368 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



eventually been brought, step by step, to correct conclu- 

 sions and a dominant position at the present day. The 

 progress from the almost universal prevalence of an 

 enormous system of preposterous false beliefs or conclu- 

 sions onward to the triumph of sound knowledge has not 

 only taken an immense period of time, but left whole 

 races of men and large sections of the population — even 

 in those races which have produced individuals remark- 

 able for their power of discovering the truth — still subject 

 to the early erroneous conceptions of natural processes 

 and of man's relation to them. 



The conclusion certainly seems to be justified that the 

 most advanced animal progenitors of mankind, who lived 

 and died unreasoning, the mere puppets of natural forces 

 which they neither could, nor tried to, understand and 

 control, were " happier " than the " rebel " man when he 

 first conceived the notion that he could detect cause and 

 effect, not only as between a blow and the production of 

 a serviceable flint implement, but in the beneficent or 

 injurious relations of the things around him to one 

 another and to himself. Primitive men seem at a very 

 remote period to have elaborated in regard to such vital 

 matters a series of conclusions — differing in various races 

 according to place and circumstance — to which they 

 were led by erroneous observation and imperfect reason- 

 ing — reasoning which was arrested and distorted by fear, 

 desire, haste, and imagination. The word "magic" is 

 now used to indicate those beliefs and conclusions in all 

 their variety, because the " magi " or priests of Zoroaster 

 (Zarathustra), the founder of the religion of the ancient 

 Persians, taught them in an elaborated form, and 

 practised a system of supposed control of natural forces 

 and of spirits, good and evil, in connexion with such 

 beliefs. Magic is, therefore, defined as the general term for 



