Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/152

 134 From Spell to Prayer.

comes to this. Magic is a negative, but not a positive, condition of the genesis of religion. The failure of magic is the opportunity of religion. Hence it may be said to help to generate religion in the sense in which the idle apprentice may be said to help to set up his more indus- trious rival by allowing him to step into his shoes. But it makes no positive contribution to religion either in the way of form or of content.

More explicitly stated. Dr. Frazer's theory runs some- what thus. (It is only fair to note that it is a theory which he puts forward "tentatively" and "with diffidence,")^ Originally, and so long as the highest human culture was at what may be described as an Australian level, magic reigned supreme, and religion was not. But time and trial proved magic to be a broken reed. " 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." Whereupon "our primitive philosopher" (and truly, we may say, did that savage of "deeper mind" and "shrewder intelligence" deserve this title of " philosopher," if he could thus reason, as Dr. Frazer makes him do, about " causes " and the like) advanced, " very slowly," indeed, and " step by step," to the following " solution of his harassing doubts." " 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, <lirected its course and brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic."

Now the impression I get from these passages, and from the whole of those twenty pages or so which Dr. Frazer devotes to the subject of the relation of magic to religion ' G. B.:-\., 73"-. 75-