormant beliefs in man's mysterious 

 possibilities. Witness to this is the power which the words 

 magic, spell, charm, to bewitch and to enchant, possess in poetry, 

 where the inner value of words, the emotional forces which they 

 still release, survive longest and are revealed most clearly. 



Yet when the sociologist approaches the study of magic, there 

 where it still reigns supreme, where even now it can be found 

 fully developed — that is, among the stone-age savages of to-day — • 

 he finds to his disappointment an entirely sober, prosaic, even 

 clumsy art, enacted for purely practical reasons, governed by crude 



