Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/306

 274 age is as though we were to assume a "medico-poisonous" age. It is to assume that men knew both poison and medicine, without knowing that poison was poison, and medicine, medicine. The assumption allke in the case of the "magico-religious" and the "medico-poisonous" is self-contradictory or meaningless. To say that the same drug is used by poisoner and physician is true enough. The same bricks and mortar may serve as a house or a home. But there is a difference between them. And it is an error in classification to say that house and home, poisoner and physician, or magic and religion are "generically akin." The difference is fundamental. The difference is fundamental for those who believe in magic. It is fundamental also for those of us who, though they believe in religion, do not believe in magic. For those of us, however, who believe in neither it can hardly be fundamental.

To one person in a street a certain house is home; to the hundreds or thousands of other people who pass it by it is but a house. Yet the distinction is fundamental between the conception of a house and the feeling of home. And it remains fundamental however much one house in a street may be like another. If both were built of brick, we might possibly say they had an element in common. But we should not feel that they had really. So too when Dr. Marett says (E.R.E., viii., p. 249b), "mana usefully calls attention to the eleme'nt which magic and religion have in common," I do not feel that they have anything in common really. But since both Dr. Marett and the Bishop of Upsala think that they have, we must pay attention to what they say.

Dr. Söderblom says (Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, p. 195), that belief in mana, and dealings with that power are accompanied not merely by fear but also by trust. Further, these two feelings—fear and trust—are the marks by which religion is distinguished from magic. But the