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.
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
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phase of the human mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or are passing on their way to religion and science.
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 be-take 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 ceremo-
nies 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.
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 harass-ing 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