Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/164

 146 From Spell to Prayer.

moment changed. It henceforth forms an integral part of the rite, since it helps the action out.

What do I mean by " helping the action out " ? Let us recur to the notion of developed magic as a more or less clearly recognised pretending, which at the same time is believed to project itself into an ulterior effect. Now I cannot but suppose that such projectiveness is bound to strike the savage as mysterious. " But no," says Dr. Frazer ; " magic is the savage equivalent of our natural science." This I cannot but profoundly doubt. If it is advisable to use the word " science " at all in such a context, I should say that magic was occult science to the savage, " occult " standing here for the very antithesis of "natural." Dr. Frazer proceeds to workout his parallel by formulating the assumption he holds to be common to magic and natural science. Both alike imply " that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency " ; or again, " that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the opera- tion of immutable laws acting mechanically."^^ But the " necessity," the " law," implicit in developed magic as revealed by the corresponding type of spell, namely the type of spell which helps the action out, is surely something utterly distinct in kind from what natural science postulates under these same notoriously ambiguous names. It is not the "is and cannot but be" of a satisfied induction. On the contrary, it is something that has but the remotest psychological affinity therewith, namely such a " must " as is involved in " May so and so happen," or " I do this in order that so and so may happen." Such a "must" belongs to magic in virtue of the premonitory projectiveness that reveals itself in the operator's act of imperative willing. Meanwhile so far as the process fails to explain

''' G. />.,- i., 61, 3. In iii., 459, however, the x-iew that magic and science have any real presupposition in common seems virtually to be given up.