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THE examples collected
in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate the general principles
of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to which we have given the
names of Homoeopathic and Contagious respectively. In some cases of
magic which have come before us we have seen that the operation of spirits
is assumed, and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer
and sacrifice. But these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit
magic tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs
in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event
follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention
of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception
is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system
is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity
of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always
produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony,
accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be attended by
the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations should chance to
be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer.
He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and
wayward being: he abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power,
great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited.
He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of
his art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by
him. To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular,
is to incur failure, and may even expose the unskilful practitioner
himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature,
it is a constitutional sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and
exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between
the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In
both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular
and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which
can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of
chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both
of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him
who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs that
set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence the
strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the
human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the
pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker,
on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their
endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding
high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists
at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but
radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. 1
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in
its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in
its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern
that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which
have been passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken
as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated,
that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great
fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by
similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A
mistaken association of similar ideas produces homoeopathic or imitative
magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces contagious
magic. The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and
indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately
applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the
bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology,
to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to
become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From
the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules
whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and
in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims,
some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules
constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false
are magic. 2
If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to
enquire how it stands related to religion. But the view we take of that
relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have formed of
the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may reasonably be expected
to define his conception of religion before he proceeds to investigate its
relation to magic. There is probably no subject in the world about which
opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a
definition of it which would satisfy every one must obviously be
impossible. All that a writer can do is, first, to say clearly what he
means by religion, and afterwards to employ the word consistently in that
sense throughout his work. By religion, then, I understand a propitiation
or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and
control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion
consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief
in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of
the two, belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in the
existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But
unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion
but merely a theology; in the language of St. James, “faith, if it hath
not works, is dead, being alone.” In other words, no man is religious who
does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On
the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also
not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of
them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts from the love or
fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts from the love or fear of
man, he is moral or immoral according as his behaviour comports or
conflicts with the general good. Hence belief and practice or, in
theological language, faith and works are equally essential to religion,
which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not necessary that
religious practice should always take the form of a ritual; that is, it
need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers,
and other outward ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if the
deity is one who delights in charity and mercy and purity more than in
oblations of blood, the chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his
worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves before
him, by intoning his praises, and by filling his temples with costly
gifts, but by being pure and merciful and charitable towards men, for in
so doing they will imitate, so far as human infirmity allows, the
perfections of the divine nature. It was this ethical side of religion
which the Hebrew prophets, inspired with a noble ideal of God’s goodness
and holiness, were never weary of inculcating. Thus Micah says: “He hath
shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” And
at a later time much of the force by which Christianity conquered the
world was drawn from the same high conception of God’s moral nature and
the duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it. “Pure religion and
undefiled,” says St. James, “before God and the Father is this, To visit
the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself
unspotted from the world.” 3
But if religion involves, first, a belief
in superhuman beings who rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win
their favour, it clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some
extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty
beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events
from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this implied
elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to the principles
of magic as well as of science, both of which assume that the processes of
nature are rigid and invariable in their operation, and that they can as
little be turned from their course by persuasion and entreaty as by
threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two conflicting
views of the universe turns on their answer to the crucial question, Are
the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious
and impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers,
assumes the former member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies
that the being conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his
conduct is in some measure uncertain, and that he can be prevailed upon to
vary it in the desired direction by a judicious appeal to his interests,
his appetites, or his emotions. Conciliation is never employed towards
things which are regarded as inanimate, nor towards persons whose
behaviour in the particular circumstances is known to be determined with
absolute certainty. Thus in so far as religion assumes the world to be
directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by
persuasion, it stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to
science, both of which take for granted that the course of nature is
determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the
operation of immutable laws acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the
assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true
that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind
assumed by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats
them exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is,
it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as
religion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings, whether human
or divine, are in the last resort subject to those impersonal forces which
control all things, but which nevertheless can be turned to account by any
one who knows how to manipulate them by the appropriate ceremonies and
spells. In ancient Egypt, for example, the magicians claimed the power of
compelling even the highest gods to do their bidding, and actually
threatened them with destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes,
without going quite so far as that, the wizard declared that he would
scatter the bones of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved
contumacious. Similarly in India at the present day the great Hindoo
trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the sorcerers,
who, by means of their spells, exercise such an ascendency over the
mightiest deities, that these are bound submissively to execute on earth
below, or in heaven above, whatever commands their masters the magicians
may please to issue. There is a saying everywhere current in India: “The
whole universe is subject to the gods; the gods are subject to the spells
(mantras); the spells to the Brahmans; therefore the Brahmans are our
gods.” 4
This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion
sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history the
priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty self-sufficiency of the
magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his
unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs could not but revolt the
priest, to whom, with his awful sense of the divine majesty, and his
humble prostration in presence of it, such claims and such a demeanour
must have appeared an impious and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives
that belong to God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives
concurred to whet the edge of the priest’s hostility. He professed to be
the proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and no doubt
his interests as well as his feelings were often injured by a rival
practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road to fortune than the
rugged and slippery path of divine favour. 5
Yet this antagonism,
familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its appearance comparatively
late in the history of religion. At an earlier stage the functions of
priest and sorcerer were often combined or, to speak perhaps more
correctly, were not yet differentiated from each other. To serve his
purpose man wooed the good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and
sacrifice, while at the same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms
of words which he hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result
without the help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and
magical rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost
in the same breath, knowing or recking little of the theoretical
inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he contrived
to get what he wanted. Instances of this fusion or confusion of magic with
religion have already met us in the practices of Melanesians and of other
peoples. 6
The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among
peoples that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in
ancient India and ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among European
peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India we are told by
an eminent Sanscrit scholar that “the sacrificial ritual at the earliest
period of which we have detailed information is pervaded with practices
that breathe the spirit of the most primitive magic.” Speaking of the
importance of magic in the East, and especially in Egypt, Professor
Maspero remarks that “we ought not to attach to the word magic the
degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the mind of a
modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The faithful
who desired to obtain some favour from a god had no chance of succeeding
except by laying hands on the deity, and this arrest could only be
effected by means of a certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and
chants, which the god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do
what was demanded of him.” 7
Among the ignorant classes of modern
Europe the same confusion of ideas, the same mixture of religion and
magic, crops up in various forms. Thus we are told that in France “the
majority of the peasants still believe that the priest possesses a secret
and irresistible power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers
which he alone knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of
which he must afterwards demand absolution, he can, on an occasion of
pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action of the eternal
laws of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail, and the rain
are at his command and obey his will. The fire also is subject to him, and
the flames of a conflagration are extinguished at his word.” For example,
French peasants used to be, perhaps are still, persuaded that the priests
could celebrate, with certain special rites, a Mass of the Holy Spirit, of
which the efficacy was so miraculous that it never met with any opposition
from the divine will; God was forced to grant whatever was asked of Him in
this form, however rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of
impiety or irreverence attached to the rite in the minds of those who, in
some of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to
take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular priests generally refused
to say the Mass of the Holy Spirit; but the monks, especially the Capuchin
friars, had the reputation of yielding with less scruple to the entreaties
of the anxious and distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic
peasantry to be laid by the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact
counterpart of the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their
magicians. Again, to take another example, in many villages of Provence
the priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of averting storms. It
is not every priest who enjoys this reputation; and in some villages, when
a change of pastors takes place, the parishioners are eager to learn
whether the new incumbent has the power (pouder), as they call it. At the
first sign of a heavy storm they put him to the proof by inviting him to
exorcise the threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their hopes,
the new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock. In
some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this respect stood
higher than that of his rector, the relations between the two have been so
strained in consequence that the bishop has had to translate the rector to
another benefice. Again, Gascon peasants believe that to revenge
themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say
a mass called the Mass of Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass,
and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or
money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and
you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render
for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of
Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The
Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church,
where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies
lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither
the bad priest comes by night with his light o’ love, and at the first
stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as
the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The
host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but
instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized
infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the
ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good
Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for
the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away
little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the
doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying
of the Mass of Saint Sécaire. 8
Yet though magic is thus found to fuse
and amalgamate with religion in many ages and in many lands, there are
some grounds for thinking that this fusion is not primitive, and that
there was a time when man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of
such wants as transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first
place a consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and religion may
incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the history of
humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is nothing but a
mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary processes of
the mind, namely the association of ideas by virtue of resemblance or
contiguity; and that on the other hand religion assumes the operation of
conscious or personal agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen
of nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex
than a simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a
theory which assumes that the course of nature is determined by conscious
agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a
far higher degree of intelligence and reflection, than the view that
things succeed each other simply by reason of their contiguity or
resemblance. The very beasts associate the ideas of things that are like
each other or that have been found together in their experience; and they
could hardly survive for a day if they ceased to do so. But who attributes
to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a
multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong
animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to
assume that the honour of devising a theory of this latter sort must be
reserved for human reason. Thus, if magic be deduced immediately from
elementary processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which
the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests on conceptions
which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet
attained to, it becomes probable that magic arose before religion in the
evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes
by the sheer force of spells and enchantments before he strove to coax and
mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible deity by the soft insinuation of
prayer and sacrifice. 9
The conclusion which we have thus reached
deductively from a consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and
religion is confirmed inductively by the observation that among the
aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate
information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense
of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly
unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, but not one
is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course
of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by
prayer and sacrifice. 10
But if in the most backward state of human
society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and
religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the
civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history
passed through a similar intellectual phase, that they attempted to force
the great powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of
courting their favour by offerings and prayer—in short that, just as on
the material side of human culture there has everywhere been an Age of
Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere been an Age of
Magic? There are reasons for answering this question in the affirmative.
When we survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del
Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are
distinguished one from the other by a great variety of religions, and that
these distinctions are not, so to speak, merely coterminous with the broad
distinctions of race, but descend into the minuter subdivisions of states
and commonwealths, nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and
even the family, so that the surface of society all over the world is
cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning
crevasses opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious
dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which
affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we
shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement
among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who
constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind. One of the great
achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this
low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus to discover its
substantial identity everywhere. It is beneath our feet—and not very far
beneath them—here in Europe at the present day, and it crops up on the
surface in the heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent
of a higher civilisation has not crushed it under ground. This universal
faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of magic.
While religious systems differ not only in different countries, but in the
same country in different ages, the system of sympathetic magic remains
everywhere and at all times substantially alike in its principles and
practice. Among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it
is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and
what it now is among the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners
of the world. If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of
heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the
Catholic Church, to the proud motto, “Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus,” as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility. 11
It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent
existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of
society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and
culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer,
whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it
otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a
thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces
slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a
sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our
feet. Now and then the polite world is startled by a paragraph in a
newspaper which tells how in Scotland an image has been found stuck full
of pins for the purpose of killing an obnoxious laird or minister, how a
woman has been slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a
girl has been murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of
human tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade
unseen. But whether the influences that make for further progress, or
those that threaten to undo what has already been accomplished, will
ultimately prevail; whether the impulsive energy of the minority or the
dead weight of the majority of mankind will prove the stronger force to
carry us up to higher heights or to sink us into lower depths, are
questions rather for the sage, the moralist, and the statesman, whose
eagle vision scans the future, than for the humble student of the present
and the past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far the uniformity,
the universality, and the permanence of a belief in magic, compared with
the endless variety and the shifting character of religious creeds, raises
a presumption that the former represents a ruder and earlier phase of the
human mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or are
passing on their way to religion and science. 12
If an Age of Religion
has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise, been preceded by an Age of
Magic, it is natural that we should enquire what causes have led mankind,
or rather a portion of them, to abandon magic as a principle of faith and
practice and to betake themselves to religion instead. When we reflect
upon the multitude, the variety, and the complexity of the facts to be
explained, and the scantiness of our information regarding them, we shall
be ready to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so
profound a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do
in the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a more or less
plausible conjecture. With all due diffidence, then, I would suggest that
a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set
the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of
nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account. The
shrewder intelligences must in time have come to perceive that magical
ceremonies and incantations did not really effect the results which they
were designed to produce, and which the majority of their simpler fellows
still believed that they did actually produce. This great discovery of the
inefficacy of magic must have wrought a radical though probably slow
revolution in the minds of those who had the sagacity to make it. The
discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time recognised their
inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto
they had believed to be completely within their control. It was a
confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for
causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of
these imaginary causes had been vain. His painful toil had been wasted,
his curious ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He had been
pulling at strings to which nothing was attached; he had been marching, as
he thought, straight to the goal, while in reality he had only been
treading in a narrow circle. Not that the effects which he had striven so
hard to produce did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still
produced, but not by him. The rain still fell on the thirsty ground: the
sun still pursued his daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the
sky: the silent procession of the seasons still moved in light and shadow,
in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were still born to labour and
sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were gathered to their
fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went on as before,
yet all seemed different to him from whose eyes the old scales had fallen.
For he could no longer cherish the pleasing illusion that it was he who
guided the earth and the heaven in their courses, and that they would
cease to perform their great revolutions were he to take his feeble hand
from the wheel. In the death of his enemies and his friends he no longer
saw a proof of the resistless potency of his own or of hostile
enchantments; he now knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a
force stronger than any that he could wield, and in obedience to a destiny
which he was powerless to control. 13
Thus cut adrift from his ancient
moorings and left to toss on a troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his
old happy confidence in himself and his powers rudely shaken, our
primitive philosopher must have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he
came to rest, as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new
system of faith and practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his
harassing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for that
sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great
world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must
surely be because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger,
who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all the
varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on
his own magic. It was they, as he now believed, and not he himself, who
made the stormy wind to blow, the lightning to flash, and the thunder to
roll; who had laid the foundations of the solid earth and set bounds to
the restless sea that it might not pass; who caused all the glorious
lights of heaven to shine; who gave the fowls of the air their meat and
the wild beasts of the desert their prey; who bade the fruitful land to
bring forth in abundance, the high hills to be clothed with forests, the
bubbling springs to rise under the rocks in the valleys, and green
pastures to grow by still waters; who breathed into man’s nostrils and
made him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and pestilence and
war. To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in all the gorgeous
and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly
confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and beseeching them of
their mercy to furnish him with all good things, to defend him from the
perils and dangers by which our mortal life is compassed about on every
hand, and finally to bring his immortal spirit, freed from the burden of
the body, to some happier world, beyond the reach of pain and sorrow,
where he might rest with them and with the spirits of good men in joy and
felicity for ever. 14
In this, or some such way as this, the deeper
minds may be conceived to have made the great transition from magic to
religion. But even in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden;
probably it proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more or
less perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man’s powerlessness to
influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been gradual; he
cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow.
Step by step he must have been driven back from his proud position; foot
by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh, the ground which he had once
viewed as his own. Now it would be the wind, now the rain, now the
sunshine, now the thunder, that he confessed himself unable to wield at
will; and as province after province of nature thus fell from his grasp,
till what had once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison,
man must have been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his
own helplessness and the might of the invisible beings by whom he believed
himself to be surrounded. Thus religion, beginning as a slight and partial
acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends with the growth of
knowledge to deepen into a confession of man’s entire and absolute
dependence on the divine; his old free bearing is exchanged for an
attitude of lowliest prostration before the mysterious powers of the
unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit his will to theirs: In la sua
volontade è nostra pace. But this deepening sense of religion, this more
perfect submission to the divine will in all things, affects only those
higher intelligences who have breadth of view enough to comprehend the
vastness of the universe and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot
grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision,
nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly
rise into religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their betters into
an outward conformity with its precepts and a verbal profession of its
tenets; but at heart they cling to their old magical superstitions, which
may be discountenanced and forbidden, but cannot be eradicated by
religion, so long as they have their roots deep down in the mental
framework and constitution of the great majority of mankind. 15
The
reader may well be tempted to ask, How was it that intelligent men did not
sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could they continue to cherish
expectations that were invariably doomed to disappointment? With what
heart persist in playing venerable antics that led to nothing, and
mumbling solemn balderdash that remained without effect? Why cling to
beliefs which were so flatly contradicted by experience? How dare to
repeat experiments that had failed so often? The answer seems to be that
the fallacy was far from easy to detect, the failure by no means obvious,
since in many, perhaps in most cases, the desired event did actually
follow, at a longer or shorter interval, the performance of the rite which
was designed to bring it about; and a mind of more than common acuteness
was needed to perceive that, even in these cases, the rite was not
necessarily the cause of the event. A ceremony intended to make the wind
blow or the rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will always be
followed, sooner or later, by the occurrence it is meant to bring to pass;
and primitive man may be excused for regarding the occurrence as a direct
result of the ceremony, and the best possible proof of its efficacy.
Similarly, rites observed in the morning to help the sun to rise, and in
spring to wake the dreaming earth from her winter sleep, will invariably
appear to be crowned with success, at least within the temperate zones;
for in these regions the sun lights his golden lamp in the east every
morning, and year by year the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a
rich mantle of green. Hence the practical savage, with his conservative
instincts, might well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical
doubter, the philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and
spring might not, after all, be direct consequences of the punctual
performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun might
perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom though the ceremonies were
occasionally intermitted, or even discontinued altogether. These sceptical
doubts would naturally be repelled by the other with scorn and indignation
as airy reveries subversive of the faith and manifestly contradicted by
experience. “Can anything be plainer,” he might say, “than that I light my
twopenny candle on earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire in
heaven? I should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe
in spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same? These are facts patent
to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain practical man, not
one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.
Theories and speculation and all that may be very well in their way, and I
have not the least objection to your indulging in them, provided, of
course, you do not put them in practice. But give me leave to stick to
facts; then I know where I am.” The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious
to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we have long made
up our minds. But let an argument of precisely the same calibre be applied
to matters which are still under debate, and it may be questioned whether
a British audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem the speaker
who used it a safe man—not brilliant or showy, perhaps, but thoroughly
sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings could pass muster among
ourselves, need we wonder that they long escaped detection by the savage?
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