Relation of Magic to Religion 509 
to another, though they ultimately blend, they are at the outset 
diametrically opposed, magic being a sort of rudimentary and mis- 
taken science’, religion having to do from the outset with spirits. 
But, setting controversy aside, at the present stage of our inquiry 
their relation becomes, I think, fairly clear. Magic is, if my? view be 
correct, the active element which informs a supersensuous world 
fashioned to meet other needs. This blend of theory and practice 
it is convenient to call religion. In practice the transition from 
magic to religion, from Spell to Prayer, has always been found easy. 
So long as mana remains impersonal you order it about ; when it is 
personified and bulks to the shape of an overgrown man, you drop 
the imperative and cringe before it. My will be done is magic, Thy 
Will be done is the last word in religion. The moral discipline 
involved in the second is momentous, the intellectual advance not 
striking. 
I have spoken of magical ritual as though it were the informing 
life-spirit without which religion was left as an empty shell. Yet 
the word ritual does not, as normally used, convey to our minds this 
notion of intense vitalism. Rather we associate ritual with something 
cut and dried, a matter of prescribed form and monotonous repetition. 
The association is correct; ritual tends to become less and less in- 
formed by the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck* 
in his brilliant monograph on Imitation has laid stress on the almost 
boundless influence of the imitation of one man by another in the 
evolution of civilisation. Imitation is one of the chief spurs to 
action. Imitation begets custom, custom begets sanctity. At first 
all custom is sacred. To the savage it is as much a religious duty to 
tattoo himself as to sacrifice to his gods. But certain customs 
naturally survive, because they are really useful; they actually 
have good effects, and so need no social sanction. Others are 
really useless; but man is too conservative and imitative to abandon 
them. These become ritual. Custom is cautious, but la vie est 
aléatotre*. 
Dr Beck’s remarks on ritual are I think profoundly true and 
1 This view held by Dr Frazer is fully set forth in his Golden Bough (2nd edit.), 
pp. 73—79, London, 1900. It is criticised by Mr R. R. Marett in From Spell to Prayer, 
Folk-Lore, x1. 1900, p. 132, also very fully by MM. Hubert and Mauss, ‘‘ Théorie générale 
de la Magie,” in L’Année Sociologique, vi. p. 1, with Mr Marett’s view and with that of 
MM. Hubert and Mauss I am in substantial agreement. 
2 This view as explained on p. 508 is, I believe, my own most serious contribution to the 
subject. In thinking it out I was much helped by Prof, Gilbert Murray. 
3 Die Nachahmung und ihre Bedeutung fiir Psychologie und Volkerkunde, Leipzig, 
1904. 
4 Bergson, op. cit. p. 143. 
