Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/388

 360 Reviews.

them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the

world The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general

assumption of a succession of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that succession. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find them to be all mistaken applications of one or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces imitative or mimetic magic ; a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces sympathetic magic in the narrower sense of the word. The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield science ; illegiti- mately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science." ^

" The fatal flaw " of the theory set forth in the eloquent para- graphs from which I have taken these sentences is that it concen- trates the attention too exclusively on one department of magic? thus reducing the whole field of magic almost entirely to sym- pathetic magic, and (explicitly in words immediately contiguous, which I have not space to quote, and implicitly in the whole passage) it leaves aside as contaminated by religion a considerable mass of practices, always and everywhere regarded by those who practise or witness them as magical, in which the effect contem- plated is held to be produced not directly but by personal agency. The authors of the present Memoire therefore seek a new defini- tion, an all-embracing theory. They do indeed refer to other theories than that of Dr. Frazer; but in effect the theory of Dr. Frazer and that of Dr. Jevons (which is treated as practically identical) are kept more particularly in view throughout the discussion.

In pursuit of their object the authors begin by considering separately the agents, the acts, and the representations of magic. They call the agent, or person accomplishing the magical acts,

' Frazer, The Golden Botigh,"^ \o\. i., pp. 61, 62.