Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/150



paper represents the fruit of some rather perfunctory, if only because interrupted, meditation on the broader and, so to speak, more philosophic features of the contrast drawn between magic and religion by Dr. Frazer in the second edition of his Golden Bough. Meanwhile, it is more immediately written round the subject of the relation of incantation to invocation, the spell to the prayer. I confess to having reached my conclusions by ways that are largely a priori. By this I do not mean, of course, that I have excogitated them out of my inner consciousness, as the Teutonic professor in the story is said to have excogitated the camel. I simply mean that the preliminary induction on which my hypothesis is based consists partly in considerations pertaining to the universal psychology of man, and partly in general impressions derived from a limited amount of discursive reading about savages. The verification of my theory, on the other hand, by means of a detailed comparison of its results with the relevant evidence is a task beyond my present means. As for my illustrations, these have been hastily gathered from a few standard books and papers, and most of all, I think, from that house of heaped-up treasure, the Golden Bough itself. In these circumstances my sole excuse for challenging the views of an authority whose knowledge and command of anthropological fact is truly vast, must be that in the present inchoate state of the science there can be no closed questions, nor even any reserved ones—no mysteries over which expert may claim the right to take counsel with expert, secure from the