Darwin and Modern Science [351]
understand our own primitive selves. To children animals are always people. You promise to take a child for a drive. The child comes up beaming with a furry bear in her arms. You say the bear cannot go. The child bursts into tears. You think it is because the child cannot endure to be separated from a toy. It is no such thing. It is the intolerable hurt done to the bear's human heart--a hurt not to be healed by any proffer of buns. He wanted to go, but he was a shy, proud bear, and he would not say so.
The relation of magic to religion has been much disputed. According to one school religion develops out of magic, according to another, though they ultimately blend, they are at the outset diametrically opposed, magic being a sort of rudimentary and mistaken science (This view held by Dr Frazer is fully set forth in his "Golden Bough" (2nd edition), pages 73-79, London, 1900. It is criticised by Mr R.R. Marett in "From Spell to Prayer", "Folk- Lore" XI. 1900, page 132, also very fully by MM. Hubert and Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in "L'Annee Sociologique", VII. page 1, with Mr Marett's view and with that of MM. Hubert and Mauss I am in substantial agreement.), 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 (This view as explained above is, I believe, my own most serious contribution to the subject. In thinking it out I was much helped by Prof. Gilbert Murray.) 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 informed by the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck ("Die Nachahmung und ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologie und Volkerkunde", Leipzig, 1904.) 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 aleatoire. (Bergson, op. cit. page 143.)
Dr Beck's remarks on ritual are I think profoundly true and suggestive, but with this reservation--they are true of ritual only when uninformed by personal experience. The very elements in ritual on which Dr Beck lays such stress, imitation, repetition, uniformity and social collectivity, have been found by the experience of all time to have a twofold influence-- they inhibit the intellect, they stimulate and suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance. The Church of Rome knows what she is about when she prescribes the telling of the rosary. Mystery-cults and sacraments, the lineal descendants of magic, all contain rites charged with suggestion, with
The relation of magic to religion has been much disputed. According to one school religion develops out of magic, according to another, though they ultimately blend, they are at the outset diametrically opposed, magic being a sort of rudimentary and mistaken science (This view held by Dr Frazer is fully set forth in his "Golden Bough" (2nd edition), pages 73-79, London, 1900. It is criticised by Mr R.R. Marett in "From Spell to Prayer", "Folk- Lore" XI. 1900, page 132, also very fully by MM. Hubert and Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in "L'Annee Sociologique", VII. page 1, with Mr Marett's view and with that of MM. Hubert and Mauss I am in substantial agreement.), 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 (This view as explained above is, I believe, my own most serious contribution to the subject. In thinking it out I was much helped by Prof. Gilbert Murray.) 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 informed by the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck ("Die Nachahmung und ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologie und Volkerkunde", Leipzig, 1904.) 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 aleatoire. (Bergson, op. cit. page 143.)
Dr Beck's remarks on ritual are I think profoundly true and suggestive, but with this reservation--they are true of ritual only when uninformed by personal experience. The very elements in ritual on which Dr Beck lays such stress, imitation, repetition, uniformity and social collectivity, have been found by the experience of all time to have a twofold influence-- they inhibit the intellect, they stimulate and suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance. The Church of Rome knows what she is about when she prescribes the telling of the rosary. Mystery-cults and sacraments, the lineal descendants of magic, all contain rites charged with suggestion, with