Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/304

272 relied upon Euclid, we shall have also to recognise that though prayer might eventually develop from rudimentary cult, it has not as a matter of fact developed in the rudimentary cult of the Australian black-fellows. The important fact however is that the rudimentary stage of religion must have been such that from it both belief in personal beings superior to man and the supplicatory attitude of prayer could develop, whereas from magic spells alone could be evolved. If the line separating magic from religion be perpendicular, as Dr. Marett says, and not horizontal, then prayer originates from or in religion on the one side, and spells from or in magic on the other. The spirit or frame of mind which resorts to spells and magic is fundamentally distinguished from, and opposed in principle to that which relies on religion and trusts to prayer. The spirit, the intention, of religion differs wholly from the spirit and intention of the magician. The two cannot be brought under one head, or into the same class. The difference between them is the same as and identical with the difference between good and bad. It cannot therefore be, as Dr. Alarett suggests that it is, "best to treat all magico-religious rites as generically akin." A poisoner and a physician may use the same drug, indeed; but to regard the two as "generically akin," implies that poisoning and healing are species of the same genus, that there is no difference—no generic difference—between the intention to heal and the intention to kill. But between the one intention and the other there is all the difference in the world; and as we do not in the least get rid of the difference between poisoning and healing by saying that the poisoner and the physician make use, it may be, of the same drug, so we do not in the least get rid of the absolute and fundamental difference between magic and religion by calling attention (E.R.E., viii., p. 379a) "to the element which magic and religion have in common," Poisoning and healing have no element in common: neither