J 2 Science Religion and Reality 



And again, the similar conception found among the North 

 American Indians cannot have anything to do with the speciaHsed 

 concrete virtue of magic. For of the wakan of the Dakota we 

 read " all life is wakan. So also is everything which exhibits 

 power, whether in action, as the winds and drifting clouds, or in 

 passive endurance, as the boulder by the wayside ... It em- 

 braces all mystery, all secret power, all divinity." Of the orenda, 

 a word taken from the Iroquois, we are told : "This potence is 

 held to be the property of all things . . . the rocks, the waters, 

 the tides, the plants and the trees, the animals and man, the wind 

 and the storms, the clouds and the thunders and the lightnings . . . 

 by the inchoate mentality of man, it is regarded as the efficient 

 cause of all phenomena, all the activities of his environment." 



After what has been established about the essence of magical 

 power, it hardly needs emphasising that there is little in common 

 between the concepts of the mana type and the special virtue of 

 magical spell and rite. We have seen that the key-note of all 

 magical belief is the sharp distinction between the traditional 

 force of magic on the one hand and the other forces and powers 

 with which man and nature are endowed. The conceptions of 

 the wakan, orenda, and mana class which include all sorts of forces 

 and powers, besides that of magic, are simply an example of an 

 early generalisation of a crude metaphysical concept such as is 

 found in several other savage words also, extremely important 

 for our knowledge of primitive mentality but, as far as our present 

 data go, opening only a problem as to the relation between the 

 early concepts of " force," " the supernatural," and " the virtue 

 of magic." It is impossible to decide, with the summary informa- 

 tion at our disposal, what is the primary meaning of these compound 

 concepts : that of physical force and that of supernatural efficiency. 

 In the American concepts the emphasis seems to be on the former, 

 in the Oceanic on the latter. What I want to make clear is that 

 in all the attempts to understand native mentality it is necessary 

 to study and describe the types of behaviour first and to explain their 

 vocabulary by their customs and their life. There is no more 

 fallacious guide of knowledge than language, and in anthropology 

 the " ontological argument " is specially dangerous. 



It was necessary to enter into this problem in detail, for the 

 theory of mana as the essence of primitive magic and religion has 

 been so brilliantly advocated and so recklessly handled that it 



