The Relation of Magic to Religion 511 
mythological segregations of Intellect, Emotion, Will. But new facts! 
are accumulating, facts about the formation and flux of personality, 
and the relations between the conscious and the sub-conscious. Any 
moment some great imagination may leap out into the dark, touch 
the secret places of life, lay bare the cardinal mystery of the marriage 
of the spatial with the non-spatial. It is, I venture to think, towards 
the apprehension of such mysteries, not by reason only, but by man’s 
whole personality, that the religious spirit in the course of its evolu- 
tion through ancient magic and modern mysticism is ever blindly yet 
persistently moving. 
Be this as it may, it is by thinking of religion in the light of 
evolution, not as a revelation given, not as a réalité faite but as a 
process, and it is so only, I think, that we attain to a spirit of real 
patience and tolerance. We have ourselves perhaps learnt laboriously 
something of the working of natural law, something of the limitations 
of our human will, and we have therefore renounced the practice of 
magic. Yet we are bidden by those in high places to pray “Sanctify 
this water to the mystical washing away of sin.” Mystical in this 
connection spells magical, and we have no place for a god-magician: 
the prayer is to us unmeaning, irreverent. Or again, after much toil 
we have ceased, or hope we have ceased, to think anthropomorphically. 
Yet we are invited to offer formal thanks to God for a meal of flesh 
whose sanctity is the last survival of that sacrifice of bulls and goats 
he has renounced. Such a ritual confuses our intellect and fails to 
stir our emotion. But to others this ritual, magical or anthropo- 
morphic as it is, is charged with emotional impulse, and others, a 
still larger number, think that they act by reason when really they 
are hypnotised by suggestion and tradition; their fathers did this 
or that and at all costs they must do it. It was good that primitive 
man in his youth should bear the yoke of conservative custom ; from 
each man’s neck that yoke will fall, when and because he has out- 
grown it. Science teaches us to await that moment with her own 
inward and abiding patience. Such a patience, such a gentleness we 
may well seek to practise in the spirit and in the memory of Darwin. 
1 See the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, London, passim, and 
especially Vols. vir.—xv. For a valuable collection of the phenomena of mysticism, see 
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Edinburgh, 1901—2. 
