Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/194

166 of magical efficacy purely to the form of its ritual would be an error analogous to that of attributing the spirit and efficacy of the poet to the rules of prosody or to the "Gradus ad Parnassum." In magic, as in poetry, there is the perpetual interreaction of form and meaning, due to the fact that the analysis of the form of the mode of expression belongs to a later date than its creation. But in magic and religion the apotheosis of form leads to sterility, and for further advance there is a cast back to the reapplication of fundamental notions.

To get at these fundamental notions we must take account of the factor of the mental state of the agent, as well as of the content of the forms in which he expresses it, and, before any clear and proper notion of magic and religion is to be obtained, much of the ground, on which imposing structures of the schematism of ritual have been built, must, I am convinced, be cleared. Let me take as an example those laws of contact and contiguity which sympathetic magic is said to employ. Here is a misapprehension arising simply from the neglect of the psychology of human nature, and resulting in the gift of a false appearance of system to that which is not systematized. There are no laws in question at all. The conception of personality in the Lower Culture is but little more vague in its extent than our own.

A man's personality embraces everything by which you can think of him, or on seeing which he is naturally recalled to you. It is because the footprint is his, not because his feet have touched the earth, that you can use it against him.

There is, therefore, I would urge, some utility in endeavouring to analyse the psychological presuppositions